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  Zero people even tried.

  I will never know how many people took the time to make sure they were in focus and pitch their talents to this company, but I’m pretty sure it couldn’t have been more than five because I received an email in less than twenty-four hours for an in-person interview a week later.

  The plan was set: I’d acquire a Greyhound bus ticket, land in Times Square with enough time to take pictures, grab lunch with Jennifer Woods to be sure I wasn’t going to kill her and wear her skin on my face for fun, dazzle the interviewers, and then grab dinner with a college friend before heading back home (triumphant! With a new job!) for a quick trip to pack up my stuff and finally move to New York.

  My mom dropped me at the bus station around seven p.m. It immediately became clear that the lipstick I’d put on this travel pig was not gonna stick. The person behind the protective glass was less than helpful as they slid me my ticket. I had simply asked if once I got to New York there were lockers of some sort to leave my larger bag in so I wouldn’t have to carry it around all day. After all, I wouldn’t be staying overnight. I’d have an afternoon and then get back on the bus and come back the way we came.

  “I don’t work in New York.”

  “Oh, I know that, I’m just wondering if there’s any consistency between Greyhound stations, amenities-wise?”

  “What’s an amenity?”

  And it was settled. I’d just have to figure it out on my own.

  The people who were boarding the bus seemed a little off, too. It wasn’t the poverty or their cleanliness. In fact, it would appear that everyone dressed above his or her means so as to impart “I could have flown if I wanted to, but I just hate flying.” No, it was the general shifty eyes and not scrolling through their cell phones to pass the time that got me. If they’d had a book, even, it would have felt like they knew they were going to be on a bus all night, and that buses are never comfortable save for when you’re touring and they give you nice beds. And even then your band would be more comfortable flying from city to city, right?

  I found a seat in the middle of the bus by the window. I’d read somewhere that the safest place to be on a plane if it crashed was in the cockpit or above the wing. Sans wings, the middle of the bus seemed like solid placement. The open seat gods blessed me with extra space to put my leg up if I felt so inclined. I put my backpack on the floor and wrapped one of the straps around my leg in a way that would make it nearly impossible to steal without kidnapping me, too. Once satisfied, I arranged my travel pillow between my head and the window so if sleep ever found me I wouldn’t have to make direct contact. It was already dark, so the Americana I reasoned would be worth this mode of transportation was similarly obscured by night.

  It wasn’t long after we pulled out of the station that the meowing started. At first I thought it was just a baby whining, as did everyone. But then it became clear that there was a cat somewhere on the bus. Did it have a ticket? Where was it headed?

  The bus driver pulled over on the highway and kicked a man off. Right there on the highway! Not even near an exit! Yes, he had smuggled a cat in his sweater. No, it was not allowed. Suddenly the shifty eyes and lack of distraction made sense: everyone was hiding something. I left my secrets and deceits at home! I knew I was forgetting something.

  After that minor hitch, we were off for the night. No matter what awkward position I put my legs and knees in, the bus never submitted to me. I was taken back to high school, competing in speech and drama tournaments where we would often have to show up at two or three a.m. Had I ever slept on those bus trips to the middle of nowhere Kentucky? No. The thrill of being seated near any number of crushes or playing mafia until sunrise kept me awake. I was so much younger then.

  Here I was, a weathered twenty-two-year-old, desperate for sleep that wouldn’t come. No one worthy of crushing on in sight. In some Pennsylvania town around four a.m. we all had to get off the bus. This would have been fine, except we needed our tickets to be permitted to get back on the bus and mine was in some unreachable pocket. I tore through my backpack and purse and hoodie pockets. Nothing. Panicking, I found another unhelpful employee to sell me another ticket, somehow more expensive than my other one even though we’d already made it a quarter of the way to my final destination. I felt fleeced. I was so tired and so angry. Thank goodness for credit cards or I’d have also felt like I was overdrafting my bank account. This was not a good start to my new New York life.

  Entering the bus now felt more like willful ignorance. This trip sucked. I was never going to get rest. I was signing myself up for having a pretty lousy day, but if college taught me anything, it was that the point is just to get through it. There’s bureaucracy and seedy people and a lot of stuff you wish you could forget, but if you just get through it, life is waiting on the other side.

  I sat down, flustered, and became increasingly so as a new passenger decided that sitting next to me was his best option. He was an older gentleman with Willie Nelson–style pigtails. I looked around the bus, mentally noting just how many additional open seats there were. In dire need of sleep, I just closed my eyes and laid my head back on my pillow.

  Hours later I felt something touch my butt. I let it go on a little longer than necessary just to be certain that it wasn’t my seat belt or a dream. Nope, it was definitely Willie Nelson’s crusty hand. Still above the pants, thankfully, but by then, a twinge of New Yorker had already gotten into me, and I turned and looked him dead in his face and just screamed. Loud. It wasn’t words, just “AHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  The bus driver didn’t slam on the breaks. He did get on the speaker and calmly ask, “Is everything okay?” and that’s when I (still making eye contact with this douchebag grandpa) yelled, “No, this perv is molesting me!”

