Rebirth19 min read
I Used to be a Background; Then the Bus Came
ButterPicks12 views
I never thought a public bus would tell me who I was. I never thought a timetabled vehicle would be the last honest thing in a world of lies.
"Seven twenty," I said the first time out loud, to the empty bench at the stop. "Always seven twenty."
Someone behind me laughed, a small nervous sound. It was Maja. "You say that like it's a prophecy."
"It's a schedule," I said. "Prophecies are supposed to be wrong."
"You're the only one who notices," she said, and she did not sound pleased. "People like wrong things. They like a plot that keeps them guessing."
I looked at her then — Maja Thomsen, new in our town and strangely luminous in a way the rest of the school cameras could not quite capture. "Do you really remember... everything?" I asked.
She swallowed. The cafeteria noises made space around her words. "I remember enough," she said. "I remember being told I had a task. I remember the phrase: 'Keep him safe, live to the end.' I also remember being fed to wolves, but that's later."
"So you're from another world," I said. "Like— a book?"
"Like a book." She met my eyes as if daring me to laugh. "Like a very nasty book."
"You mean—" I tried to put it into the shape it fit in my head. "You're the heroine."
"That's what the script says," Maja whispered. "I'm the heroine who is trapped in a tragic arc. I'm the meat in someone's plot sandwich. But I'm not sure they wrote any lines for you."
"They didn't," I admitted. "Nobody did."
"Then why could you see the blank book?" Maja's hand touched mine across the table. Her fingers were steady and cool. "Why could you break the eighty-point curse?"
"I don't know." Even saying it was like pulling an old splinter from my brain. "I used to think my life was small because I was small. But—" I looked at the tiny clock over the kitchen counter, at the time that had no interest in my questions. "The bus keeps coming on time. The paper is always eighty. The same ten people on the morning bus. Then you showed up."
"Do you know what they call people like you in these systems?" she asked. "Backgrounds, extras, NPCs. Road signs, not drivers."
"I thought I was real," I said.
"You're real," she said, soft but oddly fierce. "Real enough to feel, to hurt, to choose. And that is a glitch they're scared of."
"They're scared of us," I corrected. "Not scared. Angry."
"Do you want to leave?" Maja leaned closer. "There's a way. If you really saw the empty book change, you already broke a rule. That means—"
"—that the system noticed," I finished.
Bryce Lucas laughed that night as we walked home. "Maja, you act like the world is watching you. It's people. Humans. With phones. And so many girls, Maja. So much love."
"Not love," Patrick Clay snapped from behind a newspaper. "Fan mania."
"You can't fight that," Bryce said. "The only thing that moves a man like Fernando is the right pressure."
"Fernando?" I said. My name came out a little too sharp. "Is that his name?"
"Fernando Sims," someone said, as if reading it aloud for the first time. A whisper made the rounds like a sweet. "The guy who gets perfect scores and doesn't know what a bad hair day is."
I had seen him once, in the hallway, walking like someone had put up a halo and then forgotten to switch off the lights. People stopped. Phones rose. There was a silence that tasted like a line break.
Maja squeezed my hand between classes. "I'm going to try to keep you from being just a footnote," she said.
"Why would you care?" I had asked, though I did not mean it to sound small.
"Because," she said, and for a second her face looked as if someone else had drawn the lines. "Because someone decided you would care about me."
The first time the script got weird was simple. The bookshop — the one I had walked past a hundred times — had shelves full of blank pages. I opened a thin volume and the paper under my thumb was cotton and silence. I left, with the taste of dust and disappointment in my mouth, and then Maja walked in like a light switch. She pulled a comic off the shelf that I had just touched. When she laughed, the panels filled with ink, one dot at a time, like a low-res snowfall becoming a clear landscape.
"Did you see that?" I asked.
She nodded, smiling as if she had learned a new trick. "They can't keep the story going without players. Our presence is patchwork. Sometimes their updates take a long time."
"You sound like you like being patched," I said.
"I like not dying on page twenty," she said. "That's different."
"Do you control anything?" I asked, because the temptation to be able to make someone fall in love with me by thinking it was strong.
"No. But I can notice." She folded the comic back slowly. "Noticing is the first method."
"Then notice this: when you sat in my seat in homeroom, I stopped falling down the stairs."
"Is that what the stairs do?" she asked.
