The 57 Bus Read online

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  For Cliff

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a true story. All the people in this book are real, although in some cases pseudonyms or initials were used. Young people are identified by first name only.

  The details of the story were pieced together from a variety of sources, including interviews, documents, letters, videos, diaries, social media posts, and public records. Quotes from these sources are verbatim except in a few cases where I removed last names, replacing them with long dashes. Information from firsthand accounts was corroborated with official records wherever possible, unless those records were sealed or are not available to the public. In those cases, I relied on the memory of witnesses and participants.

  The pronouns and names used for gender-nonconforming people were approved by the people in question.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2013

  By four-thirty in the afternoon, the first mad rush of after-school passengers has come and gone. What’s left are stragglers and stay-laters, swiping their bus passes as they climb onto the 57 bus and take seats among the coming-home workers, the shoppers and errand-doers, the other students from high schools and middle schools around the city. The bus is loud but not as loud as sometimes. A few clusters of kids are shouting and laughing and an older woman at the front keeps talking to the driver.

  Dark is coming on. Daylight savings ended yesterday, and now evening rushes into the place where afternoon used to be. Everything is duskier, sleepier, wintrier now. Passengers look at their phones or stare through the scratched and grimy windows at the waning light.

  Sasha sits near the back. For much of the journey, the teenager has been reading a paperback copy of Anna Karenina for a class in Russian literature. Today, like most days, Sasha wears a T-shirt, a black fleece jacket, a gray flat cap, and a gauzy white skirt. A senior at a small private high school, the teenager identifies as agender—neither male nor female. As the bus lumbers through town, Sasha puts down the book and drifts into sleep, skirt draped over the edge of the seat.

  A few feet away, three teenage boys are laughing and joking. One of them, Richard, wears a black hoodie and an orange-billed New York Knicks hat. A sixteen-year-old junior at Oakland High School, he’s got hazel eyes and a slow, sweet grin. He stands with his back to Sasha, gripping a pole for balance.

  Sasha sleeps as Richard and his companions goof around, play fighting. Sleeps as Richard’s cousin Lloyd bounds up and down the aisle flirting with a girl up front. Sleeps as Richard surreptitiously flicks a lighter and touches it to the hem of that gauzy white skirt.

  Wait.

  In a moment, Sasha will wake inside a ball of flame and begin to scream.

  In a moment, everything will be set in motion.

  Taken by ambulance to a San Francisco burn unit, Sasha will spend the next three and a half weeks undergoing multiple surgeries to treat second- and third-degree burns running from calf to thigh.

  Arrested at school the following day, Richard will be charged with two felonies, each with a hate-crime clause that will add time to his sentence if he is convicted. Citing the severity of the crime, the district attorney will charge him as an adult, stripping him of the protections normally given to juveniles. Before the week is out, he will be facing the possibility of life imprisonment.

  But none of that has happened yet. For now, both teenagers are just taking the bus home from school.

  Surely it’s not too late to stop things from going wrong. There must be some way to wake Sasha. Divert Richard. Get the driver to stop the bus.

  There must be something you can do.

  OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA

  Oakland, California, is a city of more than 400,000 people, but it can still feel like a small town. Not small geographically, of course. The city sprawls across seventy-eight square miles, stretching from the shallow, salty estuary at the edge of San Francisco Bay to the undulating green-and-gold hills where bobcats and coyotes roam. What makes it feel small is the web of connections, the way people’s stories tangle together. Our lives make footprints, tracks in the snows of time. People know each other’s parents or siblings, their aunties and cousins. They go to school together, or worship together. They play sports on the same team, or work in the same building. The tracks cross. The stories overlap.

  Oakland is considered one of the most diverse cities in the country. It’s Asian and Latino, black and white, African, Arab, Indian, Iranian, Native American, and Pacific Islander. No one group is a majority. It has more lesbian couples per capita than any city in the nation, and one of the largest proportions of gay- and lesbian-headed households. It’s a city that prides itself on its open-mindedness, its lack of pretension, and its homegrown slang. (Oaklanders say hella when they mean very—and hecka when they want to be polite about it.)

  But for all its laid-back inclusiveness, Oakland is also a city of stark contrasts. In 2013, the year Sasha was burned, Oakland ranked seventh among American cities in income inequality—just below New York. Its per capita rate of violent crime made it the second most dangerous city in America, but its citizens still paid some of the highest rents in the country.

  Gravity works backward here—the money flows uphill. The wealthier neighborhoods in the hills boast good schools, low crime, and views of the bay. Thanks to the Bay Area’s high-tech boom, long-vacant historic buildings downtown are filling with start-ups, boutiques peddling handmade jeans, and nightspots serving seven-ingredient cocktails. But little of this good fortune spilled over into the flatlands of East Oakland, where Richard lived. This is where the bulk of the city’s murders happen—two-thirds of them, in 2013. The schools are shabbier here; the test scores are lower. There’s more trash on the streets, more roaming dogs, more liquor stores, fewer grocery stores. The median strips are ragged with weeds.

