Slowly but surely the train picked up speed until we were going so fast that we couldn’t stand next to the open boxcar door because the wind was so strong we were scared of getting blown right off the train. We had plenty of time to just sit back and regroup. We figured out that we were not entirely penniless. I still had my money, which I had kept in my back pants pocket and we had the compass. We did spend a few minutes talking about calling home once the train stopped, but then we decided that we’d made it this far, we might as well keep going.
I was the one that had decided that by saying, “We might regret for the rest of our lives that we never tried 100% to get there.”
We had time on the train to relax, think, and do some talking. Meek started out with, “You know, we always seem to talk about surfing, or stuff related to that. I don’t really know a whole lot about you apart from surfing.”
I smiled amusedly, “Take away surfing and there’s not much to me. I’m a pretty boring guy otherwise.”
“Yeah right!” Meek scoffed, “Now really, tell me something else about your life in California before you moved away. Something that has nothing to do with surfing!”
I screwed up my face as though trying to think that hard caused me pain. I then asked, “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” Meek said, “Tell me about your old neighborhood, or your friends, or how about your school.”
Scratching my head as though it would activate my brain, I grunted, “Like what?”
“Anything! Tell me something that happened that wasn’t…” he made quote signs in the air with his fingers, “…normal.”
I had to think for a moment or two before something came to mind.
“I’m not sure if this is what you mean, but there was this one time when I was in fifth grade and I had to go to the bathroom right in the middle of class. I’d been out of school the previous two days with a belly bug, which had been going around the whole school for a couple weeks. So when I raised my hand and asked to go, the principle, who was subbing our class because our teacher had the bug, too; didn’t hesitate to give me a bathroom pass.”
Meek rolled his eyes.
“What?” I asked threateningly.
“Is this going to be a story about you pooping your pants?” he asked with a groan.
“No and shut up!” I laughed.
“Anyway, I didn’t actually run, but I was moving fast to get to the bathroom as I did not want to have an accident there in the hallway. Thankfully I made it to the bathroom without incident, however when I began to push open the door I heard something that caused me to pause for a moment. I could hear voices inside and giggles that sounded like a girl.”
“A girl in the boys’ room?” Meek said while rubbing his hands together excitedly.
“Now, now! Don’t get ahead of me here!” I teased.
“So anyway, I actually took half a step back so I could double check that I was entering the ‘BOYS’ bathroom and not the girls by mistake.”
Meek laughed again at that idea.
“Sure enough, I had the right door so I went ahead and pushed it all the way open.” I paused to explain something to Meek, “The way the bathrooms were in my old school, you had to open the door, turn to the right, right-away, then turn left and left again, to actually enter the bathroom. I guess it was built like that so that no one could see into the bathroom when the door was open.”
“Wow, in my old elementary school when the bathroom doors opened, if you were in the hallway you could see all the way to the back of the bathroom and even see a couple of the urinals.” Meek stated.
“Yeah, that would suck.” I commented.
“I guess back then we were too young to know that we needed to be embarrassed.”
“You make it sound like it was decades ago for you.” I laughed.
Meek laughed too, “Feels that way some times.”
“Well I can tell you that even back in 5th grade I knew to be embarrassed about those sorts of things. It didn’t bother me as much as others. I knew some that simply hated going to the bathroom at school.”