There was a city bus that ran all over the lower half of the city. It looked like all of the other city buses with its rows of uncomfortable plastic chairs bolted to the speckled plastic floor, the windows big and dirty with the handprints of passengers long departed and the air ripe with the forced smell of industrial cleanliness. The shell of the bus was white predominantly but had two blue and green stripes that wrapped around the windshield then snaked to form the city bus logo on the back above the silts where the engine’s excess steam filtered out into the city street. The wheels were large and worn, smooth to the touch, and the driver of the bus knew that he’d have to take his beloved carriage through the depot before the ice started hardening on the roads.

He’d been a bus driver for years and the man understood buses backwards and forwards. He knew that the windows rattled louder when the overworked engine was struggling, that when a new advertisement was glued on the side of his bus the interior would stink like paste for a solid week. The bus driver understood that the steering wheel always needed to be just a little bit loose and that his mirrors always had to be double checked. He’d never had any accidents when driving his bus, although once a man had a heartache right in the third row and died in front of the rush hour commuters. The bus driver didn’t consider that much of an accident. The deceased was about as big around as the buses old wheels and in the bus driver’s eyes that sort of person could expect nothing less than a heart as stuffed as their pants.

The driver wasn’t a cold man, though. You’d think after years of driving through the streets, seeing all sorts of folk walk into his bus that’d he be hardened to people. He wasn’t though. The bus driver wouldn’t soften to every person that sauntered into his domain. It wasn’t logical in a city so big and full of down faces for a man to be so sensitive. But he certainly remembered certain folk, certain faces that he thought about when he walked home in the orange light of early morning after a night shift. Perhaps if they had some kind of deformity, a strange looking nose or a set of caterpillar eyebrows the driver would ponder over their appearance until his weary head would hit his pillow. This happened often enough but it wasn’t until a particular night shift one day that the driver could truly call himself worked up by one of his passengers.

His old bus was wheezing a bit louder than usual and the driver knew that when his bus wheezed a trip to the maintenance department was eminent. He didn’t like the men down in that department, too crass and oily for a man who took pride in keeping his uniform pressed and professional. The driver was frowning at the thought of the men when he heard the drop of coins echo into the pay box.

Looking up quickly, he wasn’t used to coins since the entire city had made the transition to fancy bus passes and city passes that the driver considered too easily counterfeited and modern to replace good hard change. In front of him stood a face that the driver knew he’d be puzzling over when he got off his shift in six hours. She was young with the sort of skin you don’t often see in people as ragged as her. In the dead of winter she was wearing a jean jacket, a thinning flannel shirt under it that looked a size too big and jeans that covered legs so thin that they looked like the sticks of a Popsicle that kids spilt for them and their best friend in the summer. But these were details the driver only took notice off after he saw the girl’s hair. Now the driver had seen more hairstyles from more decades than any stylist in a hair salon would see their entire career. All sorts climbed aboard the bus and the driver never paid notice to the bleach blondes or the jet blacks or even more recently those blazing reds that reminded the driver of fireballs. The blues though always surprised him and when he saw the girl who paid in all coins standing awkwardly in the threshold of the bus, her choppy blue hair covering up her ears and left eye the driver had to take a second look.

“Is this the bus to George Washington?” the girl asked, her voice sounding like she was diving head first into a cold or just crawling out of it.

The driver nodded and the girl moved past him, taking the seat in the far right corner. Her mop of blue stood out against the black coats and gray hats that filled the bus and as the bus driver raised the bus from the curb and pulled back into traffic, the girl’s hair popped up in his mirrors.

It was a few stops to the George Washington and the bus seemed to wheeze louder and louder as the driver let off more passengers into the night. The driver thought about the wheezing. Was it the coldness of the night that was irking his old bus so? It was the dead of January and the city had been under a blanket of gray clouds and a blight of bitter cold since the New Year. This bus had always been a little bit fussy but he’d been driving it so long he was rather attached to it. His buses were designed for such conditions, the driver reminded himself, built somewhere even colder than the city in Canada, but they never seemed quite as amiable as they did when the weather was gentle.

