Author's Note: Written for a "coming of age" short story project in my creative writing class.

Bus Loop
By Astrid Smith

Jared sat down on the neon blue bench situated directly below the sign that read ‘NEWTON EXCHANGE, BAY 2’. He slipped his backpack off his narrow shoulders and dropped it in front of him; then, he hoisted one filthy boot so it rested on top of the bag and began to clean it with a paper towel he had saved that day. He ignored the irritated looks people gave him, their lips curling at the rhythmic slop, slop of the mud falling from the sole to the pavement, their noses wrinkling when he wiped something off that might not have been just dirt. After taking the boggy, pot-holed short cut from his new school to the bus stop every day for the past year, he was used to it.

A pale, sickly looking guy who might not have been far from Jared’s sixteen years took the empty spot next to him, not as turned off by the mess as the last bus-goer—or just not aware of it. His eyes were glazed and his breaths came in short, low gasps. In the bright afternoon sun, every scar on his thin face was highlighted. He flashed a toothy, oblivious smile at something over Jared’s shoulder.

Welcome to Newton Exchange. The younger boy smiled unwillingly.

“Christ!”

Jared started and looked up at the young woman standing over him, who had previously been sitting on his other side. “Huh?”

“Do you have to do that here?” She was holding her purse out in front of her—staining the bright red leather was a giant lumpy mishmash of sludge and grass. The mass of frizzy black hair crowning her head seemed to crackle with electricity. “This isn’t your goddamn garage, people have to sit here.”

“Oh, y-yeah.” He ran a hand through his hair nervously. “Sorry—” He gestured to the wooded area surrounding the south side of the exchange.

“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes and turned away, muttering something rude under her breath that Jared pretended not to hear. He didn’t really care—not much, anyway. It had happened countless times before, someone having a little tantrum over his mess; the confrontations he would face at the bus stop were an acceptable sacrifice to what he might get if he didn’t take the shortcut.

Jared didn’t think he was strange looking. He was taller than most of the people at his school, and thinner too; according to his doctor he was approximately twenty pounds underweight, but he had always been skinny, and other than that he was perfectly healthy. Kids in elementary school had affectionately nicknamed him String Bean, or just Bean, or Fire Pole. It didn’t affect his schoolwork, his social life, and it didn’t hurt that he had a foot on everyone else when he tried out for his school basketball team. Of course, that was all back in his old town. Things were different here. No one called him Bean, no one called him anything—and he hadn’t made the basketball team. The players at his new school were stocky and agile and quick. He was the clumsy giant in tryouts. They had been laughing behind their hands as he walked off the court.

The 321 pulled away in front of him, along with the ten foot advertisement for ‘Desperate Housewives’ that he had been staring at. The stoner next to him eventually wandered off and he was left alone. Herds of people came and left in the time it took Jared to retie his wet shoelace. He inhaled the exhaust from the passing traffic, tinged with the flat, memorable scent of chlorine from the local swimming pool, sinking into a hole of after-school thoughtlessness.

A siren started suddenly from somewhere behind him. Several people around him jumped, even though they were commonplace in the neighbourhood. He shifted uncomfortably, his reverie temporarily interrupted. Balancing on the edge of the bench to make room, he tugged his backpack on again and checked his watch; three minutes until the 341, his bus, arrived.

…Two minutes, thirty-two seconds.

“What’s up, Jared?”

Jared flushed. His stomach plummeted and a fine layer of sweat covered his palms. The group of boys sat down next to him, one tucking away a brand-new pack of cigarettes, another loudly slurping a bright red slushie. They had been at the corner store. They were there every day after school. Jared took the shortcut that avoided the corner store for a reason.

One of them, a guy in his math class named Derek, with a baby face and a shaved head, clapped him hard on the back. He could feel each finger curl through his thin tee shirt as the hand balled into a fist. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” Jared repeated. They all sniggered, as though he had made a stupid joke. He smiled weakly, pleadingly.