  The 57 bus travels through both kinds of neighborhoods, traversing an eleven-mile path from one end of the city to the other. It begins at the northwest corner of Oakland and lumbers diagonally through the city, crossing the middle-class foothills where Sasha lived and where Richard went to school, and then chugging along MacArthur Boulevard for 120 blocks. The route terminates at the city’s southeast border, close to Richard’s house. Each afternoon, the two teenagers’ journeys overlapped for a mere eight minutes. If it hadn’t been for the 57 bus, their paths might never have crossed at all.

  PART 1

  SASHA

  TUMBLING

  (Adapted from Sasha’s Tumblr page)

  Favorite vegetable: bok choy

  Favorite animals: cat and cuttlefish

  Favorite type of movie: dream sequences

  Three best qualities?

  Navigation

  My friends seem to like me

  Purple

  Of course I like hats

  anyone who doesn’t is wrong

  I like compliments

  I dislike compliments

  I like my hair

  I give good hugsr />
  I’m good at finding potential puns.

  If the whole world was listening, I might just

  rant about a bunch of things like gender

  wealth inequality

  why school is important

  I like parties

  I dislike parties

  I don’t really keep track of disappointments.

  Ideal vacation spot: prob’ly a city with a nice subway

  Thinking of things to get me? Try this:

  A brass airship

  A transit map shower curtain

  A medieval cloak

  A corset with silver buttons

  A chiseled chunk of gallium that melts in your palm

  A dress swirled with the image of a nebula

  A Victorian house on wheels

  Tights painted like a mermaid tail

  PRONOUNS

  Even as a toddler, Sasha was interested in language. Not in learning Italian or Swahili or Mandarin, but in language itself, its shape and structure, the Lego blocks of sounds that snap together to make words and sentences. Most toddlers are interested in the fact that the animal with two pointy ears and a long tail is called a cat. Sasha was interested in the fact that adding an s at the end of the word cat made it plural. “Look,” Sasha would say. “Two cat … sssss.”

  Before turning three, Sasha was matching sounds with letters—sometimes in unusual ways. “B is for baby!” Sasha would exclaim. “Y is for wire! Ten is for tent!”

  At four, Sasha was reading independently, but had also begun contemplating the shapes of letters. “K is one rectangle and two parallelograms,” Sasha announced at the breakfast table one day. “M is two parallelograms and two rectangles.”

  Two years later, Sasha began creating a new language. It was called Astrolinguish and it was the language of Sasha’s home planet, Astrolingua. Written Astrolinguish was awash in diacritical marks, with lots of umlauts, accents, and tildes. The spoken language luxuriated in rolled r’s and l’s.

  As a senior in high school, Sasha was still inventing languages, hanging out online with other “conlangers”—people who construct languages of their own. By now Sasha was working up a new language. This one never had a name, but it was spoken by the members of an imaginary agricultural society something like that of ancient Mesopotamia.

  All languages embody the obsessions of the people who speak them, and so Sasha’s language was meant to reflect the interests of a people whose world was dominated by growing seasons, grains, and harvests. Instead of pronouns that distinguished between male and female, Sasha’s language had pronouns that distinguished between animate and inanimate objects. The word for sun was jejz, which was also the word for day. The difference was that sun was considered animate, a being, and day was considered inanimate, a thing.

  Our language, English, works differently. We care a lot about gender, and English reflects that in its pronouns—she or he, her or him, hers or his. You might think this is just how languages work in the real world, but there are many languages on earth that are basically gender neutral, using the same word for he, she, and it, or not using pronouns at all. You’ve probably heard of some of them. They include: Armenian, Comanche, Finnish, Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Quechua, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.

  English, on the other hand, poses a challenge for people like Sasha who don’t see themselves as fitting into neat either/or categories like male or female. Sasha, like many gender-nonconforming people, wants to be referred to with the pronoun they. It might feel awkward at first, but you’ll get used to it.

  1001 BLANK WHITE CARDS

  For their sixteenth birthday, Sasha asked for an accordion, a manual typewriter, a Soviet flag, and a new Rubik’s Cube. They didn’t know how to play the accordion, but they might have learned if they had received one, which they didn’t. They didn’t get the flag either, although Sasha and their friend Michael made a cardboard hammer and sickle not long afterward and hung it on Sasha’s bedroom wall. At the time, they were obsessed with everything having to do with Russia and communism. Their friend Carrie, who took the bus with Sasha that year, remembers Sasha going on and on about it during the bus ride home from school.

  “Sasha, once you get to know them, is very outspoken about things,” she explains.

