Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel by Peter Cameron Page B

they say, downhill from there. There were a hundred representatives participating in The American Classroom, two from each state, and we were divided into two parties, the Washingtons and the Jeffersons. Two buses took us everywhere—the Washingtons rode in one while the Jeffersons rode in the other—and there was a lot of inane cheering and pounding on the windows when one bus overtook the other. I don’t understand this propensity to turn everything, like driving from the Russell Senate Office Building to Taco Bell, into a competition.
    We were encouraged to sit beside a different person every time we rode the bus, but on our very first trip (to the Capitol on Monday morning) a cadre of students who thought they were, and therefore were perceived as being, cool sat in the back of the bus and clearly claimed the territory. As an urban student who had taken the subway to school ever since I entered fifth grade, the whole world of school buses was foreign to me. I found it rather fascinating, in an anthropological kind of way. Whenever we got back on the bus there was this covert rush to get a seat near the back of the bus, which was interesting to watch because of course it was uncool to appear as though you wanted to be cool enough to sit in the back and uncool to look as if you needed to rush to get a back seat, because if you were genuinely cool the ineluctable rules of the universe would ensure you sat in the back. I usually sat very near the front of the bus with a girl named Sue Kenney from Pennsylvania. She was an earnest, hefty gal who could have used more (or some) deodorant, but she loved everything and everyone and was having THE BEST TIME OF HER LIFE! She seemed in many ways to be the polar opposite of me and in an odd way this seemed to ideally suit us to each other. She didn’t seem to notice that I barely said ten words to her, for she was constantly prattling and pointing out interesting things outside the window that we had just passed. I actually grew fond of her in a nastily superior kind of way, for she was so completely artless and optimistic and clueless, she didn’t care that she smelled bad or was fat or wore clothes unlike everyone else’s, she had some weird disconnect with life that kept her constantly bubbling, and you knew she would go blithely through her long horribly boring life thinking everything was just swell (the opposite of me).
    Nothing was swell for me. Mealtimes were the worst. Breakfast was fine—a buffet in the hotel’s Excelsior “Ballroom” at which many people chose not to appear, so there were many empty tables, and even if you had to sit at a table with someone, they didn’t expect you to say anything besides good morning, and that I could handle. I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. I realized this is how I am all day; for me, unlike other people, there doesn’t come a moment after a cup of coffee or a shower or whatever when I suddenly feel alive and awake and connected to the world. If it were always breakfast, I would be fine. In what I assumed to be an effort to keep us fatigued and subsequently more manageable, we were not allowed to sleep until late at night and were awakened early in the morning. We didn’t return to the hotel until about 11:00, and then there was an ice-cream social (once again in the “Ballroom”) where people could sing or play their guitars or read their poetry or juggle tennis balls or egotistically display other so-called talents. Then there was a lot of running up and down the hallways and shrieking and boys running into girls’ rooms and vice versa, all of which inevitably resulted in the regurgitation of ice cream. “Lights Out” was at 12:30. Breakfast was from 7:00 to 8:00, and the buses left the parking lot every morning at 8:30 sharp.
    Lunch and dinner were awful. We ate at places like Olive Garden or