-1No need for a summary. The chapter should be as self explanatory as it need to be. Any vagueness that comes across was deliberate on my end. I only have a very minimal idea of what the pairings are going to evolve into, so they are still undecided as of yet. Suggestions are welcome.

And this has turned into my equivalent of a pet rock. If I could I would feed it and clean up after it and take it out for walks. So any amount of feedback that you guys could give me on it would make me owe you. Big time.

Disclaimer: Blah lawsuit blah blah avoidance blah ownership blah no blah blah blah.

---x---

The bus rumbled. A heave and a shove for a second and it was back on it’s way, trailing the rest of the desert bareness in it’s wake, only a tiny gas station in every 30 mile range or so.

Lucas picked up his camera, held it closely up to his eye, adjusted the focus closer then farther again, and clicked. He would probably end up trashing the picture; he just needed something to keep his hands occupied for now. He sighed and gave his camera the once over before wiping the lens shiny with the rim of his shirt.

Lucas stared at the other occupants of the run down bus, considering taking a quick snapshot. One girl, at the front of the bus, sat rummaging through the contents of her purse, more out of boredom than inspection. Brown hair falling across the sway of her left shoulder, and lips taking on the perfect shape of a cupid’s arrow; her back faced the window and her legs splayed out across the empty seat she had reserved for herself. Lucas clicked.

A few rows behind her another girl was fast asleep, her small head of auburn resting on the shoulder of another very agitated girl—her wild shock of blonde curls made it difficult to clearly see her expression, Lucas could only tell she was agitated by the subtle shoves she gave the girl next to her every 3 minutes. She kept a sketchbook well balanced on her knee, despite the number of bumps and abrupt stops. He could only catch the edge of an obscure drawing of sorts. Lucas clicked.

He glanced over to his right. Some guy, not two or three years older than himself, sat fumbling with the strings on his guitar; plucking out a chord or two every couple of minutes. His hair seemed to stand a little more limply than it did a few hours ago. Whenever he’d strike a chord, the girl would look up from her sketch in his direction—the guy, however, would make a point of closing his eyes each time. Lucas clicked.

Another guy, sitting in the seat just before Lucas’, kept tossing a basketball up and down—throwing it so high it even hit the ceiling sometimes. Lucas could only see the back of his head; he had one of those really short, frat boy haircuts which Lucas inexplicably detested. He watched as he hurled the basketball into the air again, his fingers arching back in an immediate position to catch it right away. Lucas clicked.

The shutter made its little snapping sound and the frat boy turned around. Irking his eyebrows at Lucas, he let out a very put-upon sigh—like this wasn’t nearly worth any of his attention—and turned around again.

Lucas rested the back of his head on the dust coated window, his arm lying across the scalding hot leather, and stared out the back of the bus at the empty road. He swallowed the uncomfortable bulge in his throat and shrugged his shoulders loose. He was never one to fear what he didn’t know or like, that was, in fact, the very reason why he’d even agreed to sign up for this.

It was all so out of his element. But then again, anything outside the parameters of a camera lens was out of Lucas’s element.

The bus came to another abrupt stop, causing Lucas’ head to bang forcefully against the glass. He cringed a little but swallowed the shock of pain and looked up around the bus. The girl at the front of the bus was rubbing at the back of her neck and giving the bus driver glares of hell-like damnation, the rest of them had simply lifted their eyes from whatever it was they had been preoccupied with a second ago—music, art, sport, and sleep.

“Anyone need to use the john?”

---x---

Lucas zipped up his fly and flushed, barely able to hold his breath in from the putrid stink of this poison tank disguised as a bathroom, and just before he could make his narrow escape in comes the guitar-man; his face immediately distorting into a purely sickened expression.

He concentrated his revolted look in Lucas’s direction and raised the hem of his collar up to his nose. “Bean burrito, eh? Always a killer.”

Lucas stood idle for a second, trying to think up a snappy response to the abominable accusation that such a repugnant stench could have ever emanated from any human, let alone himself. He, however, did nothing but blink a few times and let the side of his mouth hang a little open.

The guitar-man raised his collar a little higher up his face and nodded. “Thanks a lot, man,” he muttered from under his shirt before disappearing into a bathroom stall.

Immediately the familiar fumes began to choke Lucas’ nostrils again and he found himself in an immediate hurry to leave the room.

Pushing through the door and resisting the bodily urge to hurl, Lucas failed to notice the blonde girl coming straight at him—or, more accurately, the ladies room just a few steps behind him—and they collided, her sketch folder releasing a multitude of papers to flail helplessly in the air before landing all over the grimy tile.

She let out a peculiar sound, halfway between a yelp and a shriek, and muttered, “-could you?” before hurriedly continuing on and pushing her way through the bathroom door.

Lucas stood somewhat taken aback, he wasn’t exactly sure what she had asked of him; he figured he should probably do something about the dozen papers lying on the floor lest they should cause any other awkward incidents.

