The 57 Bus Read online

  Richard loved having a job. He was conscientious about arriving promptly, and he took care with his work, doing things right the first time and stepping in to fix mistakes made by other interns. Once, Guzman asked Richard to help him with a project another intern hadn’t completed, organizing some notes Guzman had jotted down on a notepad about the summer workshop and turning them into an organized lesson plan. Richard took the scattered, out-of-order notes, typed them, and arranged them into easy-to-follow lessons. Guzman was impressed.

  Richard really did amazing work during his internship, he wrote in a letter. I am confident when I say that he has the potential to achieve anything that he wants.

  Jasmine noticed how much more grown-up Richard seemed now that he was working. He offered to help out with the bills instead of spending his earnings on himself. He liked being a man with a paycheck.

  STRIPPED

  It was the end of October, two months into Richard’s junior year. He and his cousin Gerald were on their way over to Cherie’s house to kick it with her brother and they stopped in at a liquor store to get something to drink. That’s when Richard ran into a boy he knew from around the way.

  A few minutes later: two guns to his head.

  Gerald was walking in front, so he didn’t see what happened. But suddenly Richard wasn’t wearing his pink Nike Foamposites anymore. Richard’s face was crimson, the way it always got when he was furious.

  In Oakland it’s called getting stripped. The kid took his wallet, money, phone, shoes, coat. Gerald wanted to go back, find the kids who did it, but Richard told him to keep walking.

  He’d been caught without his people, that’s all there was to say. But at least he hadn’t been killed. Rumor was that the boy who robbed him had killed people.

  TRUST ISSUES

  Who in this world can you trust?

  When the guns are drawn,

  when the sun goes down,

  when you’re walking in the shadows,

  Who

  Can

  You

  Trust?

  People call themselves your friend.

  They say they were there

  but they weren’t there.

  Say they’re coming

  but they don’t show.

  Say they got your back

  as they get their knives out.

  Two tongues in their mouths,

  the one they use to promise

  and the one they use to lie.

  “I don’t have any friends,” Richard once said.

  “I have associates.”

  RESOLVE

  After he was robbed, Richard didn’t come to school for a few days. When he returned, he sat in Kaprice’s office and told her what had happened. He seemed pensive and a little shaken. The whole time the guns were pointed at him, he said, he’d stayed calm. Observing. Trying to figure out how not to have the situation escalate. How not to die.

  Then Richard gave Kaprice his mother’s phone number.

  “The type of character you have and the type of character my mama has, you could almost be friends,” he said.

  Kaprice laughed. “Richard, you know if I become friends with your mom and I’m working here at school, that means she’s going to know every single thing that you’re doing, because I’m going to tell her.”

  “I want you to do that,” Richard said. “Because I already have a bad rap and I want her to know that I’m really trying to do everything I can to not be like that. I’ma graduate. And I’ma make her happy.”

  PART 3

  THE FIRE

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2013

  A week or so after Richard was robbed, Jasmine came into his room to talk to him as he got ready for school.

  She was concerned about his schoolwork. He complained sometimes that his classes didn’t make sense. Now she told him he needed to talk to his teachers.

  “You have to ask for help,” she said.

  That afternoon, Richard’s cousin Lloyd came by Oakland High looking for him. A heavy, bespectacled kid with a gap between his front teeth, Lloyd was goofy and boisterous—qualities that made him unpopular with the school’s security staff. He was two years older than Richard, but he didn’t act it.

  “Just a big old baby,” campus security officer Carlitta Collins says. “A big rambunctious ball of energy. I always make Lloyd leave whenever I see him here.”

  Richard and Lloyd were always together. Lloyd spent a lot of time at Richard’s house, since his own mother was often out of town. Richard looked up to him. “He would always be with him,” Lloyd’s brother Gerald remembers. “It was just Lloyd and Richard. He was always following behind Lloyd.”

  That afternoon, Lloyd wanted Richard to leave school early, but Richard wouldn’t do it. So Lloyd hung around outside the gates until Richard was out of school.