"They always do," I said. "Every morning, I fall, every morning I prove I exist by hitting the floor. Now I didn't."
She looked at me like I was telling a secret I shouldn't be trusted with. "Then maybe you're not backgrounding anymore."
The first violent scene came faster than it should have. The hostel of cowards called itself a group of fans, and they livestreamed cruelty as if reality needed an encore. They trapped Maja in a restroom; they had the phones, the light rings, the hunger to watch. I remember the small cruel things they said, the words that sought to collapse her into nothing.
"She wants male attention," one of them giggled. "Look at her. So pale, so used up."
"Rip that skirt," another ordered. "This stream needs content."
Maja's cries were tiny through the door. I tried to push it open and my arm refused me. I found my feet glued, as if the world had a rule about interfering with scripts. I banged and banged and felt my head hit wood and make the sort of thudding silence a thing makes when it's certain of itself.
"You can't," I told the door. "You can't keep me stuck. I'm done being acceptable."
The mop I snatched from the janitor's broom closet meant nothing. It was an object of form, not force, until I picked up momentum. Something loosened. I pushed and the handle cracked like a starting bell. I hit the lock and it splintered, and the world made room for a little sudden rebellion.
When I burst through the restroom door, the room smelled of cheap perfume and thinner courage. Phones recorded the scene in wide lenses. Maja lay curled, cheeks red, hands gripping her thighs as if they were anchors.
"Stop!" I had shouted, foolish and gigantic. "Stop filming this!"
They laughed like knives. One girl lunged. I used the mop like a baton. It was ridiculous, graceless, and it worked. Phones dropped. One by one, the ring lights stuttered and died as whoever had been on the other end of the stream realized someone had turned the camera toward them.
We ran. I had found a box of tacks in my bag because I am the sort of person who carries odd solutions. I flung the tacks behind us into the hallway and the sneakers slid like clowns' feet. We reached the exit panting. The taxi that was supposed to take us home did not stop. It barrelled past in the rain.
"Are you okay?" someone asked later, voice like a small prayer.
Maja looked at me and shook her head. "I am not okay," she said, not because she feared for her safety but because she had never been asked to be safe before. "But now I might be."
The bad thing about stories that are made to hurt is they work in many versions. Some villains are subtle; some are loud. Gracelyn Garza was loud. She smiled like a polished blade and spoke in honey that tasted of iron.
"You're so naive, Maja," she told Maja in the cafeteria a week later. "You think any of this is bad luck? No. It's investment. I'm the one who risks my reputation for him." She tapped Fernando's name with her fork, as if that could pin him like a butterfly. "He owes me."
"You never even met him before a year ago," someone hissed. "You weren't even here."
Gracelyn smiled. "I know how to be useful."
The pattern accelerated. Fernando aced a competition that had been designed to keep the world in an appropriate ratio of hero to background. He sat for a test that would have given me a chance — a chance — at something bigger than the eighty-point border. He walked out of the examination hall with a calm I could not fake and a score that knocked the sky sideways: a perfect one hundred.
"There was only one above eighty," the teacher whispered. "Only Fernando."
I had been between lifelines. Seventy-nine point five, a hairbreadth from the line that would have changed everything. It hurt like a betrayal.
"You did your best," Maja said, as if that was not a lie. "We don't know the ending."
"Of course we know," I muttered. "Book logic."
But I began to understand the system in ways that had nothing to do with plots and everything to do with patterns. The bus that came at 7:20 every morning had passengers who shimmered like sprites. Someone new got on the bus and the rules bent. The blank book page filled with ink when Maja touched it. My eighty percent didn't mean lack of effort; it meant a script had assigned me a comfortable area of mediocrity.
We tried subtlety after the restroom incident. We told teachers about the threats, we notified authorities. Fernando — Fernando with the halo — went after the people who had attacked Maja with a fury that looked like protection.
"Stop," he said the first time he confronted the ring of fans in the courtyard. "This stops now."
The ring quieted because he had said it, because the world recognized his role. But the world is not fair. Not when a person like Gracelyn decides to be clever. She worked the channels that were not just digital but social, personal, sticky. She learned names. She learned customs. She found slivers of truth she could flip into daggers.
It got worse. They targeted Maja's grandfather. They targeted anyone close to her. People who had always been background in their own lives now stood in the open. "Are you sure it's safe?" the janitor asked me. "You and this girl... you chase trouble."
