Toward Something Better

I grew up a mile from a bread factory. Early mornings, hours before the sunrise, a yeasty richness filled my body and breath as I walked to the bus stop. Plastic backpack straps itched my arms, and my thrift-store jeans sagged in an unstylish way.

Ms. M, the bus driver, always greeted me with intense eyes and a hint of a smile. She liked to race public transport vehicles on long stretches of road before dropping us kids off at school. She occasionally sang upbeat songs I didn’t know.

In elementary school, I daydreamed as I held onto the sides of my seat, knowing that one day the yellow school bus would take a wrong turn. I’d reach for my black Moleskine and jot stories about where we might end up. In my stories, Ms. M would reach into the back pocket of her tight slacks and offer me an envelope each day. Inside the first one was a ticket that would be my portal to the reality I was supposed to embody, not this one. Not the one where my parents fought in the worst kind of way—through silence. Not the one where I was groped at school on ordinary bad days and threatened on worse ones. This ticket would take me to a place that was simply kind.

I knew Ms. M was trying to get to the kind place, too. This is why she was in such a hurry, taking hairpin turns on squarely planned Midwestern streets.

By eighth grade, I remember opening a new notebook and drawing the moon, which I imagined tasted of ice. The roundness of the moon was difficult to capture, but I kept trying, and Ms. M handed me a second envelope that contained secret knowledge about the world.

The moon was always full around my August birthday. The same birthday as my cousin, who was my role model then. She didn’t care what people thought, and I dreamed about not caring what people thought.

Some years later, I’d find out I was a quadruple Leo. I have the kind of chart Astrologers put on a kind face for, searching their creative brains to find some semblance of appeasement. Leo is about self, inversion, fire, creation. Fire is fierce and hot and problematic. Fire can burn us alive, and I am the bluest part of the flame.

Fire is also energy and attention. With my newfound knowledge, I could see beyond words. I watched adults who smiled through pain, and could see their truth. I noticed their longing and desire to break free from a cloistered reality of clocking in and out or teaching over-filled classes. To break the barrier of age at that time, however, was something I didn’t have the language for. And I especially didn’t have the language for children my age. I only knew what my parents knew. To be angry and sad and silent. To be silent through abuse, through pain, through poverty, through anxiety. To be silent was to be strong. So, I wrote.

I noticed the feel of torn upholstery, watched the sickness of the neighborhoods we passed that led way to cornfields and grass, and I imagined that if I could pay the rent, my parents might speak to each other. I’d draw the symbol, my star sign. Ms. M handed me an envelope that contained two items, a small medallion embedded with the image of a lion. The other item was a new notebook wrapped with an orange ribbon. Inside it, I wrote the story of a girl who paid her parents’ rent and created beautiful spaces.

Lions are quiet, patient, able to wait incredible stretches of time with empty bellies and searching eyes. They wait, then they drift, then they pounce. But a chunky-bottomed kid with unhappy parents doesn’t pounce. She gets bullied. The pouncing would be for later, when I’d write about middle school and science class and the Bradly twins to who would push or grab at me during lab, knowing I didn’t want to risk embarrassment by saying something. What they didn’t know was that I was learning to dissect their pain so precisely that no science could touch what I knew about them.

Much like a child who sees the pain in an adult’s eyes, as a teenager I began to see the pain of small-time predators who destroyed themselves without my needing to intervene. Because with perspective and patience I was coming to conclusions about how weakness in humans is fed. Yes, it is fed with silence, but it is also fed with acts of aggression or grandiosity. I knew there was more and better so, like the lion, I drifted.

I wrote an entirely new reality while sitting on that yellow school bus with Ms. M. She was my driver from elementary through high school, and all the time I waited for her to finally take me to my true home. On our last ride together, she turned to me and handed me a final envelope full of cash. $20,000 was enough money to pay my parents’ rent for a year. I imagined their faces when I handed them the crisp, new bills before hopping back on the bus to write yet newer and more expansive realities.

Ms. M and I have been ready for a long time. We’ve been patient. Today, at last, she’s stepping hard on that gas pedal.