Lucas knelt down and slid papers in his direction and began piling them up, taking an absent-minded look or two at some of them. They were alright, he supposed. Some of them were made up of mostly a flurry of lines taking on inscrutable shapes, some were simply pencil-sketches of people and things, and some were a crossway between the two. He thought it wasn’t bad, good even. Not his kind of art, but good nonetheless.

He stood up, the papers carefully packed between his fingers, he eyed around the floor for the sketch folder, but not a trace. He supposed she had carried it in with her.

Lucas looked around the crummy convenience store, taking in all its tastelessness. Harsh, yellow lighting. Unvarnished tile floors. Rotating Budweiser banner falling by the wayside. Tinny Americana song sounding through the radio. The whole place was just as worthless as that ramshackle bus that’d brought them here.

The two other girls from the bus were hanging around the counter. Cupid Lips stood thumbing through, from what he could see, was one of those trashy tabloids filled with tawdry stories of celebrity drunkenness. He watched her flip page after page, and she couldn’t look any less interested. Lucas crinkled his forehead, and squared his eyes on her for a second. Looking at her, he guessed she was one of those valley girls who housed constant rotations of about ten dogs, read dozens of cheap celebrity news journals, and suffered some kind of daddy complex. He had to admit though, she was a pretty girl.

The other girl seemed to be paying the guy at the counter for something or other, she had her head dug into her purse and her auburn hair falling all over her face. Lucas realized she was the only person on the bus whose face he hadn’t seen yet. He could hear little ends of words, or grunts garbled out of her every few seconds; he figured she was scrounging the very bottom of her purse for change or something equally frustrating. He took a moment to question what anyone could possibly wish to buy at this store that wasn’t either unsanitary, phony, or useless.

“Oh.” Lucas spun around—so fast he felt his stomach dip—to find a haze of blonde curls and bright eyes right there. “Thanks,” she drably added as she nimbly swooped her sketches out of his fingers. Lucas simply nodded, noticing the sketch-folder tucked tightly under her arm.

She stiffened her bottom lip and threw him a hint of a saluting nod before scurrying back to the bus, closely followed by the guitar-man a few seconds later. He stole a quick glance at Lucas, smirked slightly, then stuffed his hands into his pockets and continued casually on to the bus.

For an instant, Lucas felt an almost irrepressible urge to shout out to him that he could never possibly have made that stench in the bathroom, that he was an idiot to think so, that his hair was starting to look a lot like those annoying weeds found budding out of concrete blocks, that— Honk.

Lucas flinched at the abrupt sound and glanced around instinctively for it’s cause as his eyes landed on bus and the shrinking figure of Cupid Lips making her way back to it. Honk, honk.

“Shit.” Lucas heard a sharp mumble, turning to find the same auburn-haired girl still rifling through her purse and the counter-guy looking less than patient. Lucas approached her, reaching for the wallet in his back pocket. “Oh, I’m sorry, hi—uhm…” She clutched Lucas by the wrist without looking up from her purse, as if only half-worried of being abandoned. “Do you happen to have any change on you? I’m just short fifty cents and this cheap-wad wont let me slide without them, and I really need this, and—” Lucas had already thumbed fifty cents out of the edge of his pocket and slid them across the counter before she could reach the tail-end of her rant.

“Thank you.” She let the words breathily fly past her lips—sigh meeting speech. Slinging her hair back over her shoulder, her face rounded out into a splintering smile; her lips fluttering open and shut nervously. “Uhm… Lucas?” Lucas couldn’t help but let the moldings of his face contort into a wildly confused shape. How did she know his name?

“Lucas?” She repeated again, only this time the tip of her finger pointed towards his vest pocket, at the hem of which were stitched the words, ‘Lucas. R.’ She giggled at his reformed expression and quickly shoved the items she’d purchased into her purse. “I’m Haley.” Lucas nodded, the edges of his lips notching only a few centimeters upwards.

Honk, honk, honk.

“Thanks, uhm, Lucas.” She quickly muttered and hurriedly made her way towards the clearly irritated bus, leaving Lucas to follow only a few steps behind her.

---x---

Even before he could make it to his seat, the bus shoved violently on, leaving Lucas at the mercy of balance and gravity. Yet, somehow, the frat boy continued to throw and catch his basketball with perfect ease—Lucas wondered whether he’d been doing that the whole time the rest of them were in the convenience store.

A forcefully uneven bump and Lucas’ arms wrenched out of their sockets as his grasp on the rusted metal grips nailed into the tops of seats slipped out of his fingers like an oily bar of buttered soap.

Instinctively so, his knees and palms took the brunt of the fall, a sharply stinging sensation immediately racing through his nerves as he attempted to quickly lift himself off the floor. He blinked his eyes up, without craning his neck, and found a pencil caught tightly in a weave of long fingers, the palm of which was smeared with ink and seemed to be outstretched to him.

He cupped his hand into hers—the girl with the drawings, he knew—and flexed his muscles straight and his shoulders tight to help him up.

