Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 3: The Bus
The bus was a rolling argument between the life Maya had chosen and the life her body actually required.
She needed quiet to write. The bus was never quiet — it was fifty-five feet of diesel engine, rolling road noise, Dex’s inability to watch videos without commentary, and Linc’s periodic snoring, which he denied existed and which had been recorded on Petra’s phone on three separate occasions. Maya’s bunk was the third one back on the right, which was theoretically private when the curtain was drawn but acoustically connected to everything.
She’d learned, in the four days since New York, to write in the hour before anyone else woke up.
She was doing that now — notebook open on her knees in her bunk, the bus humming through the New Jersey corridor in the early grey of a November morning, everyone else still asleep. She had a half-completed verse and a melody she was trying to notate in the shorthand she’d developed in college, because she couldn’t reliably hold a melody in her head for more than three hours without it transforming into something else entirely.
The verse was about a hallway. She’d been trying not to notice that it was about a hallway.
She closed the notebook.
The bus arrangement on this tour was: Maya’s team had their own vehicle — her, Petra, Dex, and Linc, plus a driver — and they were supposed to travel independently. That had lasted until the second leg of the drive out of New York, when the two buses had ended up at the same truck stop at two in the morning and Joss Navarro had knocked on their door asking if anyone had a phone charger with an iPhone cable because his was “somewhere in the abyss” and he’d quoted it exactly like that, with audible quotation marks. Petra had given him her spare and he’d stayed for twenty minutes talking to Dex about drums while Maya made instant coffee at the little galley station and watched Petra watch the conversation with her tactical expression on.
After that, the two buses had traveled within sight of each other more often than not. It wasn’t a formal arrangement. It just happened.
The Static’s bus was larger. That was the whole of the difference from the outside. Inside, Maya had gathered, it was basically the same configuration scaled up — four bunks, a lounge area, a small bathroom that everyone fought over. The difference was that The Static had been doing this for six years and their equipment was better, their crew was bigger, and their bus did not smell like Linc’s protein powder.
“You’re up early,” said Petra’s voice from two bunks down.
“So are you.”
“I never sleep properly on the bus.” A rustling of bedding. “What are you working on?”
“Nothing useful.”
A pause. Petra was very good at reading the pauses around Maya’s answers, a skill she’d been developing for seven years of friendship. “Is it the thing that happened in the corridor?”
“Nothing happened in the corridor.”
“He told you the set was good and then he came and found you after the show to talk about the song.”
“That’s called industry networking.”
“Maya.”
“Petra.”
Another pause. “I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already know.”
“Good. Then go back to sleep.”
Petra did not go back to sleep. She appeared at Maya’s bunk curtain three minutes later with two mugs of instant coffee, which Maya accepted because she was not going to win a cold war when coffee was on the table.
They sat on opposite ends of Maya’s bunk in the dim moving dark, and Petra said, quietly, “I don’t want you to be careful in a way that makes you small. But I do want you to be careful.”
“I know.”
“This tour is the biggest thing that’s happened to us. If it goes well—”
“I know, Petra.”
“—the label will start listening differently. The booking agency will start calling instead of waiting for us to call. We have a real window here.”
“I know all of this.”
Petra wrapped both hands around her mug. “He’s probably not a bad person.”
“I didn’t say he was.”
“He’s just someone with a label rule against exactly the situation that could develop if you don’t—”
“There’s no situation,” Maya said. “He said my song was good. I said thank you. End of story.”
“You’re writing in your notebook at six in the morning.”
“I always write in my notebook at six in the morning.”
Petra looked at her with the expression Maya privately thought of as the tactical warmth face — real warmth, absolute, underneath an assessment that never fully shut off. “Just don’t be the opening act who makes headlines for the wrong reason.”
“That’s the most you’ve ever said that specific thought out loud.”
“I’ve been working up to it.”
Maya laughed, which was probably what Petra had been aiming for. “I’m not making any headlines. I’m working.”
“Good.”
“He’s not interested anyway.”
Petra said nothing.
“He was being collegial,” Maya said. “He’s the kind of person who takes music seriously and he heard something he found interesting and he said so. That’s all it was.”
“You’ve thought about it a lot for something that’s all it was.”
“I haven’t thought about it that much.”
“You wrote about a hallway.”
Maya opened her mouth. Closed it.
Petra finished her coffee and stood up, tucking the mug against her side. “I’m going to try to sleep for another hour. The Philadelphia load-in’s at noon.”
She went back to her bunk. Maya sat with her notebook closed on her knees and listened to the road moving under them.
Outside the window, the sky was beginning to lighten at the edges. They were somewhere in Connecticut — she’d looked at the route the night before — moving through the kind of landscape that looked like everywhere and nowhere in the dark, trees and overpass supports and the occasional cluster of lights that meant a town.
She opened the notebook. Read what she’d written. The verse was good. Better than she wanted it to be.
She crossed out the last line and wrote three different versions of it. None of them were as good as the original.
She wrote the original back in and closed the notebook and put it under her pillow and lay down.
She did not sleep for a while.
Through the thin wall of the bus, she could hear the world moving past. At some point the bus slowed and she felt the change in engine noise that meant they were pulling off for a stop. She heard Dex’s voice saying something, Linc responding. Heard the other bus somewhere nearby, or imagined she did.
She told herself she was imagining it.
She was almost certain she was imagining it.
She closed her eyes and thought about the Boston setlist and what she wanted to change and whether she should move “Signal Fire” to the second slot instead of the third, and eventually she fell asleep, and if she dreamed about anything specific she couldn’t remember it by the time Petra knocked on her curtain at eight-thirty with a gas station egg sandwich and the particular expression she wore when she’d already assessed the day and found it manageable.
“Eat,” Petra said.
Maya ate.
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