Five hours into an overnight bus ride, the stranger in the seat behind me hooked his bare foot over my armrest, and when I asked him to take it down he grinned and said, “You’ve got two armrests, sweetheart. Use the other one.” I didn’t raise my voice at him once. I just waited for him to fall asleep.
I’d paid $61 for a window seat on the bus to Albuquerque so I could doze sitting up on the way to my sister’s.
That was the whole plan.
Sleep.
Somewhere past one in the morning, something damp pressed against my elbow.
I looked.
A heel. Cracked and yellow, parked on my armrest like it had bought its own ticket.
Then the smell came up off it, sour, like a gym bag somebody left in a hot trunk all summer.
I twisted around in my seat.
The guy back there was maybe thirty-eight, hood up, earbuds in, his phone glowing on his chest. His rubber slides were on the floor under my seat, kicked forward so he’d have room to stretch.
“Hey. Can you take your foot off my armrest?”
He tugged one earbud out.
“It’s not on you.”
“It’s on my armrest. Right next to my arm.”
“My feet swell on these things. Doctor says keep them up.”
“Then keep them up in your own row.”
He grinned like I’d told him a joke. “Lady, it’s a bus. Nothing on here is yours.”
He nodded at my other side.
“You’ve got two armrests, sweetheart. Use the other one.”
The woman in the aisle seat next to me lowered her pen. She was about seventy, in a quilted green vest, with a crossword folded on her knee. Her name was Irene. We’d talked for maybe a minute at the depot about the price of the vending machine coffee.
He put the earbud back in.
Then he wiggled his toes. Right by my sleeve.
I leaned against the window and pulled my arm into my lap.
Half an hour went by.
The heel didn’t move.
When the bus rolled over the grooves at a construction zone, his foot slid sideways and the edge of it pushed into my shoulder.
I turned around again.
“I’m asking you ONE more time. Move it.”
He let a long breath out through his nose, the way you would at a toddler in a checkout line.
“It’s a FOOT. You’re acting like I stuck it in your coffee.”
Irene said, “That’s disgusting, young man.”
He laughed at her too.
“Ladies. Go to sleep.”
So I quit.
“Okay,” I said.
He smiled up at the ceiling like he’d won something.
Irene looked at me like I’d let her down. I didn’t explain.
The bus went quiet. Somebody up front was playing a cartoon with the sound turned way down, and the driver had a little plastic hula dancer on the dash that bobbed every time we changed lanes.
Around three, the guy behind me started to snore.
Both feet were up by then. One on my armrest, the other jammed into the gap by the window, toes about an inch from my hair.
I looked at them for a long time.
Then I reached under the seat for the gift bag I was bringing my niece, Zuri, for her eleventh birthday.
I’d spent $23 on what was inside it at a mall kiosk, and she’d been asking for it since June.
Irene saw me pull the tissue paper out.
“What are you doing?” she said.
I leaned in close and told her.
She put her crossword over her mouth. Her shoulders shook so hard her pen fell on the floor.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Do it. I’ll keep an eye out.”
She turned in her seat so her vest blocked the aisle and held the paper up in front of her face like she was still stuck on the same clue.
It took me about six minutes.
My hands didn’t shake once.
He didn’t even twitch.
When I was done I put everything back in the bag, tucked the tissue paper in on top, and shut my eyes.
I didn’t sleep.
I waited.
A little after six, we pulled into a gas station off the interstate. The driver, Tuan, flipped on every overhead light at once.
“Fifteen minutes, folks. Bathrooms are inside, and they’re not free.”
The guy behind me yawned, shoved his feet into his slides and stood up in the aisle, scratching his stomach.
He got four steps.
A man across the aisle with a neck pillow, Dwayne, I’d find out later, glanced down at the floor, then up at the guy’s face, then down again.
He made a sound like a balloon losing air.
Then he laughed so hard he had to grab the seat in front of him.
“Oh, shit,” Dwayne said. “Oh, buddy.”
