The 57 Bus Page 11

  “They said it was a hate crime, but he had family that wasn’t straight,” Richard’s friend Lidell said. “We were with ‘No H8’ but in Richard’s case it wasn’t hate. What he did was wrong, as like a joke, playful. It was like a funny little prank-joke turns to something that ends your whole life.”

  To Lidell, it just seemed like the outside world didn’t grasp how easy it was for kids who grew up in poor neighborhoods to take that wrong turn.

  “People have different habitats,” he explained. “Some people have it better than others. They grew up in good neighborhoods. Their family has jobs. They have good income. They don’t understand. Their life is so good, they think everybody’s life is good. They don’t understand the struggles people go through. I don’t know where you grew up at, if it’s like a low-income area, where there’s a lot of violence and crime. But if you grew up in a low-income area and all you see is crime and drugs? If you have family that does crime? You see it. It has an impact on you. If you’re around it a lot, it’s hard to do good.”

  “It just hurt,” Cherie said. “Somebody you are that close to? And it becomes, like, all viral?” She shook her head. “People would say all type of stuff. Like he was just intentionally trying to burn him. Like, ‘Oh yeah, he gay, he hecka gay, let’s burn him.’ I’m not saying what he did was right, I’m just saying at the end of the day, he was sixteen. You’re all just trying to put an opinion on something that you don’t know. Y’all don’t know.”

  THE CIRCLE

  Each day that the No H8 organizing at Oakland High School went on, Richard’s friends grew increasingly upset. Finally, Kaprice went to Principal Abdel-Qawi to ask if she could hold a restorative justice circle so that Richard’s friends could share their feelings. She invited Amy Wilder, an Oakland High School resource specialist who was the faculty adviser for the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. Wilder, who majored in gender studies in college, had been working with students to show support for Sasha.

  About a dozen students gathered in a circle in an empty classroom a few days later. Most of them didn’t really know each other—Richard was the one thing they had in common. The facilitator passed around a green race car that served as a “talking piece.” When the race car reached you, it was your turn to speak. Otherwise, you listened.

  The first few times the race car went around the circle the questions were playful. If you were a superhero, what would your superpower be? Questions that let them get to know one another a bit. Then they talked about Richard. How silly he was, and how kind, and how he’d had a friend and a family member who were gay. One of them passed around a photo of Richard on a cell phone.

  When the phone reached Wilder, she gave a start of recognition. It was Richard’s eyes she remembered. His hazel eyes.

  Earlier in the year, a parent had come in to meet with her and had brought along a younger sibling. The kid was wild, out of control. No way were they going to be able to have a conversation with this kid bouncing off the walls. But then Richard had come out of Kaprice’s office. He went over to the kid and somehow calmed him down, got him focused so the meeting could take place.

  Now, as she stared at Richard’s picture, Wilder’s eyes filled with tears. “Because he was so sweet,” she explained. “And he’s such a young person facing such serious consequences.”

  “When she shared that, it was huge,” Kaprice said afterward. “It was incredible. We could hardly take it.”

  All they had wanted was someone else to understand.

  SKINNED

  Five days after the second surgery, Sasha returned to the operating room, where Dr. Grossman’s team used a tool called a Dermatome to harvest three-inch-wide strips of skin from Sasha’s back. After removing each strip, Dr. Grossman passed it through a meshing device that perforated it with tiny holes so that it could be stretched to cover a larger area. Then he placed it over Sasha’s wounds and stapled it into place. Peel, mesh, place, staple. Peel, mesh, place, staple. When it was over, the burn sites were covered with new skin. But Sasha’s back was raw, exposed. The pain was intense—more intense than the burns had been. It was as if they had been skinned alive.

  GOD IS GOOD

  The Ladies seemed to materialize out of nowhere. There were three of them at the third court hearing on November 26, older white women who dressed as chastely as nuns, in turtlenecks and blazers and sensible shoes. They came, they said, because they were concerned about Richard.

