Meeting Sarah

     When the bell rang ending the first day of school, I darted for the bus. My mother had dropped me off that morning because I slept through my alarm. She couldn't pick me up, though, because she had to go to work at 10. I was afraid if I wanted too long before reaching the parking lot, I wouldn't be able to secure a seat to myself on the bus. Thankfully my classmates all hated me enough to avoid me, for what reason I never knew. I quickly claimed a seat at the front of the bus—no one liked sitting there so it was a safe place to be—and placed my backpack on the seat beside me.

    The minute she walked on the bus, I knew Sarah was a bully. She had thick, unkempt eyebrows, wild, frizzy hair, and a glare that caused the temperature to plummet at least 30 degrees. She was in a higher grade than me, and I was new to the middle school. I'd never seen her before. I chanced a glance over my shoulder and noted that there was not an empty seat in sight, but a few other kids were sitting alone.
    
    I swallowed hard and faced the window, relieved when she passed me by. In a gruff voice, I heard her ask each student in turn if she could sit with them today, but they were all saving seats for their siblings or friends. In a stretching motion, I nonchalantly shoved the backpack further over onto the seat beside me, hoping it would take up more space.  My pulse started racing as I counted each thudding footstep that echoed off the walls as she slowly moved back towards the front of the bus. Without a word to me, she shoved my backpack into my lap and proceeded to press against my side as hard as she could as she sat down, bruising a few ribs in the process.

    The next morning I stood shivering in shorts at the bus stop waiting for the bus. The morning was unseasonably cold for a Texas September, and all my winter clothes were still packed away in the attic. My bus stop was the last on the route and the bus was running later than usual today.

    I had just turned about, intending to head home and assuming I had missed the bus already, when I heard tires squeak around a corner a few blocks down—my bus was nearly there. In the distance I could see that all the seats but one were full; the one next to Sarah. The driver had already seen me. It was too late to go home. When the doors to the bus swung open in front of me, I stood frozen in place for what seemed like an eternity. “It's much warmer inside, I promise,” the driver said to me tauntingly. I shifted the straps of my backpack, distributing the weight more evenly, and headed up the steps to face my doom.

    “Ugh, what's that smell!” Sarah held her nose and stared at me. She must have smelled my fear. “You can't sit here. Sit with someone else. Anybody else!”
    
    The bus driver interjected, “There's no place else. She sits with you.”
    
    Sarah turned and stuck her feet out across the seat so that I had only about 2 inches of space on the end of the seat. I sat there very carefully, facing outward into the isle, and she immediately proceeded to kick me off the seat. The bus driver didn't notice. I got up, shoved pointlessly at her shoes, and sat carefully back down next to her. She proceeded to kick me repeatedly the rest of the way to school as I planted my feet firmly to avoid falling. I was sore for days.

    When I got home, my I told my mother about the incident and she wrote a note to the bus driver. When I handed the driver the note the next day, she looked at me bewildered, and assigned me a seat in the back of the bus next to Shannon, the other girl no one liked. Shannon always smelled like mildew and stale cigarettes. It gave me a headache. At least she didn't kick me, though.

    The year went by without any further encounters with Sarah. She passed and moved on to the next grade level which put her into high school. Time went on and middle school crawled by. My family moved to a new housing development which put me within walking distance of both my middle school and the high school.

    Time wore on, I got excellent grades, and I made my way to high school. The environment there was different. I thrived there, making friends easily for the first time in years. One day at lunch, my friend Chris introduced me to a new friend she had made that day, someone who I hadn't seen around before because she was a little older than us.

    Chris’s new friend wore an inviting smile on her face. She had lovely glossy curls pulled back into a pony tail, a nice nose, clear blue eyes, and perfectly arched eyebrows. She seemed so sociable and I knew we would be quick friends. There was something hauntingly familiar about her, though.

    “Hi, my name is Sarah,” she spoke. “It's nice to meet you.” We became fast friends.

 

 

This was a simple story I wrote as part of a school assignment. The assignment was to share a quick story about a time where I had to reevaluate my incorrect first impressions of someone. The story needed to use careful language in order to form a sort of trap that forced readers to make snap judgements of the person like I had. Or something like that. The assignment was more about setting up the trap and having a reveal than having a solid story, so it unfortunately ends a bit abruptly. But I guess that sort of works.

Anyway, I decided it would make sense to find and share that (hastily written) story here since it was a dramatized version of something that actually happened in my childhood.