This is how it smelled at the bus stop on October mornings: of dew evaporating off cold moulding leaves. It’s not yet cold enough to wear my winter coat - not because it’s not cold (it is) but because it’s important to keep something to upgrade to when the only smell in the morning is my own breath, turned back in to my nose by a scarf tied around my face. So I am shivering, with my hands thrust deep in pockets.
The bus stop is outside our house, but that doesn’t mean that the other kids have to be nice to me. It used to be a busier hub - my friends would walk down the hill and wait with me - but the district has rearranged the pickup route so now it’s just me and these two boys, standing in my driveway.
They are tough boys: no more than thirteen but with access to packs of Marlboro Reds. They light one each and flick ash in the driveway where it sputters in the damp. I’ve only just learned the word that describes suburban white kids who dress like this, but it is racist and unutterable, so my dad has coined the term ‘low pants loonies’, evocative of the way that the waistbands of their jeans dangle perilously off their flat adolescent bums, a style which he regards as lunatic.
I stand ten feet away. They regard me from under their baseball caps, which are layered under the hoods of their black Starter jackets.
Bitch, says the older low pants loony. It’s something that my girlfriends and I quickly accepted, upon making the jump from elementary to middle school, that boys call girls.
I want to shout at him to get out of my driveway, to stop grinding cigarette butts into the smooth tar that my dad had spread a few weeks ago, but I know better. I retreat into the door on the side of the garage and peer through a crack until I hear the monstrous yellow vehicle wheeze around the corner.
In a few minutes, once I’m safe and settled in a seat with my friends and absorbed in conversation with them and take my coat off, the low pants loonies will fill my pockets with dog food. I won’t discover it until I get to school and the pellets spill across the corridor outside our lockers. I will cry.
