Bus Ride
by Maoly Hernandez
I sit in the middle of the bus, right by the window, next to someone I rarely speak to. My best friend sits in the far right all the way in the back of the bus. Pink headphones hang from her fingers. Her eyebrows, coming together, carry and crease her forehead. Just below her eyebrows, her determined eyes, the color of mud, seem to question the knot on the cords in her hand. Her nose expands as she takes a deep breath and exhales fast.
This is the time of the year when my boarding school forces students to “embrace” nature and to “bond” with other students outside of our normal circles of friends. We are on a one-hour ride to the annual “adventure” the school board baptized as “Fall Outing.”
Our driver is the football coach, a heavy-set Latin American man from California who never learned to speak Spanish.
The sun slaps my left eye when I turn to look at the window.
Arizona should be called the “Cactus State” I think. There are so many everywhere. The bus moves fast, and the cacti soon become green flashes. I stare at them until I drift off.
Soon, I’m no longer on the bus; I’m wondering around a gift-shop in Utah. I’m looking at little ceramic sculptures of buffalo when I see a fluffy looking cactus. It is fascinating, I think, and so I wrap my hand around it with the same fearlessness of a small child wandering along the shore of the ocean.
“Ouch!!”
I feel the sting in my right hand; a thousand needles penetrate my skin as my nervous system forces my hand to retrieve.
I am back in my seat soon after; my hand still hurts and there are still miles and more miles of open road to come, but the view is calming.
I watch intently as the plants and rocks look like they are moving backwards. Back home, in Harlem, the buildings sit still when I walk past them on my way to the train, which moves faster than this, and does not let me see what is ahead. On the bus, I can see what is around me, but this doesn’t make it more familiar.
I look to the back of the bus to see if my best friend has finally untangled her headphones. I am pleased to see the tiny buds sticking out from her earlobes. Her forehead is still folded.
My best friend, an African American fifteen year old who hates “outside anything” is a true city girl; she is unaccustomed to the bug bites, the smell of fresh air, and walking for hours. She prefers perfumed city malls and the smell of freshly brewed Starbucks coffee. She reminds me of the girls back in Harlem who would wince at the thought of going on a hike.
I don’t really like Starbucks coffee, but I understand that the smell of freshly brewed coffee is heavenly. Growing up with my mother and grandmother, I quickly learned to love coffee. The smell of my mother’s Café Santo Domingo carried me all the way back to the Caribbean, a place where I was always outside before we moved to New York and way before I ever left for boarding school in Arizona.
My head pivots to the back of the seat in front of me. I can only see the back of it. It is a rectangular shape with round edges at the top. Small lines engrave it, the same lines that appear on people’s faces when they age. Most of the wrinkles in the back of this seat are at the bottom, a sure sign that people with both big and little butts have sat there.
There is a rip. The fake black leather covering the seat has given up, and this has created an open wound. The yellow stuffing is exposed as bits of fake leather hang from the sides of the yellow part, desperately clinging to the uninjured part.
My best friend’s voice breaks my analysis of the seat. “This is so bootleg!” she yells, tired of the ride. One of the football players responds, “Shut up!” He is a heavy and tall European-American, who I once beat in a pie-eating contest back in October.
His friend joins him and calls to her, “Yeah! Shut your mouth.” Before I can stop the words from vomiting from my mouth, I respond, “You shut up. She can say whatever she wants!”
This second boy is another European-American, but he is tall and skinny. He sits in front of me, on the seat with the open wound.
He makes fun of my Spanish accent and tells me I sound like a “ fucking hyena.”
“Fuck you!” I answer. “At least I have a language that’s mine. You’re mad because I understand what you’re saying, but you can’t understand my language.”
I then speak to him in Spanish because I know it will make him mad; “Mardito gringo. Ven sacame ven! Por lo menos mis ancestros no mataron para que yo este aqui!”
He doesn’t understand my words, but—just as I predicted—they make him mad anyway. He turns red, then pink. The purple veins in his neck stick out as he proceeds to spit out racist slurs. “Wetback! You dirty fucking Mexican…” he says before he adds that I should get the “fuck” out of “his” country.
I am deaf by this point. I can’t hear him anymore over the sound of my anger.
I stab him with my eyes.
I think to myself about how many ways I could take him. I think about how many ways my best friend and I could take them both. I think of how big his body is, how strong he is, how unafraid I am. I think of how, if he dared touch me, I would grab his head and smash it against the window.
The blood gushing from his head would add color to the dull scenery framed by the broken glass. Parts of his left eyebrow would be gone, stuck to jagged shards. The boy’s eyes would look up to the sky for an answer, but he would not find God in the ceiling of this bus. He would feel weak, probably dizzy. His legs would go numb; he would bow to me as he fell to his seat.