A woman two rows up turned around. Then her husband. Then the college kid in the back who’d been asleep since the depot.
Tuan stopped halfway down the steps and stared at the guy’s feet.
“Sir,” Tuan said. “Uh.”
The guy frowned. “What?”
Nobody answered him.
He looked down at his own feet in that white gas station light.
The red started at his collar and went all the way up to his hairline.
He turned around slow and found me in my window seat, my hands folded on top of the gift bag, Irene filling in her crossword beside me.
“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO TO MY FEET?”
Galaxy Grape
“I painted them,” I said.
All ten toenails. Galaxy Grape, the purple with the glitter in it that Zuri had pointed at through the phone back in June. On each big toe a little unicorn decal with a pink rhinestone for an eye. I’d pressed those on with my thumbnail while he snored through it.
I took the bottle out of the bag and held it up so he could read the label.
Somebody up front clapped twice and quit.
“You painted my feet,” he said. “While I was asleep.”
“You told me to go to sleep. I couldn’t.”
Dwayne had to sit back down.
The guy looked at his toes. He looked at Tuan, then at the whole bus looking at his toes. The red stayed in his face, but the grin came back up on top of it, slow, like he’d found a twenty on the floor.
He pulled his phone out of his hoodie pocket and thumbed it on.
“Driver,” he said. “I want her off this bus.”
The kiosk by the pretzel place
The kit was called Glitter Toes Studio. I bought it on a Tuesday in July at a cart between the pretzel place and the phone-case guy. Eight bottles of quick-dry, a sheet of twelve unicorn decals, two foam toe separators shaped like clouds. The girl working the cart painted her own pinky to show me it dried in sixty seconds.
Twenty-three dollars with tax. I paid cash.
Zuri had FaceTimed me in June with her feet in the camera. A girl in her class had unicorn toes. My sister had said not until eleven, and Zuri said it like eleven was a hundred years off.
I’d missed nine and ten. I worked both of them.
For ten I mailed a gift card that got there two weeks late. Zuri thanked me on the phone in the voice kids use for grown-ups they don’t really know.
So this year I took three days off without pay and bought the bus ticket, because a plane was four times that and I don’t drive nights anymore. I wrapped the kit in tissue paper. I wrote ZURI on the tag in purple marker and drew a cake on it that came out leaning to one side.
The line at the depot had gone out the door. The guy was four people behind me, hood already up. He was holding his phone sideways at chest height, panning it slow down the line, and he said something low to it and laughed.
I figured he was filming the departures board.
Irene figured that too. “Everybody’s a movie director now,” she said, and went back to how $2.75 was a crime for coffee that tasted like a penny.
When we boarded, he walked past three empty rows to take the seat behind mine.
Now Tuan was coming down the aisle toward us.
Pump nine
Tuan was somewhere past fifty, with reading glasses on a cord and a company vest zipped to the neck. He looked at the toes for a long time before he looked at me.
“Ma’am. Did you touch this man while he was sleeping?”
“He had his feet in her hair,” Irene said.
“Ma’am.”
“Yes,” I said.
Tuan let his breath out. He took his glasses off and let them hang.
“Okay. So here’s my problem. Hands on another passenger, I have to call it in. Dispatch decides. Most of the time, dispatch says leave them at the stop.” He pointed out the window at the pumps. “Here.”
“Here,” I said.
“I don’t make it up. There’s a sheet.”
We were a little over two hundred miles out. Zuri’s party was at four. The next bus on that line came through the same gas station at eleven that night.
The guy already had his phone up, pointed at Tuan’s face.
“Say that part again,” he said. “About the sheet. For the people.”
“Sir, please put that down.”
“It’s a free country, man. Read her the sheet.”
Irene twisted around in her seat. “You had your feet on her for five hours.”
“Doctor’s orders.” He wiggled the purple toes at her. The rhinestones caught the light. “Look what she did to a medical condition.”
