This year, I’ve decided to conduct an experiment to see what time the bus comes every day. I created a little notes app data sheet where every day I enter the exact time it comes. It's always around 3:43, yet every Tuesday it comes around 3:50—7 minutes later and consequently 7 more minutes of standing in the cold. Yet, while I’ve begun tracking this data, I still don't trust it enough to fly by the minute, so I stand there knowing that the bus will probably come 10 minutes later than it usually does. It’s good to be 3 minutes earlier than the average, right?

I know the people on my bus pretty well. They're mostly Cambridge kids, since most people in my school take actual school buses because they live close enough. My house, however, is 40 minutes away by bus. I’ve always been proud of it on the outside. Whenever I tell someone, I always tack on an extra 20 minutes to the journey to account for the time it takes for me to walk to the bus stop and back. Two hours of transit each day sounds like an admirable thing. It makes me sound like every day I go through a journey to get to school, like people in Siberia walking miles through a tundra to catch the rickety bus whose engine is on the verge of freezing into one giant cube. Travel is a huge mental drain, so I delude myself with stories I make up in my head.

Yet my fellow Cambridge kids haven't caught on to the bus time thing on Tuesday, so they always squabble to themselves and complain about the bus being late, not realizing the pattern. In the back of my head, I always feel a strange, evil bit of satisfaction in the realization of this pattern—the why behind the problem. Yet today I realized I’m not alone. I sat down in the library to wait for the clock to strike 3:37, the time I usually leave for the bus, and noticed another kid who's on the bus do the same. Then at 3:47, he shows up at the bus stop. The whole trip I kept staring at the back of his head, wondering whether he caught on to it too. If so, when did he catch on to it? Has he ever missed the bus because he was wrong?

I often have these thoughts about people on the bus. I think it's a theme, even—wanting to know the person you’re traveling next to. Imagining some complex story behind the silent person you see every day. Noticing the small details, like what shoes they wear or how someone fidgets when they're extremely bored. As you must be on the bus. Above all else, I was thinking about whether or not I should bring it up and ask him. Of course, it's an extremely nerdy thing to say, but on the other hand, he's just a stranger on the bus. I decided not to ask him, as I like the feeling of the little secret, and I like the secret of knowing who knows it too.