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Show stitches, we called my mother to tell her that I had split my pinkie in two. school at Fairhill, my mother no longer walked with me down the hill but saw me off at the front door_as-the deepeningfall took more and more of the light. Write if you get work, she would call, a smile in her voiceAand then shut the door quickly to prevent Scott from escaping. The neighbor boy across the street, Ross, also walked to the bottom of the hill for the bus and might have provided some company. But he had lived in Virginia his entire life, had never moved, never been the new kid. Plus I was a girl. As we waited at the bus stop he said nothing to me, batted a nearby shrub with a stick, the silence growing thick between us. When the bus finally appeared, his relief could not have been more apparent. He practically ran up the steps of the bus and headed for the very back where his friends had saved him a seat. The children on the bus seemed older than me, though that fact is impossible. Some of the children had to be in first grade as well. What they probably were was simply more at ease. They had been riding the bus for a while, knew where everyone else lived, had slumber parties and birthday parties, and knew the best backpack to buy. I watched them enviously from my seat by myself, wishing to be in their center. The chaos on the bus both appalled and thrilled me. Kids turned around backwards chatting with their friends, kids in the aisles with their heads bent together, the bus driver, a woman the other children called "Grandma," looking into her enormous rearview mirror and yelling at the children by name to settle down. Often, I opened a book and read, hoping my outsiderness would appear chosen, a tactic I would use my entire adolescence to mask my loneliness. I looked to the sixth grade JPOs, Junior Police 59 |