“Wanna smoke?” Derek held one out between two fingers, showing a grin with too many teeth.

“No thanks.”

“Too bad.” He was about to light the one already in his mouth when he noticed the mud. He was up like his feet were on fire, kicking the mud off in disgust. “What the hell, man? You’re sitting in shit, what the hell is wrong with you? What the hell?”

The others started to notice too, reacting to every erratic movement Derek made with a burst of raucous laughter. “Screw off,” he growled, jerking his foot awkwardly back and forth, trying to get some of the mess off. Mud flew in every direction; and just as Jared’s bus was pulling up next to the stop, a clump hit him square on the right cheek.

Instantaneously the laughter leapt to a nasty guttural roar. The boy behind him was patting him on the shoulder between gasps for breath, as though to comfort him. “Aw, man, wash it off—” The cold was unexpected. Jared leapt up instinctively as cherry-coloured slush traveled down the back of his shirt and stained his dark hair a hideous maroon. Sticky trails of flavoured syrup ran along the underside of his spread arms and he could see little pink flowers blossoming on his grey socks.

“See you at school, man,” Derek called back as the group headed off, still convulsing with elated laughter. Jared stared straight ahead, waiting until they had disappeared from his line of vision before both hands began furiously scrubbing the mud off his face. His entire body shook as he readjusted his soaking backpack to start the forty-minute walk home.

The next few days, Jared did not sit down at the bus stop. He stayed behind the corner store, in the shaded sanctuary of the trees, until the bus doors opened and he could walk straight onto another safe-haven. The clear sky had turned grey and the air was muggy. People moved in slow motion through the fog and the clouds of their own condensed breath from bus to bus. On Friday, Jared could see the rain as it split leaves and blended with the oil stains on the road: rainbows in puddles.

The 341 was due in about six minutes when he heard a familiar chorus of voices—it came from the other side of the trees, and it sounded thrilled.

“Piss off, dickweed.” The girl was taking long determined steps away from the corner store and toward the woods, the only direction they hadn’t blocked off. Jared could make out the slight waver in her stride from fifty feet away. Derek and the others were jeering and catcalling as she pushed a wandering hand off her waist. As though there had been an on-switch there, she whirled around and tugged a little grey aerosol can out of her bright red purse, thrusting it directly in front of her. “Don’t touch me.” Her voice was low, broken.
Derek knocked the can out of her grasp with a broad swipe of his arm; she ran.

Feet pounded on the raw earth towards Jared. His backpack dug excitedly into his neck. He heaved it off himself and ducked around the corner of the building, the uneven grey brick pressing against his back. After a pause, he slipped off his boots and put them in his bag, pointing neatly to one side.

As the sound of her breath grew nearer, he reached out a hand. Seconds later it enclosed around warm flesh and he tugged her as hard as he could around him, hearing her side smack into the wall. He only glanced at her stricken face before bringing his backpack up and waiting for the next set of lungs. One person always led the herd.

Jared felt his arms seize up as the uneven thump of the stampede came closer. He straightened out his elbows, bent his knees and turned his torso away; as soon as a foot appeared around the corner, he swivelled.

The steel toes of his boots hit Derek’s face with a gratifying thud—there was a resounding crunch, a strangled cry, and finally a thump as the boy hit the ground. The rest of the footsteps came to an abrupt halt. Jared grabbed the girl’s hand and walked away.

“You’re—”

“Yeah.” He gave her an odd twitch of his mouth; a lopsided smile. “It’s Jared.”

She smiled back, the orb of black hair standing at the ready. Her teeth seemed perfectly white against the darkness of her skin. “Cynthia. You’re not wearing shoes.”

The 341 pulled into the loop. Calmly, Jared slung his considerably lighter backpack over one shoulder. “This one’s mine.”
“Mine too.”

As they took a seat together at the back of the bus, she turned to him, like an old friend. “So, d’you always take that path through there?”

“No.” He hesitated, shrugging. “Not any more.”

FIN