World Lit
Narrative Essay
April 29, 2008
Ice Cream and A Bus
“My stomach doesn’t feel so good Coach. See that’s why I’m eating ice cream Coach. Ice cream heals upset stomachs. So no worries Coach, I’ll be fine for the ride home.” I so foolishly said to Coach Person at the McDonalds on the way home from one of our away basketball games. The team did great, all four of them. We had victories straight across the board and all were content with the way things had gone. It must be admitted though that the closest thing to helping the team win is that I carried the water bottles over to the JV Girls bench for them. I am the team manager for them. Very hard business it is, managing for a basketball team, but that is beside the point. The point is that…well I think you’ll find out soon enough.
If you were to ask Coach Pearson what I had said or done you would get a different story than this one. In this story I would be painted as a sweet but naïve girl. It is entirely possible that her side is more interesting and more entertaining, and my side could be too if I were willing to stretch the truth a little, a lot. This is my side of the story…the real thing.
One thing must be cleared up before I get started though. I am not naturally of a sickly nature, but it must be admitted that over the summer break I had indeed became on a first name relationship with my doctor and got many a “you again?” looks from nurses in the office. I am not normally weak, surely not for I was once known as the power house of the volleyball team. I have never been much of an invalid. I just had a sickness that liked to hold onto me is all. This sickness would come up at random times in the day. And as random as it came it would leave. Strangely enough it would occur when the male gender was presently talking to me or in close proximity, but that is probably irrelevant.
I had happened to be riding in the far back seat of the bus (safe to sit in on the way to a game but not so much on the way home, in the dark) with all the nauseatingly “oh-so-dating” couples around me. As I sat in the afore mentioned seat I was being taunted for my very sitting the luggage chair. It seemed that the seat itself shoved my lack of strings in my face. And that is all that a “couple” is, a pair of strings that you painfully sew in and then have torn out with only the blood and scars to show for it. There is nothing so great about all this “dating” nonsense. I’m not bitter about my singleness as people think, it’s just an observation from a younger sister to an older and rabid dating sister. All the more I can say is this…who’s not being danced around by love on the puppet strings and being made a fool of? That’s right, the girl eating the ice cream. Now back to the story…
It was dark outside and I was starting to get tired of being on a bus like everyone else that was on the bus was feeling. Smiling at my new lace up ballet wedges that I had purchased the day before, I turned on some tunes and looked out the window. There is something about night time that makes me think many a thought. This night happened to bring a line of thoughts like…
I love the night time (it always starts like this). It’s so amazingly beautiful and full of mystery. God is a poet. There could be no doubt about it. Only a poet could come up with something as beautiful as the night time. And then be able to make a new one every night that is never the same as the night before. We all know there is something thrilling and irresistible about not being able to see more than a foot away. It makes us feel like we are walking on the wild side, like we are daring the night to do it’s worst and then we laugh at ourselves for thinking that the sound next to us was a mass murderer talked about on the radio the other day (he was caught by the way). But what is truly out there? Angels? Demons? Lost Souls? Anything could be out there. The night holds an infinite amount of possibilities. A child’s monster comes alive at night, if only to be a shadow on the wall. Wicked me get the confidence to do wicked things that the sun would stop other wise. How can men be so wicked? Could anyone that I know ever do something so terrible as kill a man? When you take the place of God you are not going to get very far in life and that man will pay for it on judgment day. How like a man to think he can take the place of God.
And so my thoughts went. A little bit deeper than what I usually entertain, but nonetheless very true. Then that feeling came up inside of me. That wretched and horrid feeling of Mount Vesuvius getting ready to cover Pompeii with lava…or in my case luggage with ice cream.
I luckily had time to move the school bags and the luggage. I looked madly for that Big Town Hero bag that had been right there two minutes ago but of course since I needed it I couldn’t see it anywhere, how like a man, but by then it was too late. “Ugh, what is that smell?“ and “Is she puking?“ or my personal favorite “How’s that ice cream doing for you Lara?” were some of the lovely comments that I heard float back to me from the front of the bus. My favorite part was when a garbage bag was passed back to me after I had spilt all of my stomach contents. I won’t go into details about the actual projecting of the stomach contents, but let’s just say that…
- My shoes did not stay clean.
- Dairy can smell bad if left alone for more than an hour and should not be shaken so much.
- Axe body spray covers up the terrible smell if applied at regular intervals.
- People do not appreciate having all the windows down on the way home from a game.
- People do not appreciate the smell of old ice cream even more and
- Ice cream does NOT heal all stomach problems.
