Throughout the story, the buses Beth rides represent community and independence. On the bus, Beth finds a place to belong after years of feeling alone and rejected by society and her family. The drivers become her mentors and friends. She creates her own community by spending her time riding the buses.

When Rachel comes to join her, she experiences a similar sense of community and recognizes what she is lacking in her life. The bus drivers and the bus system itself connect:

[…] riders who might have been on that run last year and are now over here, and riders frim over here who might be transferring to a bus over there—and how the journeys seem separate, yet are constantly and inextricably joined together I step back and take in […] the enormous web of the world (334).

Riding the bus allows Beth to become entangled with the web of the world rather than kept away and isolated. Beth’s fascination with buses may have been sparked when her mother and stepfather took Beth on endless bus rides to escape whoever they believed was chasing them. Beth described spending those rides looking for someone to help her. Beth’s insistence on riding the buses in her own positive way can be read as a reclaiming and re-writing of one of the darkest experiences of her life.