  He grabbed his one bag and ran to an open seat next to the bus driver. Presumably making his case for why his hand needed to be not just touching, or resting, but caressing my ass while I was enjoying the first rest of this Oregon Trail–ian misadventure. Why, oh why, wouldn’t our bus driver just try to ford the next river we came upon and drown us all out of our misery? And for some inexplicable reason this dude was allowed to stay on the bus, but the guy with the cat was presumably still hitchhiking back toward civilization.

  At sunrise we stopped in Philadelphia. The bus driver again made us all exit the bus. I made sure I had my ticket in my hand and I never put it down, not even when I used the restroom at the icky rest stop. I did put it between my legs as I washed my hands, but that’s because I still had standards.

  My eyes burned in the sunlight, but I was relieved because the butt-rubber wasn’t getting back on the bus. Obviously I wasn’t going to risk going back to sleep. Bloodshot eyes would be my look of the day, but I had already overcome so much adversity in trying to get a job doing what I already knew how to do for no additional money.

  It started to rain as we began the rush-hour crawl to the city. America sure is hideous in the rain. Maybe not at the beaches, but cities definitely don’t benefit from the grays and stark white skies as they drip everywhere. The heating system had been activated on the bus. I knew this because I could hear it over my headphones, not because I ever felt any heat. Freezing, trying to make my hoodie a full-size blanket, I posted some lie about how great New York was to Facebook, trying to make anyone jealous of my horror-movie escapade.

  New Jersey to New York was the shortest leg of the trip by miles, but seemingly the longest in duration. I half expected to descend the stairs of the bus a grizzled old man, bearded and wild-eyed like it was my first taste of freedom in decades. What had I done to deserve this, aside from being too broke to pay for a real trip to the city? If I could just survive one or two more hours on this hell-wagon I would make it to Oz, meet Jennifer the wonderful and powerful, get a job at wherever the fuck, and brag across Facebook.

  When you take the Greyhound to New York, you don’t actually get let out i
n Times Square, but at Port Authority. It’s a dark and dungeon-esque garage. Aboveground rats greet you. There were lockers for you to store your extra bag.

  I found a bathroom and washed my face, brushed my teeth, put on makeup, gave up on my eye bags, and locked up my things. After a few wrong turns, I found Times Square.

  And after just a moment of seeing those lights, I knew that no matter what, I was going to be on one of those billboards. I belonged here more than anywhere before it. The bus was now a distant memory, as I gazed up and saw a future filled with possibilities.

  A person in a dirty Elmo costume asked if I’d like to take a picture with him. I didn’t.

  I sat on the big red staircase in the middle of it all. New York City, center of the universe. I took pictures in a circle, trying to capture everything for friends I knew would never visit.

  Lunch with Jennifer was just lunch. As expected, she was just a person, nervous about her new job and new fame, looking for someone to hang out with and maybe sometimes share snacks. She was on the show that night, so she looked excellent. She was tall and had naturally long eyelashes. I had just ridden a bus all night. We were very different, but similar enough to remain friends now that we had met in real life.

  The job interview was forgettable. The location was near my lunch date, so I arrived early, having nothing else to really do to pass the time. All of my experience was applicable. Spoiler alert: I didn’t get the job. They simply didn’t believe that I was actually going to move to the city. Apparently lots of people say they’re going to move here. But after everything that I’d seen so far (the sweater cat(!!!)) I was definitely moving here. That couldn’t have been for nothing. Still, it was a loss.

  I met up with my college friend Bianca for Chinese food near Times Square. Shortly after we sat down, Russell Simmons’s daughter and friends came in, too.

  “This sort of thing happens all the time here. You hardly even notice it after a while,” Bianca told me. Still, it was the most glamorous day of my life so far. High highs and low lows. At least it wasn’t boring.

  We took pictures in the now-closed Toys “R” Us. We giggled at police officers’ very distinct Bronx accents. We spun around in the lights and the dirt and the cold and the bustling life that attracted so many regular people like me every day.

  I went back to the bus station, vigilantly attending to my ticket and luggage. I got back on the bus.

  I slept all the way to Cincinnati.

  Eight Movies That Gave Me False Expectations About Living in New York

  Dragging my two overweight suitcases up the stoop, I was eager to finally move into my first apartment in New York. My bedroom was the size of any Midwestern master bedroom’s closet. The room faced an alleyway and had no air circulation. After I rolled my bags in, I decided to use the restroom. Upon flicking on the light, a few roaches scattered. Not great. The shower had baked-in footprints and blackish mold that may or may not have been a hazard for my lungs. The soap in the dish had a hair on it, too curly to go unnoticed, especially since none of my roommates had curly hair. The walls were so thin that I heard all of the exaggerated moans of my roommate’s girlfriend during his odd-hour sex sessions. This was not what I thought New York was. As an avid viewer of New York–based movies and shows, I can tell you we’ve all been sold a lemon. Here are the movies that gave me false expectations about New York:

  1. RENT

  Though I never saw the musical onstage, I was ridiculously enthralled by the cinematic adaptation in the fall of 2005. The plot is straightforward: A group of young friends are inordinately artistic and bohemian and broke in pre-’90s East Village, New York City. A bunch of the characters contract AIDS and sing about how scary dying is, but also how awesome it is to be young and really stand for something, man. I saw it in theaters twice and spent a paltry ten-dollar Best Buy gift card on the two-disc soundtrack set.