  “’Bye, Auntie,” Richard said to Collins as he left. He opened his arms and gave her a hug.

  “He’s a beautiful young man,” Collins said later. “I’m telling you, I didn’t feel nothing but love when he hugged me.”

  THE 57 BUS

  Sasha’s bus ride to and from Maybeck High School took an hour and involved as many as two transfers, but Sasha didn’t mind. They had always loved the bus. Loved the intersecting lines of transit routes on the map, the crisp procession of times on the schedule. In their spare time, they drew maps of new bus, subway, and streetcar lines, or read up on historical public transit systems.

  “Sasha loves buses in a way I can’t even understand,” explains Healy. “I don’t even like buses. They love buses. They like reading things about buses. You can offer them a ride home and they’re like, ‘I’ll take the bus.’”

  Most days after school, Sasha and their best friend, Michael, walked together from Maybeck to the BART station on College Avenue, about a mile away. Along the way, they’d pass a manhole cover on which someone had spray-painted DO NOT EAT THIS!

  Usually, one of them would point out the instruction to the other. “Hey—don’t eat that.”

  Most of the time they split up when they got to the BART station. Michael would take the BART train and Sasha would take the bus. Sometimes when they arrived at the station, the train would already be there.

  “Dude, I got this,” Michael always said, a joking reference to the impossibility of sprinting upstairs to the platform in time to catch the train. It didn’t really make sense. It just seemed funny. They weren’t really “dude”-type people.

  After that, Sasha would walk across the street to pick up the first of two buses that would take them home. The 57 was the second. In the afternoon, it was usually packed with students from a dozen different elementary, middle, and high schools. On game days, the kids from rival high schools razzed each other back and forth. It was loud, obnoxious. Rowdy. The kids were tired, wired, just sprung from school. The adults looked out the window or studied their phones. Tried not to make eye contact. The bus felt charged with daredevil energy. Hot. Muggy and musky with adolescent bodies.

  The first question you faced when getting on was where to sit. Up front, close to the driver? It felt safer there, if the chaos made you nervous. That’s where girls tended to sit. In the back, out of sight? More room to spread out. You might even get a seat to yourself.

  Sasha liked the back of the bus. A platform seat they could spread out on, tuck their legs under. There they could read, do homework, nap. They had trained themself to wake as the bus rounded the sharp S-curve just before their stop. On November 4, they were unusually tired, having stayed up late the night before writing a paper for Russian Lit. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, they’d shared their exhaustion on Tumblr:

  Do u ever just get rly tired when u have a lot of shit to do and u just start crying for no reason

  Now, as the 57 bus rattled up MacArthur Boulevard, Sasha’s eyes drifted closed.

  4:52 P.M.

  Every AC Transit bus is equipped with cameras that continuously record sound and video from multiple vantag
e points. The 57 bus was no exception. The cameras recorded Lloyd and Richard climbing on at the front a little before five p.m. and walking down the aisle toward the back—Lloyd chubby in a zipped-up black hoodie, Richard lean in a black hoodie over a white T-shirt and an orange-billed New York Knicks hat.

  The bus was a double-length one, two buses fused together like conjoined twins by an accordion-pleated rubber seam. Most of the seats were taken. An older woman who wanted to talk to the bus driver about her route. A mom holding the hand of a little girl in a pink hoodie. A gaggle of laughing teenage boys.

  “How’s everything?” the driver asked a middle-aged man as he slid his bus pass into the machine.

  “Long day,” the man replied, shaking his head.

  Richard recognized a boy named Jamal sitting at the back of the bus and greeted him with a dap.

  “Mali B!” Lloyd shouted, following suit.

  “What’s up, dude?” Jamal was tall and lanky. He wore jeans and a white hoodie with a thick horizontal black stripe across the shoulders. His voice was low and thick, faded.