"Her trouble is a plot," I told him. "I can't tell whether it wants her dead or famous, so we will make a different ending."
We did what we could. We made a fire report that was, at best, irregular. The collection yard downwind of Maja's old apartment burned that night. I watched the news and did not feel triumph but a thin sheet of relief.
"Thank you," Maja said to me the next morning, voice small. "You did it."
"I set a trap," I said. "It was ugly."
"It saved them." She looked at me with something almost like admiration. "You're not at all what I expected."
The system responded by making things we knew were impossible. The villain who was supposed to arrive five years from now arrived early. The girl who would one day, by a petition to fate, take Maja's place and lay claim to Fernando appeared under the hospital lights with a script of her own.
Her name was Gracelyn originally, but in our retelling she had a gentle face in which the teeth were always wrong. She wove a story: "I saved him," she said to Fernando, in a voice that smelled like lemon. She had a family that played the part; they spoke of misfortune and sacrifice, of a diagnosis so dire it required miracles.
"She saved me from not-being," Fernando said, because he was human and because guilt has the power of gravity.
Gracelyn pressed the theater of fragility like an instrument. She collapsed faintly in front of everyone, and the world, generous and naïve, bent to tend her. She became the thing she had trained to be: an angel who knew how to manipulate pity.
We tried to expose her. We gathered evidence, half-hopeful that the world had not already decided its favorite. We found messages, plot points, fragments indicating that her family had arranged everything. We found the clinic receipts. We traced deposits.
The public punishment for Gracelyn had to be more than humiliation; it had to be dismantling. The system would patch and reset, so the exposure needed to be surgical and theatrical, the kind of thing that left no plausible deniability and that the crowd could feel in their bones.
We organized a small event. "A community meeting," Patrick said, voice low. "A town hall. People will be there."
"They'll be in her corner," Kaede warned. "She has fans."
"Good," I said. "We need an audience."
Bryce and I stood up on borrowed chairs in the square near the lake, where students liked to loiter. My palms were slick. My voice shook, but the first words came out because lies run better with a chorus.
"If you think you know the story of a person," I told the crowd, "then listen. Because the truth deserves its own audience."
Phones rose. The initial reactions were of suspicion. "What's the stunt?"
"Are you protestors?"
"Is this one of those influencer feuds?"
Gracelyn was there too, sitting at a table like a queen at a children’s play. She smiled with the confidence of a cat who has nine fake lives. Fernando hovered at the edges, a lighthouse unsure of his coordinates. When I looked at him, he met me with a face that had the exhaustion of someone who had to be right and kind at once.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked, quietly.
"Because," I said, "she's done this to people she doesn't know how to be."
"Say it," Maja told me just behind me. Her voice was steel. "Say what she did."
I took a breath that tasted like the inside of a book and then I read.
We had the receipts and we had the call logs. We had a voice file of a woman with a practiced sob arranging the actors. We had messages: "Make her faint," "Make sure Fernando sees," "We need a liver, not a story; the sympathy is the ladder."
"It was arranged," I said aloud. "Evidence shows payments. Evidence shows staged faintings. Evidence shows actors. Evidence shows that the illness was amplified for sympathy."
Gracelyn's smile thinned. "You're lying," she said.
"Am I?" I held up the voice file. "This is the mother on a recording, 'Make sure he blames her.' This shows deposits from a shell account. This shows messages to fifteen people to 'go live' for the drama."
The phones in the crowd began to act like mirrors. People who had only ever watched began to consume. A murmur went through the square like wind through dry grass. I saw faces shift — recognition, disgust, the painful pleasure of being on the right side of a reveal.
Gracelyn's expression passed through colors the way a lamp finds hues. For a moment, she was all smiles. Then she was bright red. Then she looked small. Then she leaned into denial.
"It's—this is fake," she stammered. "You can't prove—"
"But we can," Patrick said. He produced copies of bank transfer screenshots. Kaede produced messages that had been forwarded under the illusion of safety. Bryce read aloud lines from the chat logs that had no place in genuine grief.
The crowd leaned in. "Oh my God," whispered someone. "She did it."
Gracelyn's first move was fury. "How dare you!" she yelled. Her voice cracked like glass. "You are defaming me."
"Where's your evidence?" a voice called from the side. "Where's his heart? Where's the thing he lost?"
