Deirdre

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Deirdre was the best bus partner I could have asked for, I think.  Like Molly, she laughs at even the most terrible of jokes.  She stayed awake the whole time and talked to me almost constantly for every bus ride the entire two-day trip.  I really appreciated that.  I would have killed myself if my seat partner slept or just sat silently listening to their iPod.  That’s no fun at all.  Here are some highlights of the stories she shared.

 

She went to a boarding school for the last two years of high school, and they were pretty strict.  Every night from 8pm-10pm, they shut off the internet and you had to go to study hall.  Which meant you needed to be in your room with your door propped open with your computer open and a book in your lap doing work.  However, they didn’t shut off the email system, which was very easy to use and extremely quick.  And whenever someone received an email, the computer would make a “Ding!” sound.  Sometimes the kids would send a message organizing a ding attack, and then they’d all email each other like crazy and the house parents would just hear “Ding! Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! Ding! Ding!” all over the place and get really upset with the kids, who then laughed heartily.  Sometimes kids would just send an email to every person in the school and then the entire dorm would go DING all at the same time.  Sometimes they’d turn their volume up to annoy the parents.  Sometimes they’d turn the volume down to avoid the parents.  Sometimes they’d tape a message to a soccer ball and bounce it down the hall and into a room.  Technically they never left the room at all, so they couldn’t get in trouble for it.

 

She works at a camp for troubled children, basically, near Providence, Rhode Island (she lives in a town nearby).  There was one girl at the camp who was 15 – which is too old, but they didn’t care ‘cuz they all liked her – and she was extremely beautiful, apparently.  There was another guy who liked her, and he had a 5-year-old brother.  One time, when they were at lunch at a museum or something, the brother stood up and shouted to the girl, “Hey Miranda, my brother wants to see yo’ t*****s!” and lifted up his shirt as he did it.  Everyone burst out laughing, including the counselors, who were also filled with disgust at the same time, like Miranda.  That’s not her name, I forget it.  But then the counselors had to go to the little kid and be like, “You know what you [giggle, giggle] did was [giggle] wrong, yeah?”  And the kid knew that it was funny so he didn’t really care but he said yes anyway.  The point is, imagine a five year old doing that.

 

There was a group of kids that went to the camp for a while but they were super huge trouble makers – like, slamming kids’ heads against the concrete – so they kicked them out.  They were young, too, as in the sister who was the oldest was I think 10 or 12 years old.  They would always mess with Deirdre, because she had to drive separately from the rest of the camp and always had food, and if she had extra at the end of the day she felt too guilty to not give it to them.  She knew their home situation was seriously straight from a nightmare and therefore she couldn’t say no if she legitimately had extra.  But they really annoyed her.  They keyed one person’s car from the camp after they were kicked out.  Sometimes they would sit on her trunk or stand beside the car and she’d have to go slowly slowly slowly until they finally realized they had to get out of the way or she’d probably kill them.  She’s not violent, but she did have to go.  One time they were bugging her and she really had to go, so she just tried to get in her car full of food for the campers.  As she opened her driver side door, the sister reached in and hit the unlock button, and her brothers on the other side reached in and grabbed everything.  She was really upset, but instead of freaking out she said, “Fine.  Take it.  Actually, keep it, yeah, that’s better.  Can I take a picture of you guys with it?  It’ll be great evidence for when the police show up.”  And then all of a sudden the kids were like, “Whoa whoa whoa!  Nevermind!  We’re just playin’, you know?  Here, take it.”  So they gave it back to her, and then got in the backseat of her car.  She told them to get out and they wouldn’t.  “Fine, that’s fine.  Here, you guys just stay here while I call the police on my cell phone, it’ll make it a lot easier for them.”  And they were out of the car like that.

 

Once she was loading kids onto the camp bus.  They were going on, and then suddenly they heard sirens.  A parent, I think, shoved the rest of the kids onto the bus, but Deirdre had her own car and wouldn’t fit, so she went to it.  She didn’t have time to get in though, and before she knew it, some guy was running down the street with an assault rifle firing everywhere.  He missed Deirdre and all the kids, thankfully, but kept going.  She still didn’t know what to do – check on the kids?  Get in the car?  She couldn’t drive anywhere ‘cuz the exits were now blocked.  Go to the school across the street?  No, he probably went in there when she was hiding from him.  Before she could even make up her mind, he was running back at her with his assault rifle telling her to stay still and that he was going to take her as a hostage.  At that moment some woman came and screamed at her GET IN THE CAR and he was still yelling, but she said “You can get out, GO.”  And so she got in the car and realized that the exit had been cleared and booked it in reverse to the opening.  She said she never drove home faster than that day.  I totally ruined that story, but the point is a man with an AK-47 shooting wildly probably while on speed was trying to take her as a hostage.  The police got him to the ground shortly after.

 

There are two towns on the coast of Rhode Island called, I think, Judea and Galilee.  One is better than the other, I think Judea.  She said that they’re the only thing she missed about home.  She could do this trip for three years, she said, and not miss anything at all, but she’ll miss those places and going to a nice restaurant there with her dad.  And when she gets home, she wants to do that more than anything at all.

 

There was tons more – the bus rides were probably like 8 hours at least altogether – but that’s way too much to put in.  I did show her an XKCD comic (“Hell”) and she enjoyed that.  The point is, I actually spent more time on a bus talking to her than I did in the village exploring, which is really a sad reflection on the trip more than anything, but I had a really nice time talking to her so I really didn’t mind in the least.