Victoria’s van

Another writing exercise from a café from when I worked on the Victoria and the Secrets website. All characters and events are purely fictionalized. Caution: This post contains strong language.

The summer of ’61 was a long one for Victoria and the Secrets. That was the year that their tour bus — an old VW camper van — caught fire under suspicious circumstances while stopping for gas in San Antonio, Texas. In retrospect, the suspicious circumstances weren’t necessarily suspicious, but highly irregular. While Adrienne and Victoria were inside picking up snacks for the next leg of their trip, Patrick fueled the bus, and somehow completely failed to notice the sudden appearance of several emptied gas cans in the parking lot.

To be fair, gas cans at a gas station aren’t in themselves suspicious, so there was no actual reason why Patrick should have even batted an eye. A nose, though, he should have batted, if it can be said that anyone can bat anything other than an eye, a baseball, or a mobile. Unnoticed as he gripped the nozzle, fighting away the waves of fatigue that blurred his view of the spinning digits on the pump, was a rising smell of gasoline. A smell stronger than usual.

After returning the nozzle and tightening the cap, he trudged to the counter to pay, while completely failing to notice a pleasant warm glow rising behind him. Victoria passed him, unwrapping a peanut butter cup before stopping dead.

“Buh,” she said, which Patrick ignored as he slipped through the glass doors to look for Adrienne. “Buh” she repeated helplessly, watching flames lick higher in the bus, now with oily black smoke billowing through the side windows. Her peanut butter cups fell to the ground, unnoticed.

“Fire,” the word fell noiselessly from her lips. “Fire,” she repeated, staring straight ahead. It was, she felt, as if she had taken the wrong exit from the station’s convenience store and found herself in an alternate reality where tour buses aren’t reliable things that stay much the same as they are where you leave them. In this new universe, tour buses burn vigorously even when you leave them completely alone.

Suddenly, Victoria found her voice, and, summoning her best singer’s breath support, screamed quite loudly: “FIRE!!!”

The fire kept burning stubbornly and did not go out. Giving an exasperated sigh, and with a slump to her shoulders, she spun on her heels and marched back into the store. Maybe, she thought, if she exited through another door, she’d find herself back in her proper reality where the bus was perfectly fine, and nobody needed to scream “fire” about anything.

Reality is stubborn, of course, so this didn’t work. In fact, Adrienne and Patrick were at that very moment bursting through the doors with the station attendant in tow. “NO!” Victoria pleaded. “It’s the wrong universe! Wrong door!” She clawed at them, trying to haul them both by their collars.

Patrick and Adrienne stopped, stared, and each took a turn saying “Buh.” What else was there to do, after all, presented with a VW bus that was now fully engulfed in flames?

“Buh,” said Patrick.

“Buh,” said Adrienne.

“Go back,” said Victoria.

“Buh,” said the station attendant.

Adrienne spun to face the attendant. “Hey, shouldn’t you… you know… DO something?”

The attendant just shook his head, his jaw agape. “I…I…buh.”

“STOP SAYING ‘BUH’!!” she screamed, then took the man firmly by the lapels in two fists, pulled him to her face.

Stop…saying…’buh’…and fucking DO SOMETHING.”

Victoria spun on her heels and sprinted into the store to look for exits back to her own reality. The one where everything was fine. The one where she had nothing more serious to worry about than how many peanut butter cups to eat before they reached Phoenix. The reality where her fucking bus wasn’t on fucking fire.

“Adrienne,” said Patrick. “Adrienne! ADRIENNE!” Each time he repeated his wife’s name, his voice tightened with growing urgency.

“ADRIENNNNNNE!!”

“WHAT??” Adrienne snapped to face Patrick, the attendant still locked in her steely grip.”

Patrick hesitated for a fraction of a second, then leaned close and whispered, “The bus is…on fire.”

“What?”

“It’s on fire. Fire. IT’S ON FIRE,” he stated simply.

A growl started deep in Adrienne’s chest and grew like the rumbling of an approaching train, louder, resembling a closed-mouth scream. As the sound rose, Patrick edged backwards. This, he felt, wasn’t a good place to be standing when the sound reached her lips.
But it was too late. Too, too late. “OF…FUCKING…COURSE…IT’S… FUCKING…ON…FUCKING…FIRE.”

“Well, it’s just that—”

Suddenly Adrienne’s voice became almost inaudible, which to Patrick’s trained ear was even worse than the shouting. “The van is on fire,” she whispered. “The fucking van…is…fucking…on…FUCKING FIRE! I can fucking see that, can’t I?”

During this, the station attendant tried to slip her iron grip, which made Adrienne’s focus snap Terminator-like back to him, making him squeak pitifully. “And you,” she pulled him closer. “Why the fucking fuck aren’t you fixing this? There’s a fucking fire at your fucking pump. Do something, you little shitbag.”

The attendant nodded vigorously, and Adrienne relaxed her grip enough for him to slip away in a lightspeed blur.

Over by the pump, the van was, by this point, a flaming skeleton.