The Train, a Short Story

A few of the passengers were still struggling to locate a place to sit before the train departed. I sighed at the empty seat by my side, shining like a beacon for the desperate seat-searcher who was destined to take his or her seat by my side and potentially annoy me for the next couple of hours. One of them, a rather overweight man, walked - or should I say waddled? - in my direction. I could hardly contain my excitement.

To prepare for the inevitable, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my smart phone so that I could listen to music and tune him out. “Less than 20% of battery life remaining” the phone’s screen read. Grunting in frustration, I pocketed my phone. My parents would be pissed at me if I let it die and they couldn't contact me before I got to my grandmother’s house. I immediately regretted choosing to leave all of my books at home.

To my great surprise, however, the man did not sit next to me. He instead opted to stand, holding onto the rails hanging from the roof of the train. But why? What was wrong with sitting next to me? I wasn’t the fat and nerdy one with the obnoxious glasses and the World of Warcraft t-shirt. I didn't fidget awkwardly as I looked about the people on the train, nor did I flinch from surprise stupidly when the train started to move. I was sure he didn't have many friends, so wouldn't he love to have someone to sit down next to and talk to? He must have been socially awkward or intimidated by me. Yeah, that explained it.

Examining him was irritating me, so I took to looking out of the window instead. The people at the station awaiting the next train became shapeless blurs before my eyes as I sped away from them and they were replaced by the countryside. The blurry view from the window quickly grew boring to me, so I took to reading the signs on the train instead. They were mostly meaningless things like safety protocols that everybody already knew or advertisements that I didn’t care about, but it still gave me something to read, at least. But reading the signs didn’t last me very long, so I went back to reading people instead.

There was a ditsy looking girl sitting not far from me chattering away on the phone. She sounded scared about having lost something, but the way she said “Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod!” made her sound like the mindless preppy girls I went to school with, so I just dismissed it as something pointless. She probably thought she had lost the phone she was talking on or something. Girls like her seriously upset me. She probably thought that just because she had all the curves in the right places that she was better than everything else and that labor and intelligence were beneath her.

She was really beautiful, though, I had to admit. Just my age and my type, physically speaking. But regardless, the bottle of beer beside her told me all I needed to know. She was an underage drinker, a ditz, and probably a partier, too.

But still…something about her was strongly alluring to me. It was hard to look away. But after hearing the shrill, high-pitched, sickeningly cute voice of her friend talking to her on the phone, I shook my head and turned my attention back to the countryside. I hated being attracted to girls like her, but she was just so gosh darn pretty. Maybe the most attractive I had ever seen, but I didn’t really keep score. I did my best to push her from my mind as I contemplated what books I’d read at my grandmother’s house. I didn’t much like visiting her because she always rambled on about the most pointless topics, like which of my third cousins is going on some scandalous date or whatever. But she had the biggest collection of books I’d ever seen, so that was something positive.

As my mind was racing through the many literary possibilities, the train passed through a tunnel, making me feel particularly claustrophobic and tightly packed in with the others on the train. It was a particularly nauseating feeling. Worst of all was that in the darkness of the tunnel, she was clearly visible in the reflection in my window. I could see her more clear than before, even.

She was wearing a button on her sleeve that read “pro-choice”. Great, she was a baby killer. Actually, strike that. I don’t really like to get political or whatever. But still, a lot of the pro-choice girls that went to my school only felt that way to justify sleeping around. So far, I had little reason to believe she’s a whole lot different. Not only that, but people who wore their opinions on their sleeves - literally, in this case - were always so annoying, shoving their ideas down your throat and stuff. Ugh.

Perhaps worst of all was that her jeans had slid down slightly because of the way she was sitting, exposing a part of a thong. I never got why girls would wear stuff like that in a public place unless they were like really desperate or something. And those kinds of girls really pissed me off. Maybe the most frustrating part was how I couldn’t take my eyes away from it. But the way her lower back was exposed like that, showing off her smooth skin that was entirely without blemishes, really fascinated the more primal part of my stupid male brain.

