The 2:40 Route and the Man Who Always Reads Upside Down

The 2:40 leaves the depot with the heater already giving up. I take the front seat on the top deck, the one with the best view and the worst draft, and I put on something slow with a bassline you can feel in the window frame. The route is the long one, out past the retail park, and the streetlights along it are a tired orange that makes everybody look like a photograph left in a drawer.

He gets on at the second stop. Grey scarf, tall, a face that has clearly decided not to have an opinion before dawn. He sits across the aisle and one row back, which is exactly where you sit if you want to see what someone else is holding. I had a paperback open on my knee. I felt his eyes arrive on the page like a hand arriving on a shoulder.

He gets on at the second stop.

Here is what I noticed: he was reading it upside down. Not carelessly. He tilted his head the way you tilt it at a record sleeve in a shop, with a kind of respectful squint. I turned a page slower than I needed to. I let a sentence sit under the orange light a little longer than it deserved. It felt rude to rush someone who was clearly enjoying it.

There is a stretch near the canal where the bus leans into a long curve and everyone's shoulders lean with it. On that curve I tilted the book, just an inch, toward his side of the aisle. Not a gesture, not an invitation. Call it hospitality. In the black glass I saw him sit up very slightly, the way you do when you realize you have been caught and have no plans to apologize.

He got off at the stop before the hospital without saying a word. He did not look back and I did not turn around, which is the correct etiquette and also quietly unbearable. I finished the chapter alone, under the same orange light, and the lines I had let him read hummed a little louder than the rest. If you want to hear how Mira would have said something to him, that conversation is waiting for you on TheFriend.

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