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The ringleader of the group was a large banshee of a woman who never once faced forward, instead lifting up the armrest and directing her underlings face-forward for the eight hours we spent together. She sat on me. There was never a point in our trip where a portion of her ass was not resting on my right leg, save for the few points where I’d ask her to just move forward, please, which would last for a few seconds. Also worth mentioning: she spent most of her time bouncing on her seat. She was thirty-one years old, about ten years older than she looked and thirty-one years older than she acted, and, if she is to be believed, a mother of seven. With another one on the way. At one point she tells one of the girls – aged seventeen – “Damn, I got a kid older than you!” Nineteen years old, she said, which means, according to math, that she had a kid at twelve, which I’m not sure is possible. I’m not sure if any of it is true, but in a fit of frustration – I just wanted to read – I wondered if this was some Peter Pan complex, if she didn’t have a childhood and saw her chance to be a teenager with a bunch of teenagers. It’s cruel to remove people from their context, and hers was obviously a less affluent and less Jewish and more southern context than mine, but perhaps people lose their right to context when they spend eight hours bouncing on you against your will.

She spent the trip in a fit of hollers; she was the center of the bus. South Dakota has brilliant hills. It’s mostly made of farms, but between them are the pastel-green hills, canvasses for cloud shadows. Whenever we would pass a particularly beautiful set of hills, she would screech: “SEE!? THE HILLS HAVE EYES! THE HILLS HAVE EYES!” I couldn’t figure out why.

There was the girl sitting at the front of the bus, who I originally thought was her sister. She would pop by and look up to the banshee next to me with curious adoration. More on her later, I guess.

There was the Hooters girl, who sure worked at Hooters. There was the guy who found her worthy of his pursuance, mid-twenties, wearing a tank top from which blonde body hair protruded from every free particle of skin; he helped me with the old man, so I won’t hold anything against him.

There were two girls I called collateral. They just stared and smiled and laughed. They turned the clique into a veritable army.

They would talk about music, recent hits; anal girl would bring up new rappers and the Banshee leader would go: “Who? I’m not into that newwww shit, I’m still into Jeezy and all that.”

There was a black guy in his twenties who seemed like he would be perfectly enjoyable to be around in any other context – though as soon as I thought this I had to footnote it with that might just be my white guilt speaking.  He enjoyed them and seemed to know how annoying they were, but he was an enabler. He would sing songs they’d bring up, and the Banshee would spend the entire duration dancing—on a Greyhound bus—and clapping like a seal. As soon as he finished the song, she would immediately groan and say, “See, I hate that song.”

There was the middle-aged woman behind me, sitting next to anal girl; towards the beginning, realizing that their group was a “thing,” she offered any of the girls her Janet Evanovich romance, as it wasn’t very good, she said. They declined. By the end of her trip, she told me she was never going to take Greyhound again. She would later talk on the phone to her husband, boyfriend or mister (who she loved very much) about the passion plays they used to go to in Wyoming. She seemed to dislike everything else in this world.

And then there was anal girl. She was the cute one. At a bus stop in Wyoming, over the phone, her boyfriend was trying to convince her to try it. “No, who told you that it’d feel as good for me as it would for you?” Her birthday was next week, and he wanted that to be her present.

And they talked about sex. Though my body spent those hours slowly filling with lava, I felt much, much worse for the teen-aged girl and her mother sitting in the row in front of me, both dressed in the most innocent of fleece L.L. Bean jackets. They obviously had a healthy, loving relationship, but hadn’t gotten to the point where they can speak freely about the carnal. At one point, the banshee says, in some difficult-to-parse context, “She fucks niggers;” and through the pursuing discussion about how it’s not cool to say that, okay, the girl and her mother stared straight ahead, unbreathing. I have no idea who it was more embarrassing for.

All of them, including the banshee, spent a half an hour heckling the busdriver for going too slow.