  “Not that it’s not a horrible crime,” one explained, “but it’s also a crime to try a child as an adult.”

  Inside the courtroom, defendants appeared in a small box to the left of the judge. It was possible to see them only if you sat on the far right side of the gallery and pressed your cheek against the wall. By the third hearing, the reporters had figured this out and they all squished into the same column of seats, leaning into one another to get a glimpse of Richard’s face.

  Jasmine wore glossy pink lipstick, black leggings, and a T-shirt that said Los Angeles. Her face was bright, eager, confident. She knew it would all turn out okay.

  “God is good,” she repeated to herself in the elevator. “God is good. God is so good.”

  “You look nice,” her cousin Regis said as the family gathered in the hallway, waiting for Du Bois to be done talking to reporters. “I like your hair.” His own hair was gorgeous—streaked red and gold, with hair extensions he’d made himself. He was dressed stylishly in a gold jacket, tight jeans, a scarf, and lace-up boots. They were an attractive trio, he and Jasmine and Jasmine’s sister Juliette. As they waited for Richard’s lawyer to give them an update, they talked about what they were cooking for Thanksgiving, just two days away. Macaroni and cheese. Yams. That spinach dip they loved.

  Conversation turned to a case that was in the news—Donald Williams Jr., an African American freshman at San Jose State University, had been relentlessly bullied by the white students he lived with in a four-bedroom dormitory suite. The white kids, also freshmen, had insisted on calling Williams “three-fifths,” a reference to the clause in the original US Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person when determining population for representation in Congress. They clamped a bike lock around his neck and claimed to have lost the key. They wrote Nigger on a whiteboard and draped a Confederate flag over a cardboard cutout of Elvis Presley in the suite’s living room. They locked him in his room. And they claimed it was all just a series of good-natured pranks.

  In the end, three eighteen-year-old white students were expelled for what they did to Williams, and a seventeen-year-old was suspended. The three who were expelled were also charged in criminal court. The charge: misdemeanor battery with a hate-crime enhancement, which carried a maximum penalty of a year and a half in county jail. A jury eventually convicted all three of battery but acquitted one of the students of the hate-crime charge and deadlocked on the others.

  “Girl, they got misdemeanors,” Regis said. “Nobody got charged with any felonies. Three white boys on one black boy.”

  DOES IT HAVE TO BE ME?

  Sasha was released from the hospital the next day, twenty-three days after the fire. Reporters lined the street in front of Sasha’s house, pushing up against the front door. News helicopters circled.

  Sasha gave an interview to the local news, wearing a skirt over bandaged legs. “I was really excited that an agender person was in the news,” they said later. “But I wasn’t that excited about the circumstances, obviously. Those were my feelings: This is really great—but does it have to be me?”

  Sasha also suspected that not everyone understood what the story was all about. “I got the idea that it wasn’t really about me being agender,” they said. “A lot of the news coverage was, ‘A boy was wearing a skirt.’ Rather than, ‘An agender person was wearing a skirt.’ And that kind of bugged me, that I was being misrepresented in that way.”

  BACK AT MAYBECK

  Sasha returned to school in December, on the Monday after the Thank
sgiving break. They were eager to be back after the long boring days in the hospital and they dressed a little smarter than usual—matching the flat cap and skirt with a vest, bow tie, and crisp white shirt. The press was there, of course—craning to get a view of Sasha, like paparazzi angling for a shot of the royal family.

  Sasha’s friends made a point of not making a big deal about Sasha’s return, and they asked their classmates to do the same. They knew Sasha hated being the center of attention, so after greeting them with hugs they tried to be chill. As chill as you can be with a line of news trucks idling in front of your school, antennas stabbing the sky.

  “There were so many cameras at the school and they were like, ‘Are you Sasha’s friend, can we talk to you?’” Teah remembered. “And that was a little weird because I didn’t know how to approach my friendship with Sasha. I don’t think Sasha wanted to be around their friends with their friends thinking, ‘I’m talking to a famous person,’ or ‘I’m talking to somebody that something horrible happened to.’ They just wanted things to be normal. It really distanced me from the friendship, which is a shame.”