The college kid in the back said, “Bro, they look kind of fire,” and somebody laughed, and the guy swung the phone back there and the laughing stopped.
Tuan looked at me again. I didn’t have anything to say that he’d want to hear. I had the bottle still in my hand, like I was waiting to give it back to somebody.
“Stay in your seat,” he said to me. “Both of you stay put.”
He walked to the front, took the handset off its hook beside the hula dancer, and keyed it.
The little bottle by the lighters
I didn’t stay put.
The store had one shelf of what they called beauty, between the phone chargers and the lighters. One bottle of remover, the small kind, $3.99. I bought it and a bag of cotton balls with the last cash I had on me, and I went back out.
He was standing by pump nine in his slides, filming his own feet.
“It comes right off,” I said. “Thirty seconds a foot. I’ll do it myself. Then we all get back on.”
I held out the bag.
He took the bottle and read the back of it, slow, like a man reading a contract. Then he unscrewed the cap and poured the whole thing into the trash can by the pump. It smelled like a nail salon for about two seconds and then it smelled like gas again.
“Nah,” he said. “Dispatch is gonna want to see these.”
“You’d rather walk into Albuquerque like that.”
“I’d rather you didn’t get on the bus.”
He turned the phone around and held it up to my face.
It was a video. The picture came from low down, from somebody’s chest, aimed straight up the gap between two seats. A bare heel on an armrest. Then the back of my head. Then my face coming round the side of my seat, puffy, under the reading light.
Hey. Can you take your foot off my armrest?
Across the top, in white letters: she really thinks she owns the armrest.
Posted 1:14 a.m. Two hundred and twelve thousand views.
The comments slid by under his thumb. Her face lmao. Somebody’s aunt is MAD. Part 12 when.
So the phone glowing on his chest the whole time had been looking the other way. At me.
“It slid off me around two,” he said. “Otherwise you’d be in this one too.”
He took the phone back and pointed it at me.
“Smile, sweetheart. This one’s gonna do a million.”
Part eleven
Back on the bus, Dwayne was waiting in the aisle by my row with his own phone out. He’d read the name off the guy’s screen when it was in my face, and he’d typed it in.
“Ma’am,” he said. “You need to look at this.”
He sat down on the edge of his seat and held it so me and Irene could both see.
The whole page was one video, made over and over.
Same angle. Low, from a chest, up a gap between seats. Same bare foot. Same black slides kicked forward under somebody else’s seat. A woman with gray roots in a window seat, turning around. A girl in scrubs. A man with a cane who just got up and moved, and that one had a laughing face over it.
Dwayne scrolled and read the titles out loud, flat, the way you’d read a grocery list.
“Part four. ‘Doctor says keep them up.’ Part six. ‘She cried lol.’ Part nine. ‘They ALWAYS move the arm.'”
In every one, the same voice off camera said the same thing. My feet swell on these things.
The feet on that screen were thin. You could see the bones in the tops of them. Nothing was swollen in any of the eleven.
“Part ten’s a plane,” Dwayne said. “He’s not even picky.”
Irene took the phone out of his hand and held it at arm’s length, the way she held her crossword.
“That man in the depot,” she said. “With the phone sideways.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He’d walked past three empty rows. I’d thought it was because mine was by the bathroom less.
Irene handed the phone back. Her mouth was flat.
Dwayne scrolled back to the top, to the newest one. My face, under the reading light, at 1:14 in the morning.
Part eleven.
Seat fourteen
Tuan came back down the aisle with the handset cord stretched as far as it went, then let it go and walked the rest.
“Dispatch says it’s my call,” he said.
The guy climbed back on behind him, slapping up the steps in his slides, phone first.
“Great. So call it. She drugged me or something. Nobody sleeps through that. She put her hands on me while I was unconscious, and that’s assault, that’s a crime in all fifty states, I looked it up while she was in there buying her little bottle.”
“Show him yours,” I said.
He stopped. “What?”
“The one you posted. Show him.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. He had two hundred thousand people on his side and he wanted one more.