My fingers would press on his neck. He would be branded before my right hand would pull back and then forward in the direction of his mouth. Jab, Cross, Jab, Cross, Hook, Jab, Jab, Jab, Hook, Cross. His head would swing back allowing me to see his red nostrils. The boy would raise his hand to defend himself.
But I would grab that hand and twist it before he could reach me. He would jerk in pain!
“Get up the fucking chair” I’d command the boy in Spanish. The heavy-set, non-Spanish speaking Latino bus driver would not understand what I said but he would stop the bus and look back.
The boy would not comply, so I would grab him by his blue shirt and drag him outside. My fingers would be entangled in his soft Gringo hair. I would smash his head on the ground engraving the shape of his horrifying face on the sand. He would look like the dirty one from the brown sand and gravel that would stick to his skin.
I’d kick him in the stomach full force before I’d get on top of him. Closed fisted, I’d punch him in the eyes, nose, mouth, chest, legs, nose, mouth, and chest, again and again and again. I’d hear his voice in my mind as I punched him: “You dirty fucking Mexican. Get the fuck out of my country.”
I’d hear that over and over and over as my nails would claw at his ears. Blood would run from his ears, to his jawline, to his throat. It would stream from his cheek, drenching the dry earth. If anything grew here, it would be poisonous, I’d think.
His mouth would start to foam. I would look around at the stained sand ….for anything…for…
A rock!
My left hand would pin him down while my right hand reached for the stone. Its sharp edges would hurt the places the cactus had stung me. But I wouldn’t care. I would lift the rock in the same way I lift my Dominican flag. I would aim at his temple…
I would--
But then…
Then….
…the others would get up to see; I’d see them staring from the bus windows, looks of horror in their eyes as I confirmed the stereotypes they’d heard about people like me…
The first week of boarding school, some of the students had asked me, “Is Harlem really like they show in the movies?” “Are people from Harlem violent?” …
“No,” I had told them.
And so I just sit there. I stare at the ripped seat, and I say nothing.
-------
But then! Then, I glance at the driver whose ears seem to have shot up. One of his eyes runs toward the center of his nose while the other runs away from it toward his right ear. He is listening! He’s heard! He will take action now. He will do something! He will make this right. He will tell this asshole that we are not hyenas, or wetbacks, or dirty, or….
But he doesn’t. He just sits there. And says nothing. He is no more helpful than anyone else on that bus…
Like them, he is silent. Like me, he is Latin American.
But unlike me, he has power.
He is the driver.
He is older.
He is their coach.
This is the time of the year when my boarding school forces students to “embrace” nature and to “bond” with other students outside of our normal circles of friends. We are on a one-hour ride to the annual “adventure” the school board baptized as “Fall Outing.”
Our driver is the football coach, a heavy-set Latin American man from California who never learned to speak Spanish.
The sun slaps my left eye when I turn to look at the window.
Arizona should be called the “Cactus State” I think. There are so many everywhere. The bus moves fast, and the cacti soon become green flashes. I stare at them until I drift off.
Soon, I’m no longer on the bus; I’m wondering around a gift-shop in Utah. I’m looking at little ceramic sculptures of buffalo when I see a fluffy looking cactus. It is fascinating, I think, and so I wrap my hand around it with the same fearlessness of a small child wandering along the shore of the ocean.
“Ouch!!”
I feel the sting in my right hand; a thousand needles penetrate my skin as my nervous system forces my hand to retrieve.
I am back in my seat soon after; my hand still hurts and there are still miles and more miles of open road to come, but the view is calming.
I watch intently as the plants and rocks look like they are moving backwards. Back home, in Harlem, the buildings sit still when I walk past them on my way to the train, which moves faster than this, and does not let me see what is ahead. On the bus, I can see what is around me, but this doesn’t make it more familiar.
I look to the back of the bus to see if my best friend has finally untangled her headphones. I am pleased to see the tiny buds sticking out from her earlobes. Her forehead is still folded.
My best friend, an African American fifteen year old who hates “outside anything” is a true city girl; she is unaccustomed to the bug bites, the smell of fresh air, and walking for hours. She prefers perfumed city malls and the smell of freshly brewed Starbucks coffee. She reminds me of the girls back in Harlem who would wince at the thought of going on a hike.
I don’t really like Starbucks coffee, but I understand that the smell of freshly brewed coffee is heavenly. Growing up with my mother and grandmother, I quickly learned to love coffee. The smell of my mother’s Café Santo Domingo carried me all the way back to the Caribbean, a place where I was always outside before we moved to New York and way before I ever left for boarding school in Arizona.