  After school, Sasha went to Ballroom Dance Club. Teah was crazy about ballroom dancing, so she had started the club and Sasha, Nemo, and Michael had joined. Sasha and Nemo were useful additions, because they could dance either the male or the female part, depending on what was needed. That first day back, Sasha waltzed with Michael as their partner. Michael noticed that his friend was quieter than they’d been before. A little more inward. But overall Sasha seemed okay.

  WORST DAYS EVER

  There were a lot more of them now. Worst Days. Worst Nights. The days their legs itched from the graft, from their leg hairs getting caught in the bandages, a prickly irritation that never stopped. The days their legs ached. When everything that used to be normal was suddenly difficult: showering (seated now, using a handheld shower), getting dressed (both legs had to be wrapped in three layers of bandages), going to school (they were so tired, just so very tired). The nights after getting home from the hospital when they felt like they had to pee all the time, but couldn’t, a side effect of having had a urinary catheter in for all those weeks in the hospital. The nights when sleep felt like a distant cousin they’d met long ago but didn’t know well enough to talk to. The nights they took Percocet for the pain and it made them hyper instead of sleepy.

  They tried not to think about the fire or the person who set it, but sometimes it was hard not to wonder why, not to just feel incredulous that this was the situation—one minute you’re on your way home from school and then it’s an ambulance and a hospital and surgery and pain and painkillers and bandages and seated showers. It was just like, How is this a thing that happens?

  REUNION

  Dan Gale sat in a wicker chair in Sasha’s living room beside his cousin Russell, taking deep, nervous breaths and exhaling through his teeth. It was a Saturday in early December and Dan had been invited to join Sasha’s family for brunch. Russell came along for support.

  The past few weeks had been a whirlwind for Dan. A month ago he’d been an ordinary guy, a construction worker who did some extra work on the side at a friend’s T-shirt shop. Then he’d taken the bus home from work one day and helped save the life of a teenager whose skirt was on fire. Suddenly he was a hero, a Good Samaritan. He’d been honored at City Hall, featured on the news. Police chief Sean Whent had said that Dan’s actions on the bus had proved that despite Oakland’s reputation for crime, “there are good people all over the city.” Even his own family looked at him with a newfound respect.

  Now Dan was about to see Sasha for the first time since that day on the bus. But it was taking Sasha a while to come out of their bedroom.

  “They have to put these stockings on over the scars,” Debbie explained. “There are a few spots that still have to be bandaged, but they’re healing really well.”

  “That’s great,” Dan said, his expression grave. He was in his early fifties and had basset-hound brown eyes, a thick salt-and-pepper mustache, and a deep, gravelly voice. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, resting one of his white tennis shoes on his knee. Beside him, Russell, who owned the construction company where Dan worked, blinked sleepily, a three-day beard peppering his cheeks. The two of them surveyed the living room, which was cozy and cluttered, its surfaces covered with houseplants, magazines, dried flowers, and framed photographs, its shelves overflowing with hardback books and board games, its limited floor space crammed with musical instruments (a piano, two guitars, a bongo drum). A paper banner inscribed with get-well messages wrapped nearly all the way around the room, a souvenir from the march along the 57 bus route the previous month.

  At last Sasha came in, wearing a gray hoodie and a black skirt, legs swaddled in white bandages.

  Dan sucked in a breath.

  “Oh, wow,” he whispered. He stood and enveloped Sasha in a hug. “How you doing, man?”

  “I’m doing good.” Sasha blinked a few times, grinning shyly.

  “You look great.”

  “Yeah. I’m not feeling too bad.”

  “That’s great. Don’t change who you are, dude, don’t change.” Dan shook his head. “This is weird. Awkward.” His eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m sorry, dude. I’m really sorry,” he croaked, voice breaking.

  “Thanks for all you did,” Karl said, coming into the room behind Sasha.

