Penelope recommends “Good Old Days” by Pink
The sun is glaring through the stained window, directly into my eyes. I squint and shift over in my seat, squeezing in closer to my younger sister. Our backpacks are sitting heavy on our laps and our legs are uncomfortably suctioned to the sticky emerald seats of our humid school bus. I pop open my Airpods case and hold the left one out to her. She eagerly takes it. We hear the engine rumble, and she leans her head onto my shoulder, closing her eyes against the navy cotton of my uniform polo.
We’ve had many mornings like this over the past year. Some mornings she would huddle up against me to keep warm whenever the bus heating system failed. Other mornings she would sit further away from me while fanning herself, sometimes with a cold bottle of water propped up against the back of her neck. There were some mornings that began with our heads leaning close together, staring down at algebraic equations that neither of us quite understood but would be tested on later in the day. My favorite mornings with her were the ones when she would accept my left Airpod.
I unlock my phone and shuffle my most recent Spotify playlist, aptly titled, “The rest? It’s confetti,” as a reference to my senior quote (taken directly from the soul-crushing ending of The Haunting of Hill House). The scene was bittersweet—both in the Netflix show, and here on the sweaty school bus. It’s my last day of school, forever. I am a senior in high school, my sister a freshman. She sleepily buries her head into my shoulder despite the 80 degree weather, and we both acknowledge that this is the last time we’ll be on a school bus together. The last time we’ll walk into the building with our bags swung over one shoulder (a habit terrible for posture which she picked up from me), the last time I’ll get to store my change of clothes for tap club in her locker, and the last time I’ll get to poke her shoulder in between classes, just to watch her look around for me in the hallways with a confused smile.
Good Old Days by P!nk fittingly pours into our ears. Our mom raised us on P!nk. As kids, we obnoxiously sang along to the countdown sequence in her hit Funhouse every single time it played on the radio. Just Give Me a Reason was our go-to duet, and So What was our family anthem. It was no surprise to me when Good Old Days was the first song to play on our final busride together. When she sings “I still feel the same way I did when I was seventeen,” I squeeze my sister’s hand, hoping I can sing the same when I’m no longer seventeen and 184 miles away, alone in an unknown city and stuffed in a dorm room.
Her reaffirming lyrics repeat over and over. She sings the tale of her newfound revelation; that these are the good old days. “I wish that I could stay,” serenades our ears, and I look down at the top of my sister’s head, shining golden brown from the sun. My eyes look out the window at the same sweet birch trees I’ve seen for the past four years, and the bus turns into my high school parking lot for the last time. I do wish that I could stay, but I understand what P!nk means when she sings about the good old days. “It’s all good right now,” she whispers into my right ear. I agreed with her then, and almost a year later, with brand new friends in college and a recently discovered love for Boston, I still agree with her now.
Everything is all good right now, and I know it will continue to be. My left Airpod has gone unused, but whenever I hear this song, I know that my relationship with my sister can surpass the distance between us. I hope that when her senior year comes, she’ll play this song on her way to school and think of me.
Penelope Parker is about to start her second year as a Writing, Lit., and Publishing student at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Her work was recently published for the first time with Concrete Lit Magazine. Although she loves her home state of New York, she spent this past summer studying abroad in the Netherlands for a travel writing program.
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