You wouldn't expect it. Or at least I wouldn't expect it. Not of her. She climbs on the bus every morning. Her hair is always curled. Her face is always powdered. Her eyebrows are always plucked and penciled into perfect arcs. Her bleached teeth sparkle.
I wouldn't expect it, not of her, because I am prejudiced against sweatpants and uggs and girls who talk about how trashed they got on the weekend. I wouldn't expect it of her because I too often assume that a polished exterior is a shallow exterior and that a shallow exterior hides a shallow interior.
As we pull into the transfer station, she puts in her pink headphones and opens her designer purse. Her fingers disappear inside as she shifts wallet and keys, searching for something in the bottom. The man next to her looks and smiles. She has found it and pulls it out, disentangling it from the loose threads of the liner.
She holds him between her fingertips. He reclines on his plastic stomach, propped up on his plastic elbows, holding a green plastic rifle in his green plastic hands.
She is singing along to the music now, her lined and glossed lips forming the words silently. Her shadowed eyelids slide half closed and her blue eyes peer past the mascarad curtain of her eyelashes to look out the grimy bus window.
I watched her lips forming the silent words and turning her fingers turning her soldier over and over in her hands like a nun fingering the beads of a rosary.
I wouldn't heave expected it, not of her, but I knew that in her mind and in her heart she was praying for him, whoever he is.
I prayed too.
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