  “Man, I’m sorry I couldn’t’ve done more.” Dan turned to Sasha. “It was hard to get to you.”

  “You did all you could,” Sasha said. “You did the best—”

  But Dan had already moved on to the future. He wanted to accompany Sasha on their return to the bus. “I want to be there,” he insisted. “I mean, you’re my friend now. Forever. Because of you, because of this whole situation, I feel real better about myself. I have a better relationship with my daughters and stuff. I’m sorry for what happened to you. But man, I benefited big-time out of it.” He laughed and, to his evident relief, everyone joined in.

  The conversation moved in fits and spurts—lapsing into awkward pauses and then reigniting again. Sasha told Dan about using the fire to full advantage. “‘I can’t do the dishes, my legs got injured.’ ‘I can’t help with dinner, my legs!’ ‘I can’t do my homework—legs!’”

  Dan talked about how he’d seen Sasha on the bus for years, always with a book in hand. “The kid’s smarter than everybody on the bus combined,” he announced. Then he turned back to Sasha. “That’s because of your parents, you know. Remember this: all your life you’re going to want your parents off your back. Then you realize when you get older, they’re the only ones that had your back.”

  “You had my back,” Sasha said.

  Dan shut his eyes for a moment.

  “You know, I turned around and I saw the fire,” he said. “And my first reaction was, ‘Oh, I can do this. I got this.’”

  Twenty years earlier, he explained, he’d been with a friend who was driving a car at a demolition derby. The friend had been working on the car when he mistook a container of gasoline for a container of water and tried to use it to douse a spark. When Dan saw his friend go up in flames, he tackled him and put him out. Who’d ever imagine it was a skill he’d need to use a second time?

  Over breakfast—a tofu scramble for Sasha, eggs and pastries for everyone else—the conversation turned to the kid who’d set Sasha on fire. Debbie and Karl had told reporters that they wanted to see Richard tried as a juvenile, not as an adult.

  “I think you guys are a lot more lenient about what you want to see than I would be,” Dan said.

  “Mostly, it’s just—we don’t know,” Karl explained. They didn’t want to be the ones to decide what should happen to Richard. They didn’t feel like they had enough information. “I’ll leave it to other people to figure out.”

  Dan turned to Sasha. “How do you feel on that? I mean, this kid hurt you.”

  Sasha considered this. “I know he hurt me. He did something that’s reall
y dangerous and stupid. But then again, he’s a sixteen-year-old kid and sixteen-year-old kids are kind of dumb. It’s really hard to know what I want for him.”

  PART 4

  JUSTICE

  BINARY

  There are two kinds of people in the world.

  Male and Female.

  Gay and Straight.

  Black and White.

  Normal and Weird.

  Cis and Trans.

  There are two kinds of people in the world.

  Saints and Sinners.

  Victims and Villains.

  Cruel and Kind.

  Guilty and Innocent.

  There are two kinds of people in the world.

  Just two.

  Just two.

  Only two.

  CRUEL AND UNUSUAL?

  Jasmine had her eyes fixed on Richard as he was escorted into the courtroom. He was dressed in Juvenile Hall’s gray sweatshirt and khaki pants, his hair cropped close. When his eyes landed on her face, she made the shape of a heart with her fingers and held it to her chest.

  He grinned, then he pulled his expression into a neutral mask. If he smiled, people might think he didn’t have compassion for Sasha. They might say he was smirking.

  It was mid-January. Richard had been at Juvenile Hall for over two months. So far, not much had happened on his case. But today, a judge would hear a petition Du Bois had filed asking the judge to send Richard’s case back to juvenile court.

  Proposition 21, the law allowing prosecutors to file charges against juveniles in adult court, had been upheld by the California Supreme Court way back in 2002. But three subsequent United States Supreme Court decisions had put strict limits on the sentences that juveniles can receive, eliminating death sentences and many sentences of life without the possibility of parole, sometimes called LWOP. In each case, the high court had cited the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which bans “cruel and unusual” punishment.