  It turns out, though, that you actually can’t protest having to pay rent after being given a free year in a big-ass studio apartment unless you’re down with the whole “squatting” thing, which should be made clear from the jump. Sure, their apartments have holes in the ceiling (which I’m reasonably certain isn’t up to any codes or regulations), and the only belongings they do seem to have in there are an answering machine, a variety of creative apparatuses like guitars and cameras, and a bike—but at least they have sunlight! Do you know how much an apartment that doesn’t face a brick wall or a piss puddle goes for?! So much money, omg. My first apartment in this city cost seven hundred dollars a month and was shared with three Craigslist randos. We had no cell reception in the bedrooms and had to sit in the living room with the roaches if we wanted to call anyone. Everything was made out of roaches! There ain’t nary a roach in Rent! How much could it have possibly cost in the early ’90s to pay for an apartment where the toilet is in the kitchen?

  Plus, nowadays any group of friends that diverse and talented would already have a hit reality show on Bravo and would not be worried about the cost of living in their freshly gentrified neighborhood.

  2. A Little Princess

  I am honestly too lazy to look up what this movie was actually about, but I sort of remember it being about a cute little white girl and her black friend who are orphans and hallucinate about living in India and colorful sand circles? And the white friend’s dad isn’t dead, he’s just in a coma and she’s waiting for him to wake up?? What I am certain of is that it rains a lot in that movie, but you don’t ever see the flooded uneven sidewalks and city sludge that builds up everywhere because of it. New York is nothing if it isn’t filthy.

  3. We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story

  Trust that museum dinosaurs remain inanimate and do not, I repeat: DO NOT spice up any of the city’s major parades with song and dance.

  4. Autumn in New York

  I will probably never meet Richard Gere, and that is the great tragedy of my life.

  5. You’ve Got Mail

  Meeting a guy online is pretty much the worst thing you could do. Trust me, or at least trust my experience. A few months after moving to New York, I found a guy on OkCupid who seemed totally normal and likable. We met up at a bar with his friends, who also seemed totally normal and likable. Everything was peaches and cornflakes until he suggested we go to a warehouse party in Bushwick, where he promptly decided to go snort all of the coke and ask me for sexual favors. I hopped in the first car that resembled a cab and proceeded to delete the app, my profile, and his number. Somehow he found me on Facebook and messaged me the full next day, begging for me to “pls send $20 for Chinese food xx.” Ugh, next!

  6. When Harry Met Sally

  Maybe I’m a cynic, but if a guy repeatedly says he’s not interested in you and spends decade after decade with woman after woman, maybe it’s best not to wait for him to become a good guy when you’re both fifty. Sure, his speech listing all your precious quirks is endearing, but get a grip! There are eight million people in this city; it’s unlikely that he’s the best option for you. Hell, he doesn’t even think that he is.

  7. Breakfast at Tiffany’s

  This movie is actually almost entirely accurate: parties with strange characters, a landlord who is obviously a white guy pretending to be another race very poorly, and rogue, nameless cats. I’m just really nervous about getting on the fire escape, and nobody appreciates when you sing out loud. Literally nobody. Someone should make a mash-up of Audrey Hepburn singing “Moon River” and that off-screen voice in Coming to America screaming “fuck you!” at Eddie Murphy.

  8. West Side Story

  Sorry, chica. That hot dude from the club doesn’t search your borough for you, screaming your first name under the cover of night. He just goes home with some other hot girl he finds on Hinge, or Bumble, or Raya, or some other bullshit “dating” app. Oh, and they live happily ever after.

  My Clothes Suck

  I blame growing up in the Ohio River
Valley for my still-emerging sense of style. On any given inclement day in the Greater Cincinnati Area you can bear witness to families entering Walmart or any dining establishment in white socks with shower shoes. This fashion statement has no age limit. Pajama pants are considered both inner- and outerwear, and generally speaking, if there is a free T-shirt anywhere, it is definitely worth obtaining, keeping, and wearing out into the world.

  But on the flip side, there’s a culture that demands “dressing up” for flights, buying purses beyond affordability (to be fawned over at discount stores, chain restaurants, and company potlucks), and judging everyone’s every trait as if we’ve never ourselves seen a mirror. “Look at his shirt! Eww!” she said, pulling her jorts wedgie out of her butt crack.

  I lived in this environment until I was twenty-two.

  So it should be no surprise, then, that when I moved to New York I dressed like absolute crap. The nicest things I owned were cardigans from New York & Company, a company I’ve never seen in New York, which prides itself on various watered-down collections of workplace apparel, and the pair of what I deemed “fashion Nikes” (but not fashion blogger Nikes) that I splurged a full fifty dollars on at a Shoe Carnival a month before moving.

  To say my tops were not in conversation with my footwear would be reductive; my outfits were tragedies in three parts.