When the Schoolgirls Took the Story With Them

I was waiting at the Tampines interchange for the 15 home when a group of schoolgirls sat down on the bench beside me and began telling a story at the exact volume that is meant to be private but is not. Someone — a teacher, a classmate, I could not tell — had done something embarrassing in front of a whole level. The teller had reached the setup and the first punchline and the others were laughing in the way that means more is coming.

I looked at my phone without reading it. Eavesdropping is impolite but stopping your ears in a public interchange is impossible when the story is being told with that particular energy of fourteen-year-olds who believe the world ends at the bus stop and begins again on the other side. The teller lowered her voice for the important part. I leaned slightly away to give them privacy I did not actually have. The important part was about a text message sent to the wrong group chat. The girls shrieked. An uncle on the next bench smiled at his newspaper.

Then the bus came. Not my bus — theirs, a school service with the name of the school on a card in the windscreen. They stood in a cluster, still laughing, still mid-anecdote. The teller said wait wait wait as they boarded, one hand on the railing, turning back to finish the sentence. The driver closed the door. The bus pulled out. The sentence stayed on the platform with me and the uncle and the other commuters who had heard enough to be curious and not enough to understand.

The bus took the ending. We kept the setup and the laughter and nothing that made them connect.

I thought about how many stories end this way in public — overheard, incomplete, carried away by whoever was leaving. Not dramatic endings. Just the mechanical ending of a door closing and an engine starting and the teller looking through glass at the people who did not get on.

My bus arrived twelve minutes later. I sat by the window and tried to invent endings for the group chat story. None of them were good. The uncle from the bench got on two stops later and sat across the aisle. We did not speak. We had shared something without sharing anything, which is the ordinary condition of city life if you take the bus often enough.

Why do I write about this. Because the interchange is full of stories that begin without you and end without you and leave you with the fragment anyway, like finding the first page of a letter in a bin and knowing there were other pages you will never see. The schoolgirls probably finished the anecdote on the bus. I hope they did. I hope the telling was complete somewhere between Tampines and school, even though my version of it never will be.

I still wait at the same bench on weekday afternoons when I leave work early. The schoolgirls are not always there. When they are, I listen without appearing to listen, and I accept that most of what I hear will leave on a bus I am not on. That is not a complaint. It is the shape of the interchange, and the shape of most evenings if you pay attention.