When the driver parked awkwardly in the shoulder in front of the George Washington, he couldn’t resist looking back to see if the girl with blue hair was walking up the aisle. He was surprised when he saw that the girl was not walking up the aisle, or moving to get up from her seat. The girl sat in the far corner with her head pressed against the window, her ghostly fingers drawing designs into a circle of her breath against the glass. Her hair was tousled and wild from the way she leaned and the driver thought that hair so shocking could’ve had a life of its own, moving any which way it wanted to show off its hue.

Frowning, the driver closed the doors of his bus, their squeaking causing some of the other passenger to gasp or shiver. The girl however made no notice of the disturbance and blew more hot hair on the glass, creating a steam spot as big as a summer peach. The driver shook his head and pulled his bus back up, pulling away.

The driver was a professional. He could drive a bus in any traffic but even though he could he preferred to drive the bus late at night when the thin, winding roads of the lower side of the city were empty and the people are occupied his bus were tired and too eager to go home to make much commotion. It was these still times at night when the driver could think best. He could think about his family asleep in their apartment. The driver thought about his wife wearing those sweet smelling gloves that kept her hands so soft in the dryness of the season, his two grandsons dreaming about their basketball game tomorrow afternoon. He thought about the dinner his wife had cooked up for him before he left for his shift. He wondered if the girl with the blue hair had ever eaten a meal so heavy with gravy and warmth and then figured given the state of those pathetic chicken legs that she probably hadn’t. He thought about how he used to draw designs on the windows of the taxi cab he would take with his father to the park on his father’s days off. The driver’s father had driven a bus just like him and though sometimes it comforted the driver to perform the same actions of his long passed father, it sometimes made him feel a little guilty about not taking those better paying desks jobs at the depot he’d been offered when he was first starting out. The driver checked his mirror and saw the girl still sitting in the back of bus, her eyes closed.

And at the next stop when two of his last three occupants leapt from his bus the driver turned his body full around to look at the girl. Her head had fallen over in her sleep so that all you could see was a messy circle of blue hair and the jean jacket that extended from either side. The bus wheezed loudly as the driver closed the doors. Looking out into the empty streets one last time, the bus driver adjusted the steering wheel, checking too make sure it was just a tiny bit loose before he pushed himself up and walked to the back of the bus.

“Ma’am?”

The girl didn’t stir and the silence that followed the driver’s words startled him a little. He wasn’t used to the sound of an empty question and the driver cleared his throat and repeated the phrase.

The girl looked up quickly and immediately held her hands up in a halfway defensive, halfway protective stance. She had wide, childish eyes and the driver couldn’t help but stare at a single tear that fell down her cheek in a way that driver had seen in movies. All within an instant that experienced driver wondered why the girl was crying and what she had seen. The girl’s eyes had that quality that suggested they’d seen a whole lot more than you no matter if you were a bus driver or a President or a baby just born into the world. There was something vaguely familiar about the brashness in such an expression to the driver but it wasn’t long before his voice crackled a question and his mind was focused on hearing an answer.

“Ma’am, you’re stop was awhile back and now I am just wondering where I should be taking you.”

The girl put her arms down, a little too soon for the driver’s taste, a real street smart person would’ve kept them up and ready. She looked out the black window and then back at him. The tear had crested her chin and now own the wet gleam was left to give away it’s existence.

“Can’t you just drive your rounds?”

The driver nodded slowly, unwillingly, “It’s just you seem young too be not having a place to go.”

The girl made a face that made the driver think he’d offended her in some way, she crossed her skeletal legs and copied the motion with her arms, “I’ve got a place to go.”

“Where?” the driver inquired, quite unprofessionally.

“It’s along the route.”

Chewing over her evasiveness, the driver nodded, “Well, you got an hour left before I pull into the depot and end the shift.”

“Fine.”

The driver looked out the window the way the girl was looking out the window. He couldn’t tell if she saw what he saw but what the driver saw was the ghoulish, shaded reflection of the two of them. The girl’s face was black but her hair was clear and the driver looked positively ancient beside her. He walked back to the driver’s seat and signaled out into traffic.

It had reached the point just before dawn when the whole world seemed to be black. The sidewalks were black and the cars that lined them were black and the buildings that shot up like weeds around them were black. Only the odd stoplight that floated in the night seemingly unassisted broke up the monotony and the driver yearned for a light to pull his attention away from the blue dot that seemed to dominate every mirror the driver had.