She immediately slipped her hand out of his grasp and returned absentmindedly to the pad balanced perfectly on her knee. She threw him a glance and tipped the side of her mouth in some gesture Lucas couldn’t really make out. He supposed this was just her way of returning his favor. He picks her art up off the ground; she picks him up off the ground. Equal trequal.

He scampered drudgingly to the back of the bus, rubbing rhythmic circles into the bottom of his scraped elbow. Resting his hands first on the scorching leather, he winced for a second as his whole body collapsed down the seat in a thud, then for a while the heat of the leather felt almost bearable, comforting even.

The guitar man continued from where he left off in the obscure refrain he kept on playing over and over; only now he seemed to huskily hum and mumble a few words every couple of seconds. The blonde girl constantly flitted looks back and forth between him and the sketchpad, the pencil slanted and moving all the while.

Haley—the first name he knew—smiled friendly to Lucas when she caught him glancing, most of the time though she wore an apprehensive look of weariness, her fingers endlessly tousling the ends of her hair into loops. She pulled out a book, on the black cover of which read some tiny words. Lucas raised the camera to his face and swiftly zoomed in, only readjusting views to clear the blurry vision. He made out the words ‘The Holy Bible.’

Lucas cracked the stiffness out of his neck and forcibly tried to contain a budding yawn. He wasn’t tired or bored; it was just the heat.

‘Cupid Lips’, as Lucas had taken a habit of referring to her in his mind, stared with narrowly slit eyes out the filth rimmed window. She could not look more indifferent to anything or anyone around her, like this was merely an annual ride she had to go through every year to please a parent, comfort a friend, or satisfy a lover. Nothing really in it for her. Through the ray of sun, he could see every thin tangle protruding out of her dark chocolate hair. Like examining grains of soft sand under a microscope to find their outer-edges looking all prickly and rigid.

A sudden loud twang sound sent a impulse of electricity up Lucas’ spine—‘Cupid Lips’ hardly moved.

“Shit.”

Without so much as glancing at him, Lucas knew that something had happened to the guitar man’s instrument. Droopily landing his eyes on the Goldilocks girl, he watched her turn her head sideways and drop the pencil on the pad. Curious as he always was, Lucas took a sidelong look at the guy sitting next to him. It seems the guitar string had snapped.

The guy raised his eyes and looked around, a desperate look of worry and hurt engraved on his face. He darted his eyes around too fast for Lucas to follow or understand why. For five minutes, he kept on aimlessly throwing glances around the bus—and Lucas half expected him to start up and shout across the seats, “is there a doctor in the house?”

After probably the fourth time that he’d looked his way, Lucas watched the guy lean over—the arch of his back bouncing along with the bus—and speak desperately, “hey, buddy, you got any t-”

And then a stop and a screech. A stop so intense it rammed Lucas’ shoulder against the rusted metal window panes. A screech so loud it set Lucas’ teeth on edge.

“Well… off you go.” A croaky voice from the front instructed.

“Never mind.” The guitar-man immediately mumbled as he stood up, crouching only slightly at the shrinkingly low ceiling.

Lucas remained seated, watching Haley stuff her Bible into her purse, Goldilocks slip some papers into a folder, Cupid Lips strengthening the hold of her hair band, and the guitar man carefully handling his guitar into it’s case. Then he watched all four file out of the bus. The frat boy remained, still hurling the ball up and down into his arms.

Lucas stood: nervous, excited, and nauseous. It all started and yet ended here. He gulped and threw the weight of his camera over his shoulder.

The frat boy didn’t stop with the basketball, almost as if he were hypnotized. Despite himself, Lucas couldn’t help but give him a wary glance.

“Help you with somethin’?” He threw the ball, caught it, and threw it again.

Lucas turned, shrugged, and blew hot air out of his nostrils and continued on to the squeaking steps through the bus. His muscles tensed and everything seemed to go so unbearably slow as he stepped off.

He spotted all four of the people on the bus standing in a bundle of other people. He figured he should join but didn’t, they were listening to someone speak—he didn’t care what anyone was saying.

Then a squeaking sound rung through his ears and Lucas turned to find a man stepping into the bus, seemingly carrying something into the bus, Lucas didn’t catch it. Three seconds later two other men followed. They remained waiting outside. Lucas remained watching.

About fifteen seconds later, the same squeaking sound emitted from the bus—only now it was heavier set. Lucas lifted his camera up to his face, something told him he wanted to get this on film. Through the lens, Lucas observed as the two men stepped closer to the bus door, outstretched their arms and clasped onto the ends of something coming out of the bus—something shiny.

They grunted and Lucas watched as they lifted a wheelchair up and through the door, the other man hefting it up from the other end—over the stairs the frat boy went, sitting in his chair. No click.

He smiled at Lucas, all dry and cynical. “Help you with somethin’?”

Lucas threw his camera across his shoulder and tucked it behind his arm. He watched as the man wheeled him past the crowd of people and straight into the short yet wide building. It’s name dauntingly extruding past a bushel of trees.

‘The Psychological Semantics Youth Center of North Carolina.’

Lucas hesitated, sighed, and lifted the camera up to his face. Lucas clicked.