But then she did something that surprised me. Something that utterly confused me, even, and seemed to unravel the fabric of my personal reality. Something that made her, at least for a moment, entirely different than any girl of her kind I’d ever seen before. She seemed to have realized that her thong was exposed because she suddenly got really embarrassed and pulled her jeans up. The irony of the situation baffled me. It was about then that the reflection in my darkened window faded out and was entirely consumed by the blackness of the tunnel. The emptiness stretched out from the tunnel and encompassed my brain as sleep took me so that I could return to a reality that I could understand in my dreams.

* * *

The first thing I noticed upon waking up was the large man wearing the World of Warcraft shirt, who was now occupying the seat that the girl from earlier was sitting in. He looked different now than when I first examined him. I must have been groggy from the nap, because I hardly noticed his weight now. Nothing seemed jarring about it in the least; it looked very natural on him - he looked good that way. More than that, he was wearing a baseball cap bearing the logo of the San Francisco Giants, something I would have thought to be impossible.

I stared at this oddity for a few moments before looking for the girl. A quick scan of the car I was in told me that she had either moved into another one or had gotten off of the train while I had been asleep.

“Oh hey, you’re finally awake!”

I jumped in surprise, snapping my head to the left to find that the girl had moved to the seat between the window and me. “Sorry for startling you,” she said. “I moved over here to give that other guy a seat. I hope you don’t mind.”

I mumbled to her that I didn’t and turned my gaze away from her. For some reason, I found that she now interested me a whole lot less than before. The same could not be said, however, of a man that was sitting a few rows ahead of us; he seemed to be staring quite intently at the girl, which was more than a little disturbing because he appeared to be at least ten years older than us. I dismissed him as a creep and moved on.

“Excuse me; is this yours?” I heard after I had been staring up at the ceiling in silence and boredom for roughly ten minutes. The speaker was the creepy man I had seen a minute ago, so it didn’t come as any sort of surprise that he wasn’t talking to me, but to the girl.

“My bag!” The girl exclaimed. “Oh my goodness, thank you so much! How did you know it was mine?”

“It had your ID in it. I’ve been trying to figure out for sure if the person in the picture was really you. It looks like you’ve dyed your hair since it was taken.”

“Yeah, sorry for the confusion,” she apologized. “But I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am. Can I pay you or something?”

The man smiled and shook his head. “No need; it was no trouble at all.” The girl thanked him again and he returned to his seat.

“Got something important in that bag?” I asked her. I immediately regretted starting a conversation - I really didn’t want to get involved with this girl.

She nodded. “Yeah, it has some paperwork in it for this orphan I’m adopting as part of a charity program. His mother wants to get an abortion, but we arranged this deal where I can save his life if I agree to raise him instead. I was nearly aborted myself, so I’ve got a soft spot for that kind of thing, ya know?” I just stared at her unblinkingly as she rambled on to me, a complete stranger, and defied almost every label I had placed upon her. “And she’s making me pay the medical bills, too, which sucks. I guess UC Davis will have to wait a few years for another Biotechnology major, but it’s worth it, I think. Oh, sorry. I’m rambling without even properly introducing myself. I’m Alana. And you?”

I stared a bit longer, feeling like an ass, before stuttering out my name. It was awkwardly quiet for a few moments as I thought of something else to say. This girl had totally defied everything I thought possible. The only mystery that remained was the bottle of beer that she held in her lap, which I could now see was unopened.

“Oh, I’m sorry about this,” she said, seeing that I had been staring at the bottle. “I’m not a drinker. It’s for the boy’s mother - she’s a big fan and I want to be on good terms with her.” I remained completely speechless. She was like a fascinating book, and each time I turned a page I could see that she was infinitely more fascinating than the cover. And here I was, dumbly staring at her, letting her get away.

“So, where are you going?” I asked her casually.

“Actually, this is my stop,” she said, gesturing out the window to the station that we were speeding toward. I blinked in surprise; I had no idea we were anywhere near there.

“Small world,” I replied. “This is mine, too.” The train began to slow as we drew closer to the stop.

“Oh really?” she asked. “Would you like to come with me?” The people in the train station seemed less like a crowd than usual. The individual faces were more defined, each with their own details and stories that could be seen on them.

I tore my face away from the crowd to look at Alana. Her face was more defined by far. I was starting to see the words that made up the story of her life. But I wanted more; the words alone didn’t content me. Not for her. I wanted to see the letters, too.

“I would love to.”