The Bus Club

This is the prequel to the story that I wrote before about buses. I made references in that story to a club that had ridden the bus. Well here's the story of the club.

If you walk into the cafeteria of the Grandview high school, and if you are a careful observer, you might see a group that seems a bit out of place. Two boys and two girls sitting apart from everyone else, lost in their own little worlds, but as a group. Or perhaps I should say a club because that’s what we are.

The first girl is called Yanuva, she talks, constantly. While I may sound as if I am annoyed by this I’m not really. We all have a soft spot for Yanuva; she’s the one who brought us together in the first place. She comes up with ideas and won’t let them go, we’re one of her idea’s and grateful for it.

The first boy is called Onani, he’s reserved and quiet, he spends all of his time watching other people but he never comments. He seems to like his position as a silent observer. He wears old fashioned round rimed glasses that magnify his eyes and give you the impression that he can look right through you. Because he’s quiet and wears glasses people think he’s really smart. Who’s to say that he isn’t? But we have yet to see any proof that he is.

The second girl is named Shizu. She is only a little more social then Onani but most people think it’s for the opposite reason. The teachers think that she’s stupid because she looks like she’s asleep all the time. No matter where she is she will find a wall to lean against or a chair to slouch down in. She’ll close her eyes so most people think she isn’t paying attention but she can recite back to you anything that was said word for word, which is a lot better then a lot of people who look like they’re paying attention can do.

I am the normal one, or at least I like to think that I am. I probably wouldn’t have joined this group if it wasn’t for the fact that I was a new kid and they got to me before any other clique or group could. It was fast working on Yanuva’s part but I am jumping far ahead in the story because I am actually the last person to join the club. If this is a story about the club then I should start with how the club started I suppose. I wasn’t there but I have heard the story often enough from Yanuva.

Yanuva doesn’t belong to any one category in the school; she isn’t prep, jock, goth or any other of the many other social groups that populated the school. She had social hopped before the founding of the club, talking to one group one day and to another the next. While she had never been snubbed by any of them they had never really accepted her either. Well that’s what I have heard anyway.

Shizu is the first member of the club, actually she is the reason we are an official school club. If it weren’t Shizu we would just be a group of friends who got together and had a good time. Shizu had needed a club though, so that is what they had become.

“She would just sit on her own all the time,” Yanuva once told me in regard to Shizu. “So one day I decided that I would sit next to her. The other people in the school had started to bore me; she was the only one I had never talked to. Of course I did most of the talking our first meeting, but that never stopped me.”

I have seen Shizu often enough at the lunch table to know what that first meeting probably looked like. Shizu, her head resting on a hand, her eyes half closed, listening to the wave of chatter that Yanuva is capable of producing at all times.

“I don’t even remember what was said exactly,” Yanuva admitted to me.

“I remember but it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” said Shizu. “Most of what she was saying was just space filler. But she snuck in some comments about wanting me to come over to her house and I was so put off by the other nonsense she was spouting that I didn’t actually tell her no.”

To be continued...