The girl was cold and she was lost and the driver knew that when he pulled the bus to its final stop she would walk away into the world with the same unabashed eyes that had shocked him before. The driver had always felt his bus a haven from the streets. A strong, albeit wheezing, guard of the city and he wondered if it wasn’t somehow part of his duty as coachmen of this guard to keep the blue haired girl from stalking off into the frigidness. He wondered if he should take the feigned confidence as a reassurance or an added strike against her. The pressures to do something choked at the driver like a tight collar and every time he looked back into the mirror too see the fluff of blue gazing out into the streets so blankly the driver felt little less than responsibility for her.

Then as he would look back at his steering wheel, back at the dashboard and pedals before him it became clearer that he was not a guard. He was not a champion to be rooted for or a person who could be a hero. The driver was just that, a driver and by the time he had pulled up to the large lot of the bus depot, the whimpers of obligation had been beaten back. The driver sighed and turned to look at the girl.

“Miss,” he said, pulling her attention away from the glass, “My shift is done.”

The girl’s shoulders rose and the sound of a gentle breath escaped her. The driver watched a final circle of steam blossom from the breath. The girl stood and the driver watched her with a strange twinge in the pit of him as she stepped down the buses steps and landed on the pavement.

As she turned to go the driver called out, “Ma’am!”

The girl stopped and the driver saw briefly her blue tuffs of hair shift in the icy wind that swirled up the steps into the warm bus. The driver watched the girl begin to tremble slightly and he made himself quick and plain, “You have somewhere to go tonight?”

“Of course I do,” she called back, crossing her arms over her chest as though they could shield her from the recoil of her own lies, “I’m not a child, old man.”

The driver laughed. He laughed in a way he hadn’t laughed in a while. The driver laughed because the girl looked crazy with the blue hair and he laughed because he’d heard the words from a girl who looked a lot like the cold, shivering girl in front of him. He knew that the girl would think he was cruel, think him mean but the driver just kept on laughing. He laughed because he remembered a girl he’d seen grow up from a little baby to a full out woman with the same expression, with the same ice her tongue. He laughed because he’d been a fool for this girl with the blue hair the same way he’d been a fool for the girl with the same black, curls that the driver now tousled on his grandsons heads each morning. He laughed because the girl had no idea that the driver had played this role one too many times. The cliché role of defender to those that didn’t want to be defended, to those who didn’t think they would need defending. He laughed because it was too early in a new day to cry.

“I’m sorry for bothering you.”

The girl scoffed and those wide, immodest eyes scowled back the driver with a strange intensity that made the driver want to laugh even more. The driver, with the nimbleness of a man who could catch a fly between his fingers he maneuvered his bus into the depot. He pulled it into its designated parking spot and stretched his arms and pulled on his thick winter coat. The driver turned to look at his old, wheezing bus. It was a reassurance to him that the cocky, blue haired girl was on the other side of the chain link fence that surrounded the depot.

The bus was periwinkle in the grayness of the early morning. The blue stripe looked the same but the green one had a film of pre-dawn light that made the driver think of the brackish harbor water that his apartment looked out to. The driver tried to shake the girl from his mind. After all he had known a girl with the same contempt for the world as the blue haired girl and he had learned after his many years of driving buses and simply being alive that some kinds of people don’t deserve guilt. Certain kinds of people just want the world to notice them and to notice their blue hair.

As the driver walked towards the office to punch his time card the driver gave one less look at his reliable timeworn bus. It was the same bus he’d started the day with and it was the same bus that he’d see driving past him on his walk home. He wondered if there was any comfort in being a machine so like all the other machines. The driver wondered if people couldn’t make spectacles of themselves everyone would be happier. Buses couldn’t make spectacles of themselves.

But with a wry sense of wisdom you can’t find in too often in the young the bus driver wondered if perhaps the bus had made a spectacle of itself and that’s why he had such an unwelcome feeling of sick in his stomach. The old bus driver punched his time card and started walking back to his family, back to apartment, back to his soft pillow. The bright orange glow of a particularly beautiful morning sunrise unfolded behind the old bus driver’s back. And the vision of the two girls’ large unforgiving eyes is what he pondered on his way home, though by the time he had made it to the door of his apartment the face of the blue haired girl had faded away. The driver now saw only the face of the other girl who didn’t want to be saved, the one with his grandson’s hair and the driver’s own brown eyes.