  As the bus started up again, the two cousins gripped the silver pole in front of Jamal. Behind them, Sasha slept. A paperback copy of Anna Karenina lay closed in their lap. Their skirt, gauzy and white, dangled over the edge of the seat.

  It couldn’t have been easy to sleep with Lloyd nearby. He bounced up and down trying to make the bus shake, rapped a snippet of the song “Started from the Bottom” by Drake, screeched random words like “Chinchilla!” and “Obituary!” He shouted down the aisle to a girl he’d noticed when they climbed on board, “Hey! Girl! Excuse me!”

  A girl in blue basketball shorts turned to look at him.

  “No, your friend, the light-skinned one.”

  Jamal pointed at Sasha, whispered, “Look at this dude.”

  Lloyd turned and looked over his shoulder. He cackled.

  On the video, you can’t hear what Jamal says as he hands Richard the lighter. But you can see him take out his iPhone and point it toward Sasha as if planning to record. Later Richard would say that it was supposed to be funny, like that prank show on MTV with Ashton Kutcher, Punk’d. He thought the fabric would smolder for a minute and then Sasha would wake up and slap it out, startled.

  “I need a good laugh,” he’d said just after getting on the bus. Now he showed the lighter to Lloyd and then swung to the opposite side of the silver pole, closer to Sasha.

  He flicked the lighter by the hem of Sasha’s skirt. Nothing happened.

  Lloyd was still shouting up to the front of the bus.

  “Hey! Light-skinned girl!”

  “Light-skinned girl.” Jamal kept repeating what Lloyd said, his deep voice like an echo from the bottom of a well.

  Lloyd bounced up the aisle to where the girls were sitting, perching on the edge of a nearby seat.

  “Go ahead, you do it,” Jamal said to Richard. Richard flicked the lighter again. Nothing.

  Rebuffed by the girls, Lloyd returned to his companions, stopping in front of Sasha’s sleeping form to shout an abrupt, parrotlike “Hey!”

  Sasha stirred, but didn’t wake.

  “Whoa, nigga. You said, ‘Hey!’” Jamal echoed. “Screamin’ and shit.”

  Lloyd leaned close and screeched in Jamal’s ear. Richard laughed and slapped Lloyd’s head.

  “Aw, nigga, you just broke my neck,” Lloyd yelled. “Damn, pussy, bitch, fuck!”

  Richard brandished the lighter, pretending to light Lloyd’s sleeve. He looked at Jamal.

  “Do it,” Jamal urged.

  Lloyd danced between them, landing half on Jamal’s lap.

  “Move, nigga! Get off me,” Jamal grumbled. He kept his eyes on Richard, his phone poised. “You might as well do it,” he said again.

  Richard slunk back to Sasha, flicked the lighter. Nothing. He glanced at Jamal, grinned, and flicked the lighter a fourth time.

  “Back door! Back door!” Lloyd called to the driver, ready for them to make their escape.

  The doors opened. Richard leaped off the bus. Lloyd started to follow. Then he looked back and stopped, transfixed, as Sasha’s skirt erupted into a sheet of flame. When the doors closed again, he hadn’t moved.

  FIRE

  The next few seconds of the surveillance video are hard to watch.

  Sasha leaps up, slapping the flaming skirt. “Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck!” The skirt looks unearthly, impossible, a ball of white fire.

  “Ow! Ow!” Sasha screams, voice high and terrified. “I’m on fire! I’m on fire!” Their hands snatch at the skirt, shaking it, waving it. Specks of flaming fabric swirl through the air. Sasha runs for the door and finds it closed. They turn, dance in place, screaming.

  Jamal howls with laughter. Then, as Sasha careens toward him, he cringes and climbs onto his seat. “He’s on fire!” he yells. “Put him out!”

  Passengers sprint for the exits, shrieking and coughing. “It’s a fire! It’s a fire!” Some of the other kids on the bus are giggling. The bus is still moving, the driver just starting to register that something is going on way back at the far end of his vehicle.