"She has none," I said. "She took the thing she needed — pity — and made it into a weapon."
A stream of people stepped up at that moment. There was the cashier from the bakery who had overheard Gracelyn practicing her sobs in a stall in the mall. There was a driver who saw her rehearsing lines into her shirt. There was a classmate who had been paid to be an extra in the scene. One by one they told their parts. Each testimony was small, blunt, human.
Gracelyn's demeanor changed. Her fury became disbelief. Her disbelief became panic. She tried to laugh. It sounded like a borrowed thing.
"You all are taking this too far!" she shouted.
"No," someone said. "You're the one who took what isn't yours."
The reaction was immediate and visceral. Phones did not just record; they indicted. Kids who had once cheered her muted their stories. A feed that had worshipped her now cataloged her guilt. The crowd circled and parted like water moving around rock. Parents who had once defended her called out. "We trusted you!" one woman cried.
Gracelyn paled. "You don't know what we—" she began, and then her voice stopped. She found herself surrounded by people who were not paid to stand there. They were neighbors, students, strangers who had been participants and then witnesses. Their things were truth.
There was a moment of silence when all the small noises of the square—birds, cars, murmurs—seemed to wait for the verdict of a different kind.
"You're finished here," Bryce said quietly.
"No," Gracelyn pleaded, suddenly begging like a child. "Please—"
"Please what?" someone shouted. "Please don't let us see the truth? Please don't let his name be the one you hide behind?"
The crowd was merciless in a way that felt like justice. "Shame on you," murmured a dozen voices. "Shame on you," they chanted, quiet at first and then stronger.
Gracelyn went through the stages right there. She started with indignation, then argued, "You're misunderstanding!" She tried to pull Fernando in, fingers slick with a mix of fear and calculation. "Fernando, say something. Say you know I'm honest."
He shook his head. He looked older than he had the month before. "I don't know what to think," he said. "I want to believe the woman I cared for. But this—"
Her eyes found mine. "You can't do this to me," she whispered. "You can't ruin me. I will ruin you."
For a second she seemed to mean it. Then she faltered. People whispered. Someone in the crowd held up the chat log where she promised "If they expose me, I will reveal things about their families." The crowd inhaled. Many of them had not imagined the ripples of a small lie.
The punishment was not a court sentence. It was something worse for a person who had built a life on performance: exposure, repudiation, the collapse of social oxygen.
First, the cameras that had once followed her now turned away. The brand deals dried up when a single one of the sponsors said, "We withdraw." The school committee convened and demanded a hearing. Parents wrote letters. Her mother received phone calls from people who had helped arrange actors; they recanted under pressure and named numbers. The bank froze suspicious accounts.
But the most painful part was in public. The next day, the students who had been complicit stood on the opposite side of the cafeteria and turned their backs when Gracelyn entered. People recorded the moment and it spread. A thousand small rejections made one big truth: she had been orchestrating empathy for a role. Her power had been borrowed; its source was now known.
Gracelyn tried to fight back. She ran to the teachers, to her followers, to lawyers. None of it quieted the gathering swell of revulsion. She had banked on the short memory of an audience, on the fact that performance can convince even the wary. But she had miscalculated the appetite for a fuller story.
Then came the worst thing for her — the place where the personal and public met. At the spring fair, where she had once smiled to camera lenses, Fernando appeared with a small, unremarkable manila envelope. He did not put it on a stage. He held it up and pushed play on a small speaker. It was the recorded voice of the mother, the payments, the calls. It was all there. People stood in a breathless crowd and heard the sound of the lie being built.
Gracelyn's face shifted through the same colors again — triumph to denial to loss. Her followers took off their hats. One of them threw her bouquet to the ground. No one touched it.
She tried to speak but people around her put their hands up. "No," they said. "We won't listen."
She dropped to her knees in the middle of the square like a puppet whose string had been cut. Cameras clicked. Nobody filmed to make content — they filmed in the older way, as witnesses. Some recorded so they would have proof of how a person could be so small when the story ended their game.
The public scene went on for many minutes that felt like hours. Gracelyn pleaded, begged, cursed, made threats, tried to bribe anyone who would listen. She shifted into guilt, then into promises that tasted hollow. At one point she laughed in a way that made the hair at the back of my neck stand up — the laugh of someone trying to convince themselves it's still performance. The crowd hissed and people spat words.
