Just Rose

Chapter Five

I woke up considerably earlier than I planned from a restless sleep. After I finished getting ready I sat down on my bed, alone with my thoughts. I was nervous. I could get lost, or get abandoned in the middle of nowhere by Max, or say something wrong and get arrested, or

"Hey, Rose, you have to leave in a few minutes!" called Julie through the door. "You ready?"

I jumped at the sound and hurried to the door, relieved to be rescued from my thoughts. "Yep," I said. 

Julie looked me up and down. "No you're not," she told me. "Don't you have a coat or something?"

"No... why?"

"Rose, this is Seattle. It rains. Like all the time. You'll have to take one of my rain jackets today." One of? How many rain jackets could a person have?

"Oh. Thanks," I said, following her out into the hallway. I turned to close the door and caught sight of my bag, sitting on the bed. My journal was safely hidden underneath the bed, but there were a few photos sewn into a little pocket made by me at the bottom of the bad, and I hadn't thought to get rid of the notes containing forged signatures, and my camera...

"No one will touch your things," Julie assured me. "You have to get going now," she said once we were downstairs. "You can grab a granola bar on the way out, here's a coat, here's a backpack that has everything I think you'll need... yeah, you're good. Remember what you memorized! J-Max, where in heck are you? Rose doesn't know where she's going!" she called into the kitchen.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," Max said, slipping a second shoulder into his rain jacket while balancing his backpack on the other. "You ready?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said, going over to where Julie had shown me the garage was during her tour the evening before.

"Where are you going?" Max asked.

"Well I didn't see any cars on the driveway, so I figured it must be in the garage, right?"

"We take the bus," Max informed me, opening the front door. "And we have to hurry if we want to get to the stop in time. Come on!"

The bus? I hadn't known there were buses that went to schools. "Bye, Julie. Thank you!" I said to Julie before closing the front door behind me.

"Up here," Max told me once we reached the end of the driveway, starting up a hill.

I nodded and followed. After no more than twenty steps I had already almost slipped on the wet pavement twice. "Sorry," Max said, pausing and waiting for me to catch up. "It's normally not this rainy this early in the fall. You just came a bad week. It's supposed to be nicer in a few days." He picked up his pace again once I caught up and we walked in silence to the bus stop, the only noise the occasional car rushing down the wet road. I wasn't sure how I managed to avoid getting splashed.

"This is it?" I asked when he stopped at the top of the hill. There wasn't any sign or bench or anything.

"This is it," Max said. "And... there's the bus."

A big ugly yellow thing came rumbling around the corner. It sure didn't look like the city buses in San Diego. I decided they must just have different bus designs in Seattle. Max led the way onto the bus, and I- wow, these steps are steep- followed. The bus was almost full- why is everyone in here a teenager?- but Max slid into one of the few empty seats and I sat down next to him.

It looked like he was about to say something but didn't. The bus stopped and I fell into the back of the seat in front of us. A few people- more teenagers?- got on and one paused next to Max. "Hey bro, what's- who's the girl?" he asked.