My head pivots to the back of the seat in front of me. I can only see the back of it. It is a rectangular shape with round edges at the top. Small lines engrave it, the same lines that appear on people’s faces when they age. Most of the wrinkles in the back of this seat are at the bottom, a sure sign that people with both big and little butts have sat there.
There is a rip. The fake black leather covering the seat has given up, and this has created an open wound. The yellow stuffing is exposed as bits of fake leather hang from the sides of the yellow part, desperately clinging to the uninjured part.
My best friend’s voice breaks my analysis of the seat. “This is so bootleg!” she yells, tired of the ride. One of the football players responds, “Shut up!” He is a heavy and tall European-American, who I once beat in a pie-eating contest back in October.
His friend joins him and calls to her, “Yeah! Shut your mouth.” Before I can stop the words from vomiting from my mouth, I respond, “You shut up. She can say whatever she wants!”
This second boy is another European-American, but he is tall and skinny. He sits in front of me, on the seat with the open wound.
He makes fun of my Spanish accent and tells me I sound like a “ fucking hyena.”
“Fuck you!” I answer. “At least I have a language that’s mine. You’re mad because I understand what you’re saying, but you can’t understand my language.”
I then speak to him in Spanish because I know it will make him mad; “Mardito gringo. Ven sacame ven! Por lo menos mis ancestros no mataron para que yo este aqui!”
He doesn’t understand my words, but—just as I predicted—they make him mad anyway. He turns red, then pink. The purple veins in his neck stick out as he proceeds to spit out racist slurs. “Wetback! You dirty fucking Mexican…” he says before he adds that I should get the “fuck” out of “his” country.
I am deaf by this point. I can’t hear him anymore over the sound of my anger.
I stab him with my eyes.
I think to myself about how many ways I could take him. I think about how many ways my best friend and I could take them both. I think of how big his body is, how strong he is, how unafraid I am. I think of how, if he dared touch me, I would grab his head and smash it against the window.
The blood gushing from his head would add color to the dull scenery framed by the broken glass. Parts of his left eyebrow would be gone, stuck to jagged shards. The boy’s eyes would look up to the sky for an answer, but he would not find God in the ceiling of this bus. He would feel weak, probably dizzy. His legs would go numb; he would bow to me as he fell to his seat.
My fingers would press on his neck. He would be branded before my right hand would pull back and then forward in the direction of his mouth. Jab, Cross, Jab, Cross, Hook, Jab, Jab, Jab, Hook, Cross. His head would swing back allowing me to see his red nostrils. The boy would raise his hand to defend himself.
But I would grab that hand and twist it before he could reach me. He would jerk in pain!
“Get up the fucking chair” I’d command the boy in Spanish. The heavy-set, non-Spanish speaking Latino bus driver would not understand what I said but he would stop the bus and look back.
The boy would not comply, so I would grab him by his blue shirt and drag him outside. My fingers would be entangled in his soft Gringo hair. I would smash his head on the ground engraving the shape of his horrifying face on the sand. He would look like the dirty one from the brown sand and gravel that would stick to his skin.
I’d kick him in the stomach full force before I’d get on top of him. Closed fisted, I’d punch him in the eyes, nose, mouth, chest, legs, nose, mouth, and chest, again and again and again. I’d hear his voice in my mind as I punched him: “You dirty fucking Mexican. Get the fuck out of my country.”
I’d hear that over and over and over as my nails would claw at his ears. Blood would run from his ears, to his jawline, to his throat. It would stream from his cheek, drenching the dry earth. If anything grew here, it would be poisonous, I’d think.
His mouth would start to foam. I would look around at the stained sand ….for anything…for…
A rock!
My left hand would pin him down while my right hand reached for the stone. Its sharp edges would hurt the places the cactus had stung me. But I wouldn’t care. I would lift the rock in the same way I lift my Dominican flag. I would aim at his temple…
I would--
But then…
Then….
…the others would get up to see; I’d see them staring from the bus windows, looks of horror in their eyes as I confirmed the stereotypes they’d heard about people like me…
The first week of boarding school, some of the students had asked me, “Is Harlem really like they show in the movies?” “Are people from Harlem violent?” …
“No,” I had told them.
And so I just sit there. I stare at the ripped seat, and I say nothing.
-------
But then! Then, I glance at the driver whose ears seem to have shot up. One of his eyes runs toward the center of his nose while the other runs away from it toward his right ear. He is listening! He’s heard! He will take action now. He will do something! He will make this right. He will tell this asshole that we are not hyenas, or wetbacks, or dirty, or….
But he doesn’t. He just sits there. And says nothing. He is no more helpful than anyone else on that bus…
Like them, he is silent. Like me, he is Latin American.
But unlike me, he has power.
He is the driver.
He is older.
He is their coach.