"You're the kind of person who created monsters," someone yelled. "You taught us how to be cruel."
Her mother showed up and for the first time the queen had no armor. They argued. The mother's voice cracked into public shame. "We wanted him to love our girl," she cried. "We wanted him to be ours."
"At the cost of her life?" a woman demanded. "At the cost of another girl's safety?"
Gracelyn's end was not a single moment. It was a chain of small deaths. Her social feed emptied as sponsors canceled. The people who had flattered her for opportunities turned away. She left town with her mother under a cold cloud of cameras and gossip, tickets crumpled in their hands. A week later, a rival influencer posted a video summarizing the evidence and the comment threads remained saturated with anger for months.
The final fracture for her was private and small: at a parent-teacher event, the head of a charity — someone she had hoped to charm — told guests, "We do not work with liars." That phrase spread faster than any live video. Reputation, once a fiction, became material. The bank accounts froze. Her mother lost a job because the small business that had once contracted them withdrew support.
For a person whose world had been currency, the collapse was both immediate and final. She was not jailed when the cameras stopped showing her; she was simply cut off. She could not buy the stage anymore.
But the worst of her punishment was on the faces around her — the people she had used looked at her like a learned caution. I watched her in the months after, a small figure walking too fast to keep the distance, and I knew that punishment had a texture: it was public, slow, and complete. It left a mark that would make her think twice, if she had the capacity to feel shame. It made her human in a way that could not be staged.
"Does it feel good?" Maja asked me the night after, while we sat on the library steps. The city lights blinked like hesitant applause.
"Not really," I said. "Justice is ugly. But it stopped a thing that wanted to become worse."
"Do you think it will stop everything?" she asked.
"No," I said, honest. "Stories find other means."
We kept doing what we could. We rewired small pieces of the script. We hid evidence. We created safe routes and false leads. We practiced lying like a useful technique.
The university was the next step. We moved away to the seaside town to escape a plot that had teeth. The sea smelled like an unstitched page. We were both accepted; we were both sent far from the people who had written us. Maja and I became roommates in a dorm that had balconies and wind.
For a moment, it seemed like we had escaped the spine of the book entirely. We were islands of unanswered adjectives in a paragraph that kept going regardless.
Then Gracelyn showed up again, softer, in white, with a quieter voice and a plan to be "redeemed." She had learned to bleed to camera with more precision. She was not as naïve as she pretended. Fernando appeared, apologetic, sympathetic, as if the past could be turned into an address he now inhabited.
"You can't run from a script," Maja said one night, tears collecting in the corners of her eyes.
"Maybe we can write one," I said. It felt like an impossible arrogance. "If the system can patch, we can write a hole."
We were trying to avoid them, but beautiful fiction has a way of colliding with ordinary lives. Gracelyn used a public benefit show to seat herself next to Fernando and allowed the cameras to catch the pair smiling. The campus buzzed anew. Old patterns tried to stitch themselves back together.
Maja grew quiet. She watched, and the thing that had been lionish in her became something brittle. Once she had been sure her task was to live through the cruelty. Once she had been certain she was the heroine. Now she was mutable—someone with options. She had to decide whether to use them.
At our graduation, in a hall that smelled like varnished wood and tired perfume, Fernando came to stand near Maja. "I owe you the truth," he said.
"You can't repair the past," Maja replied. "But you can stop giving the stage to the people who hurt us."
"I want to try," he said. "Not because I am the hero in someone else's plot, but because I am tired of being a prop."
His words sounded like a confession and like a promise. I watched their hands hover, as if the story had given them permission to touch.
"Do you think we change everything?" I asked.
Maja smiled in a private way. "We change this page," she said. "And the next. We make room for more lines."
I started to believe her. I started to feel like my choices had weight.
The day before I left the city where I'd been an unnamed extra for years, I went to the bus stop at dawn. It was seven twenty. The same bus that had shepherded me through a thousand mornings wheezed up to the curb as if the town had never noticed the drama happening under its lights.
"Last ride?" Maja called, breath fogging in the air. She looked healthy in a way that had nothing to do with plot.
"Maybe," I said.
The bus door opened with the practiced politeness of machinery. The driver, a man of quiet face who had always been a background fixture, nodded at me like he recognized a kind of courage.
"Next stop: final," he announced in his way. We both laughed at the absurdity.
"Are you going to get on?" Maja asked.
