The next morning, I hugged my parents goodbye in the kitchen. Once again I didn’t finish my breakfast. I left a few flakes of Raisin Bran in the bowl, dumped it in the sink, and took off to catch the bus to my internship in Philly.

Exactly one week later, I boarded a different bus to Washington, DC.

Everything happened so quickly. I drew a blank as soon as I stepped onto the Greyhound. Technically I was running away. I knew that. The stream of gut-punching, sweat-inducing adrenaline made that much clear, even if it would only be for two days. But for a brief moment I couldn’t recall why I was doing it, like I’d stumbled into the kitchen in the middle of the night but forgotten what exactly I wanted. The reason was escaping me.

Then the bus jolted forward, and I remembered.

Fucking grit.

WEEK ONE

I INHALED DEEPLY, then exhaled. This is happening, I whispered under my breath as I drifted down the aisle.

The bus smelled cheap. It didn’t reek, but it had a sterile stench that was on par with the cleaned-by-a-rag whiff of a McDonald’s table. I lifted my chin up to look around. Virtually every seat was filled with strangers, and for the first time in my life, I saw an extra layer of meaning in that word. Not that there’s anything inherently strange about a man in a business suit drinking wine straight from the bottle, or an all-girls punk rock band, or a person with teardrops tattooed on his face, but when you put these unique individuals together inside a moving box . . . voilà. Strangers. Noah Webster must have ridden this very bus when he wrote the definition. But who was I to judge? I was the token teen with a half-baked plan, so I suppose I added to the strange vibe.

I made it to the back of the bus and found two seats by the bathroom, which added a truly special touch to the smell situation. Strategically, I plopped my backpack down in one seat and myself into the other. First I would pretend to be asleep to ward off potential seatmates. They would have no choice but to assume the backpack belonged to someone else. Then, when everyone was seated, I would sprawl out across both seats and sleep like a king. It was a foolproof plan.

Seconds after I closed my eyes, though, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Is anyone sitting there?”

I opened my eyes and rubbed them pathetically, gazing up like a lost puppy. A remarkably pretty girl towered over me. She had wispy blonde hair and the kind of deep blue eyes that suck you right in. No high cheekbones or sharp jawline or anything—her face was confidently undefined. Round, but in a sweet way. Her lips, on the other hand, were inhumanly voluminous, and she pursed them while she asked. She knew no one was sitting there. She was totally onto me.