“Yeah. Sure. Look at this, man. Look how she talks to me.”
He turned the volume all the way up and held it out to Tuan.
You’ve got two armrests, sweetheart. Use the other one.
The heel by my sleeve. The toes wiggling. Then, after my face went back around, his voice again, low, close to the phone.
Watch. She’s gonna move the arm. They always move the arm.
On the screen, my arm went into my lap.
Tuan didn’t say anything. He took the phone out of the guy’s hand, which surprised everybody, the guy most, and played it again from the start.
Dwayne held up his phone next to it, the page with all eleven, the slides in every one.
“Sir,” Tuan said. “How long have your feet been swelling?”
“That’s not the point. That’s not even the point. She touched me. You saw what she did, everybody saw what she did, I’ve got a cousin who does this kind of law, and you know what, I’ve got two hundred thousand people. Two hundred and forty now. You want them knowing your name? Tuan. T-U-A-N. Bus number’s on the side. You think the company likes that?”
He grabbed his phone back and swung it around the bus. People ducked. The woman two rows up put her hand over her husband’s face.
Then he got to me. The camera came down to my lap, to the gift bag, to the tag on the handle with the leaning cake.
“Zuri,” he read. He said it to the phone, friendly. “That the kid? Happy birthday, Zuri. Auntie’s on the internet.”
Irene put her crossword up between his phone and my bag. Same way she’d held it at three in the morning.
I pulled the tag off the handle. The string tore. I put it in my pocket.
“Leave her out of it,” I said.
“You should’ve thought about her before you…”
“Sir.” Tuan said it loud enough that the cartoon up front got turned off. “Last row. Back by the restroom. Your feet go on the floor and they stay on the floor till Albuquerque, or you can wait here for the eleven o’clock. Your choice. I’ll hold the door.”
The guy looked at the door. He looked at the pumps.
“This is insane.”
“Ma’am.” Tuan turned to me. “You’re getting written up. Your name goes on the report and the report goes to the office. You do something like that on one of my buses again, I don’t call anybody. I just leave you. Next time somebody puts their feet on you, you come get me.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He went to the front and picked the handset back up. The whole bus could hear him.
“Dispatch, 4417. Two passengers on the report. I’m keeping both.”
The guy went down the aisle to the last row with his slides slapping. He didn’t put his feet up. He held his phone out in front of him and talked into it the whole way back, low, the same voice from the depot.
Dwayne whistled through his teeth.
Tuan pulled the door shut and looked at us all in the big mirror.
“Feet on the floor, everybody. That means everybody.”
Sunday on my sister’s couch
We got into Albuquerque at 2:40. I made the party.
Sunday morning, Zuri hooked her bare foot over the arm of my sister’s couch, right by my elbow, and asked me to do them again.
The kit was open on the cushion between us. Galaxy Grape was down to about a third. The sheet of unicorns had two empty spots in the top row.
Zuri had counted them at the party. “There’s only ten.”
“The cart lady must’ve shorted me,” I said, and my sister looked at me over the top of her coffee and didn’t say a thing.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. Part eleven was at 1.4 million. I’d stopped reading the comments Saturday night, after the one that guessed the town. There was an email from the bus company with a PDF attached. I hadn’t opened it.
I turned the phone face down.
“Purple,” Zuri said. “And do the unicorn on the big one.”
I shook the bottle. I peeled a unicorn off the sheet, and she held still, and I pressed it on with my thumbnail.
If you’ve ever pulled your arm into your lap for somebody who didn’t deserve the room, send this to the person you’d want in the aisle seat.
For another tense ride where a stranger ignores every boundary, read The Paper Slip Over His Seat Said Rochester, And We’d Passed Rochester. Or trade the night bus for neighbor drama in I’ve Paid $780 A Month For The Patio Under His Porch Since 2016 and a family secret in My Husband’s Mother Kept A Picture On Her Fridge From Before I Married Him.