  “I ain’t got time to be playin’ with y’all, man,” he calls over his shoulder.

  Near the middle of the bus, two men leap from their seats and elbow through the press of people trying to escape. One man is short and balding; the other is taller, with a walrusy mustache and sad basset-hound eyes.

  “Get down!” the mustached one yells. “Get on the ground!” The two men don’t know each other, but they work in unison, shoving Sasha to the floor. The mustached man smothers Sasha’s flaming skirt with his coat while the balding man stamps out the burning tatters that flame around them.

  It’s over in seconds. The driver pulls the bus to the curb. Sasha scrambles to a standing position, dazed and in shock. “Oh, Lord. Fuck.”

  “That boy was on fire, wasn’t he?” a man remarks as Sasha pushes through the back doors to the sidewalk. Behind him, Sasha’s mustached rescuer paces the aisle. “Call an ambulance,” he croaks. He goes to the door of the bus and calls to Sasha, who roams the sidewalk with a cell phone, charred legs. “You need to call an ambulance, man.”

  The girl in the blue basketball shorts calls to Sasha through the doors of the bus. “Are you okay?”

  Sasha doesn’t answer.

  The bus empties out. Passengers climb off, shaking their heads.

  “That don’t make no sense. That’s really damn sad.”

  “See how he burned all up?”

  “Oh my God. Who would want to do some shit like that?”

  “Aw, they got him messed up.”

  “That’s fucked up. That’s hella fucked up!”

  Then the driver walks down the aisle to the back of the bus and kicks the charred remnant of Sasha’s skirt through the door.

  “Real stupid motherfuckers, man!” he bellows.

  WATCHING

  After he jumped off the bus, Richard strode away with his hands in his pockets, trying to look casual. Then he heard Sasha’s screams. He stopped, turned around, went back.

  He stared at the bus, mouth open.

  The bus had begun to move again. The driver, still unaware of the fire, was continuing along his route.

  Richard ran after the bus. Suddenly, it lurched to the curb. Passengers spilled out, yelling and coughing. Another bus, the NL, had pulled up behind it, and after a moment, Richard turned around and climbed on. A few seconds later he got off again and walked back to where Sasha now paced the sidewalk on bare, charred legs.

  He ambled past, snaking his head to stare at Sasha, then turned around and walked past Sasha again, still staring. Then Jamal and Lloyd got off the 57 and the three of them half walked, half ran to the other bus.

  That night, Jasmine noticed that Richard seemed sad.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He wouldn’t tell her.

  THE MAN WITH THE MUSTACHE

  After the police arrived, the man with the mustache wa
lked home, tears streaming down his face.

  He was in shorts and a button-up shirt, his jacket charred from smothering the flames.

  “Why?” he kept asking himself. “Oh my God, why?”

  PHONE CALL

  The school day was long over at five o’clock, but Karl was still in his classroom when Sasha called him on his cell phone.

  “Dad. I need you to come over here right now. I was on the bus and I got set on fire.”

  “What?” Karl said. The reception was terrible. “Say it again.”

  “You have to pick me up and take me to the hospital because someone set me on fire.”

  Karl was sure he wasn’t hearing right. He walked around his classroom closing windows and gathering his things. “Wait. Say it again. You were on the bus and what happened?”

  “I need to go to the hospital. Now.”

  And then Karl was running, still on the phone with Sasha, still asking the same question over and over as his feet carried him block after block, down one street and up another until he reached the place where Sasha lay on the sidewalk in their underwear, shivering and hyperventilating. “Tell me again. What happened?”

  Most of the passengers had dispersed by now, but a few lingered with the driver on the sidewalk beside the empty bus. One of them, a teenage girl, had called her mother, who had called 911. The girl’s mother arrived before the ambulance did. She stood with her arm around her daughter as Karl called Debbie and told her there had been an accident.

  When Debbie got there, she thought Sasha must have fallen in mud, because why else would their legs have those black splotches? And then she understood and began to sob.