Eastbound #4, 10:45 p.m.
A twentysomething woman and her kindergarten-age daughter follow a twentysomething man onto the bus. They sit in the forward-facing seats across from his, daughter near the window, mother near the aisle, facing the object of her pursuit.
Twentysomething woman, speaking loudly enough for everyone on the bus to hear: “I just don’t understand it. Guys are always trying to talk to me. Pretty much everyone wants to be with me, and I turn them down just to see the looks on their faces. Now I’m giving you the opportunity, and you don’t want it.”
The twentysomething man sits silently, looking somewhat embarrassed. The woman continues.
Woman: “I told my cousin you turned me down, and she was like, ‘Now that’s a first.’ Really though, all kinds of men want to be with me. Basketball players have tried to holler, rappers try to get at me…”
She continues in this vein for several more minutes, until the man mumbles something unintelligible.
Woman: “What? Why can’t you tell me?” She gestures toward her daughter. “Is it her?”
Northbound #48, 9:00 a.m.
A young father is taking his preschool-aged son on the bus for the first time. The two of them seem to be having a great time: the son, excited about the bell, the big seats, the beeping of bus passes as they slide through the reader; the father, happy to answer his son’s questions about what is what and why, chuckling at the boy’s occasional outbursts (“That’s a big truck!” “Did a bad guy mess up that building?” “Three blue cars!”). It’s beautiful father-son bonding experience — that is, until, about three stops from Montlake, when an average-sized, middle-aged man gets on, and the little boy shouts, in the same excited tone he used to point out the truck, “Ooh! Look at that big fat guy!”
Southbound #48, 6:00 p.m.
Two middle-school aged girls are sitting in the sideways-facing seats in the center of the bus giggling and shrieking incessantly. The young women are apparently taking part in one of those pregnancy prevention programs they have in sex ed and life skills classes, the kind where you have to pretend to have a baby for a day or a week or a month or whatever. In the old days, they used chicken eggs for these lessons. These days, they have battery-operated dolls that, apparently, act just like real babies. At Jefferson St., the girls’ mechanical baby starts wailing. The girls start wailing right along with it.
Middle-school girl 1, amid screams: “Omigod, it’s crying on the bus!” (giggle, giggle, giggle)
MSG 2: “I hate this stupid sh*t! (giggle, giggle)
MSG 2 pulls a bottle out of her book bag and shoves it into the wailing doll’s mouth.
MSG 1: “No! You can’t just feed the m***erf***er. You gotta move it around and sh*t.”
Indeed.