Something Surprising

This was on the 72 bus, on the way out of Lake City a few years ago. I was sitting behind a woman in her late-twenties, wearing khaki pants and a black, collared shirt. It was morning. A drunk man in ratty clothes plopped next to her, with a clumsy force. His breath reeked of alcohol, I could smell it from my seat.

"Tell me something surprising," he said to her, sipping from a bottle masked by a paper bag. "I know everything about you already. No way yer gonna tell me something that surprises me."

"You don't know anything about me," she said, without looking up. He said, "Prove it. Tell me something I don't know."

"I don't have to prove anything to you," she said matter-of-factly, and even turned the page as if she'd been reading the whole time. He said, "I know your type. I know everything."

She lifted the paperback closer to her face in fake concentration. He said, "You only read on the bus, right? And you buy those shitty paperbacks cuz you want somethin' light and fluffy on the way to work. Something with a lot of dialogue. Because yer job is stressful and you want to relax. And you buy the large print editions because regular-sized words give you motion sickness, right? And you work downtown. But not in an office. You serve coffee, or food or something."

"You're just drawing conclusions," she said quickly, with a tension that seemed to suggest he was probably right about more than one of his observations. "That's not everything." He took another drink and looked the other way for a second. Then he said, "What else is there?" This seemed to make her very upset, and when she grabbed the cord to request a stop, she pulled harder than necessary.

"This isn't your stop, but you're getting off anyway. Cuz I'm gettin' under yer skin," he said, taking another sip. She exhaled as she stood up. "You're right about that." He chuckled and said, "I was right about everything. You didn't tell me anything surprising."