"I'm going to see where the road goes," I answered.
I stepped aboard. People sat in the same seats, but now they seemed less like a chorus and more like strangers with their own stories. I found a window seat. Outside, the town blinked and folded like a page.
"Do you regret it?" Maja asked, leaning over the seat as the bus pulled away.
"Regret what?" I asked.
"Being awake," she said.
"No." I looked at the road and the sea and the harbor. I thought about the public punishment, the humiliations that had been required to stop a lie. I thought about the bus and the book and the tacks I had thrown behind us like crumbs for other people to follow.
"I regret every kindness wasted and every silence I kept," I said. "But I don't regret waking up."
She smiled and then looked down at her hands.
The world behind us turned like a slow page. For a while the bus hummed and the coordinates of the town fell away. The white fog at the edge of the map loosened, and there was a place where text met the dark.
"Hold my hand if you get scared," Maja said, because she had learned that some people prefer to be held when the world fidgets.
I took her hand and felt it small and warm and stubborn. "If we can't be the main characters of their stories," I said, "we'll make our own script. Maybe it's small. Maybe it's messy. But it will be ours."
She squeezed. "I like that."
The driver called out the stops for a long time and the sun angled down like an editor. We watched towns dissolve into punctuation marks and fields fill in. At one point, the bus shuddered and a black ribbon of letters slithered across the sky like spilled ink. The system—whatever served it—tried to reel us back, to glue the seams. But we had already learned to tie knots.
When the bus reached the edge of the whitened fog, there was a place that did not look like the world we had left. It was a corridor of text. Letters spun like galaxies. It looked not like the end but like an articulation of possibility.
"Terminal," the driver announced, bored as a man who had seen the end too often to be surprised.
The bus doors sighed open. People rose and stretched and walked out into the space where words met meaning. I looked back over the shoulder of the town where my small life had been written in fonts that favored others.
Maja looked at me, eyes bright like a punctuation mark of hope. "Are you going to walk through?"
I remembered the restroom, the tacks, the bus driver's watch, the public square where Gracelyn had faltered. I remembered the sound of a world shifting when someone said something true in public. I also remembered how easy it had been to be afraid.
"Yes," I said. "But first—"
I turned and faced the place where our city was still visible, a scrap of map with bus stops and a bakery that never finished remodeling. I raised my hand and made one small obscene gesture at the horizon that had tried to tell me who I could be.
"Goodbye," I said. The word felt like a full sentence.
I stepped forward with Maja at my side. We walked into the river of letters, the place the book called "the end" and the system called "a reset." The words welcomed us like cold water. They did not make us characters; they let us be people.
"Will you ever come back?" Maja asked over the rush of ink and tide.
"If the page needs me," I replied, and I meant it. "But if it doesn't, I'll keep writing."
We walked until the letters dissolved into a murmur and then into air. Somewhere behind us, at a bus stop, a driver muttered, "Seven twenty." The bus door closed, and for a moment the world listened to nothing but the tick of the clock.
On the other side of the fog, in a city that might be made of chapters or might be something else entirely, we began to write small sentences. They were clumsy at first, and often wrong, but they were ours.
I thought of the empty book that had once been full of nothing. I thought of the tacks and the mop and the public square. I thought of the woman who had fallen from a pedestal built of pity and of the crowd that had turned away. I thought of the driver who had always driven the same route and finally had to cross a limit.
We learned that punishment can be public and brutal and necessary. We also learned that punishment is not the monster that ends a story; it is the moment that wakes people up to the truth.
When I close my eyes now, I can still see the bus stop bench where a girl used to tell herself she was nothing. I can still hear the bus door sigh open like a promise.
"Do you miss it?" Maja asked once, months later, after we had made a life that had few cameras and many small, private comforts.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "But I don't miss being written for other people."
She laughed and then said, "You always liked the bus."
"Seven twenty," I said.
She touched my wrist. "At least you had one dependable thing."
"Some things you can't schedule," I told her. "But some things show you how to leave."
We had no credits at the end of our days in that world. We had no applause. We had messy sentences and real mornings and the right to make mistakes. When a bus pulls up at seven twenty somewhere, sometimes I think of the stop and the driver and the bright little bench and I smile.
"Are you happy?" someone will ask me someday.
I will point to the line of letters behind me and then to the road ahead and say, "I am awake."
The End
— Thank you for reading —