U: Belle #1

Oh, God, he had the biggest head. I took one look at him when my
sister finally paid for my ticket and I said, "Look at that big
head!"

I came down on the Greyhound sitting next to a sailor who had seen
better days, his pinky finger pressed up against my ribs while his eyes
tried for x-ray vision. A girl is on her own when she steps onto a bus.
You can scream but you can't hide, I say.

It got worse when I stepped off that bus, the exact opposite of what it
should have been. I say that when you've sat smelling other people and
braving a bus toilet, the whole world should be your oyster. But that's
not the way it is. People in Nashville call it "paying your dues" but
I've come to believe they don't have the slightest idea what they're
talking about.

My sister picked me up with two children in the back seat and another
resting comfortably under the steering wheel. It hadn't been born yet,
of course, but could you blame it? It had a half-relation to the two in
back and, knowing my sister, a pretty steep hill towards mother-love.
If I were that baby, I would've stay cocooned forever. Though I suppose
that's what happened anyway.