A Stranger on the Greyhound

Today I sat on the bus going out of San Francisco with the two seats all to myself. The bus wasn’t crowded at all, which was fine with me: the upholstery looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 70s, which meant the bus was an old one. Limited leg space, grimy windows, and passengers who have no concept of the invisible line between seats are typical on this kind of bus. I was glad to have the space.

As the bus rolled to its first stop in Oakland, the man in front of me got up and asked, “Can I sit next to you?” I sized him up quickly: Mexican accent, in his fifties, receding white hairline, sun-leathered skin pocked with moles, loose denim jacket, reasonably well-groomed, quart-sized multi-fruit juice carton in his hand. “If you want to,” I said without showing any of the hesitance I felt. He left to go to the bathroom, and I looked around uncomfortably. I saw plenty of open seats. Why did he want to sit next to me? Was he being creepy? Did he have something he wanted to talk about? Should I move before he came back? All my friends’ Greyhound horror stories kept flicking through my mind. Maybe it was best to move. No, I would wait, see what he wanted. If he was creepy, I could always move. Or yell at the bus driver for help…

He returned and started to move his knapsack to the seat next to me. In the politest voice I could manage, I said, “You know, there are still a lot of empty seats.”

He glanced around, then looked outside at the short queue of people boarding the bus. “Oh,” he said. “Not so many people boarding here?” That’s when I realized that he wasn’t being creepy— he had assumed a lot of people would board, and he was hoping to save us both from the Russian-roulette game known as New People on the Greyhound. I think he was just as afraid of sitting next to a creeper as I was.

The man quickly moved to his original seat in front of me, but not before giving me the most heartwarming smile I’d seen all day. “Thank you,” he said. 

I smiled back, and my heart felt light. “No problem,” I said, but what I really meant was, “No, thank you.” We both got the two seats to ourselves all the way to Sacramento.

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