  That’s once you get to know them. When you first meet Sasha, they’re quiet and shy. They have chin-length, wavy brown hair, a pale, round face, and thick, dark eyebrows. When they smile, their eyes crinkle into slits. They wear glasses, round owlish ones, and they don’t always look at you straight on. As a child they were diagnosed with Asperger’s, a form of autism, which can make them awkward socially. But it also makes them passionate about their interests, and the passion eventually trumps the shyness.

  What was Sasha passionate about when they were a senior in high school? “Buses, cartoons, and the color purple,” says Healy, one of Sasha’s closest friends. To that you could add communism, games, the web comic Homestuck, and live-action role-playing, or larping. Also the ska-pop-punk band Sarchasm, which was formed by some kids at Maybeck High School and had once proclaimed Sasha their biggest fan. And veganism, although Sasha disliked the way other vegans on the Internet made such a huge deal about it.

  Sasha’s best friend was Michael, a tall, gangly kid with sandy-blond hair and thick glasses who always wore a gray beanie and a green army jacket. Michael and Sasha had been pretty much inseparable since freshman year, when they met while playing the board game Diplomacy. Over time, they formed the nucleus of a tight circle of friends: Sasha, Healy, Michael, Michael’s girlfriend, Teah, and another friend named Ian. Ian, blond, bearded, with a habit of tucking his chin and looking up at you from under his eyebrows, was the one who never stopped talking. Red-haired Healy was the unquellable fountain of excitement who stole people’s hats and wore her emotions on her sleeve. Cherub-faced Teah loved costumes and dancing—she and Michael were so close that their friends referred to them as a single person named Tichael. When the two got too cuddly, Sasha would get between them and shout, “Leave room for Jesus!” at the top of their lungs, like the chaperone at a Christian prom.

  Sasha was the brilliant one, the one who blazed through calculus, linguistics, physics, and computer programming with a kind of effortlessness. Not that any of them were slouches when it came to academics. Kids who weren’t into school were unlikely to choose Maybeck, a private high school with roughly a hundred kids that rented space on two floors of a Presbyterian church in Berkeley. In the tiny classrooms, students gathered around conference tables and critiqued the concept of America as a shining city on a hill, or compared the writings of Charles Darwin and Ursula K. Le Guin.

  Teachers liked to claim that Maybeck didn’t have cliques like other high schools, and it was true that the place was a refuge for kids like Healy who had been bullied in middle school. People were nice to each other at Maybeck, accepting. But the school still had social groupings, just like any other high school—arty kids, stoners, bros.

  “We were the nerdy kids,” Ian says. “The funny, sort of crazy, nerdy people who played video games and watched anime and read manga.”

  All of them were fascinated by games—board games, video games, card games, role-playing games, trading-card games. At lunch and after school they often gathered at a wooden table in the hallway that people called the hex table, even though, as Ian pointed out, it was an octagon, not a hexagon. There they played cards, particularly a game Michael and Sasha had learned from a couple of seniors when they were freshmen. It was officially called 1001 Blank White Cards, although they mostly just called it Index Cards.

  “It’s a game played with index cards,” Sasha explains. “Not all of which are white and at this point very few of which are blank.” The deck grew over time, with people pilfering index cards from classrooms whenever they wanted to expand it. If you drew a blank card from the deck, that meant you could fill it in, assigning it a point value and an effect, the more random the bette
r. Over time, the deck filled up with in-jokes.

  There was a card featuring a drawing of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway that resulted in the player losing two turns as you read the book and are bored to death. There was a card that required you to talk in a Russian accent, a card that required you to lisp, and a card that required you to lisp while talking in a Russian accent. There were cards that required you to play an air guitar solo, speak like an English-dubbed anime character, eat leaves like a giraffe, engage in staring contests, and end every sentence with the word dawg. There was a card called Tower of Hats that required you to take everyone else’s hats and wear them in a stack. There was a card that said Game over, Ian wins! that had been created as a birthday present for Ian. Sasha created a card called A Complete History of the Soviet Union as Told by a Humble Worker, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris, which was the name of a six-and-a-half-minute song by an obscure British comedy band called Pig with the Face of a Boy. Michael and Sasha were both obsessed with the song and sang it at every opportunity. “The effect of the card is that you have to sing the song or lose a turn,” Sasha explains.

  Aside from Ian’s birthday card, there was no way to win the game, and no real goal. They just played until people had to go home. By graduation, the stack of index cards was about two feet high and had to be carried in a special bag. But at the beginning, most of those 1001 white cards were blank. Back then, Sasha was called Luke and they were referred to as he.

  LUKE AND SAMANTHA

  In middle school, Sasha was brainy, shy, and introverted, the kind of kid who is easy to overlook. Sasha’s father, Karl, refers to that quality as Sasha’s “invisibility cloak.” “They blend into the background,” he explains. “They’ve always been that sort of kid, that nobody even knows they’re there.”