Sweet Romance15 min read
The Bus Stop, the Pink Shirt, and the Leaf I Kept
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I stood at the bus stop at five in the afternoon, my black backpack heavy on one shoulder.
"This is my first day of high school," I told the empty air and the sky like an old postcard.
"Don't be dramatic," I told myself immediately. "Just go in, sit down, survive."
I had done well in middle school until physics arrived like a wall. Every time we opened that book, the letters lined up into hills I could not climb. Still, the entrance exam worked out, and here I was at Yunhua High, the best school in our little county.
"Which class will I be in?" I whispered to the yellowing streetlight. "Who will I sit beside? Will I even have friends?"
A bus came. I climbed on with the other students and sat near the window where the cool evening light filled the glass.
I followed the crowd through the school gate. "Wow, it's big," I said aloud before stopping myself because nobody answered.
We had to find class lists in the entrance hall. My palms were damp when I found my name under Class 23.
"Twenty-three," I muttered. "Okay."
A man in his fifties with round glasses watched me peep into the doorway. "Is this your class? Why are you standing out there?"
"Yes—I'll go in now," I said too fast, and the teacher's eyes were kind but sharp. He introduced himself later as David Jorgensen, our class teacher, and he said things like, "Be strict with yourselves," that sounded stern but fair.
My desk was by the wall. My desk mate lifted her head from a phone and said, "Hi. I'm Kate Adams."
"Layne Booker," I said. My voice felt like a foreign thing.
Kate smiled briefly and went back to a screen. I watched the teacher, David, stand at the front with that framed look adults wear when they know they deserve respect. "I teach chemistry," he said. "I'm strict."
"Of course you are," I whispered in my head. "Everyone here is strict."
The introductions were the worst part. He started the introductions from the wall, S-shaped down the room. The first kid went, and my name came up faster than my heart wanted.
"Say your name, Layne," he prompted.
I wrote my name on the board and said a few safe facts. I kept my eyes down. Afterward I sat and squeezed my arm so hard it tingled, and I told myself I did okay.
Days passed. Kate and I stayed ordinary desk mates. She had a boyfriend in the next class, and she sometimes left to meet him.
"You two have a boyfriend?" I asked her once, same kitchen-sink level curiosity.
"Yes," she said. "He's in Class 1."
Class 1? An experimental class? I thought that was for geniuses.
At the bus stop, some evenings, I would find myself watching one boy more than once.
He wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans and moved like he belonged to a book cover. He was clean and calm. He never shouted. He just looked like someone who thought carefully before breathing.
I had noticed him the first week. He stood out in a field of noisy faces because he seemed quiet in a way that was not lonely. I called him Q inside my head for a long time because I did not know his name.
"You're staring," Kate once said, and I jumped as if she had grabbed my sleeve.
"Sorry," I said. "I don't know why."
She shrugged like it was not a big deal. "He's pretty, I guess."
One night a bus jerked and braked, and I was thrown into Q. I felt his warmth for a second.
"Sorry," I mumbled.
"It's okay," he said softly, his voice like soft river stones. My ears went warm. I told myself it was just embarrassment. He lived near my stop, and he probably went to the same school. I noticed little things about him—how his hair smelled faintly of laundry soap, how he seemed always ready to fold himself into silence. I found myself thinking about him, about everything small that made him look like part of another world.
School was a grind. Physics and chemistry and a thousand worksheets. I could not ask the teacher questions in front of everyone because my voice trembled. I wrote answers until the pencil wore a hole into the eraser.
"Go see the answers," I whispered to the empty classroom once, and then I stopped. I would not cheat; I would not give up.
Midterms came, and the results hit me like a door. David put a list on the podium. I scrolled through Kate's name—eight. I scrolled more. My name—twenty-first. My chest dropped.
"Twenty-first?" I said to myself. "How? I thought I did okay."
I checked each subject. Languages were passable, but physics and chemistry stared back with fifty-something numbers. I felt suddenly small and shaky.
"Hey," Kate slid a phone to me. "Look. Want to see your scores?"
"Thanks," I said, but my smile felt paper thin.
I started to dread school. Kids paired up and went to the canteen like bees with a plan. They had inside jokes and couples, and sometimes I stood at the edge like someone watching a parade from the sidewalk.
At the bus stop again, I saw him—the boy I had called Q—talking to his friends. He sounded confident and calm. Someone teased him about being top in chemistry.
"I always liked the lab," he said modestly. "You just have to work at it."
He was not arrogant. He was gentle and steady, and his friends respected him.
"From Class 1," Kate shrugged. "He must be in the experimental group."
At home my parents, tired factory workers, asked the usual questions. I lied a little because I did not want to show them disappointment. At night I lay awake wondering if I had chosen the wrong path when I picked science.
Weeks rolled by. Our class had to wear pink shirts for the sports opening ceremony because the boys wanted to "stand out." The pink shirts were garish under a gray sky and felt like a uniform of embarrassment.
"Walk fast," I told myself.
"Funny," someone in the crowd laughed. "Nice color—very bold."
We walked the field like a flock of startled birds. Then I found myself near him—near Q—and he and I collided again when someone pushed. He steadied himself, and his hand brushed mine. His voice, calm as ever: "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," I lied, because I had been scared of being swamped again.
After that, seasons passed. I chose the humanities when it was time to pick streams because math and physics made my stomach feel like an empty bird cage. My teachers looked at me like that was brave and sensible and maybe a little lazy. My parents accepted my choice with the same quiet hope they always gave me.
Then I moved to Class 9, a new bunch of faces, more girls than boys, and a gentle teacher named Laurent Vitale taught politics. I found a friend small and bright—Delphine Sullivan—who smiled like she kept a secret treasure. She was talkative and a little dramatic. She would call me "Layne" in that sing-song way that made my skin cool down.
"Let's go to the canteen together," she demanded the first week. "You're coming with me. I won't take no."
We sprinted together, trained our legs to outrun lunchtime lines, and started to feel the wet, warm pleasure of having a friend. For the first time, I was part of something small and cozy.
"You're funny," Delphine said one day.
"You like drama novels, don't you?" I asked, because she loved billionaire romance books.
"Of course," she said, "but don't judge me. They are delicious."
She loved the dramatic lines: "You belong to me," and "I will fight the world for you." We laughed at them but also made a tiny list of lines to recycle for ridiculous games. The two of us made a kind of safe, private country in the school.
Winter came with long tests. I took the midterm in Class 3 because the desks were arranged oddly, and while I waited I watched him, actually saw him—Yale Ma from Class 1—walk past with a stack of books. I almost went dizzy with the habit I had formed of searching for him.
"You really like him," Delphine said one night over cheap noodles in the dorm "Are you—"
"Maybe a little," I admitted. "But it's nothing. I'm a fool."
"You are not a fool. You are observant."
We had an argument once about romance. "Real life is not like those novels," I said when Delphine gushed.
"Of course it is," she insisted. "Everything can be dramatic if you want it to be."
"Or it can be annoying," I said.
We kept talking. We kept studying. The weeks were a pattern of routine with small sparks—Delphine's laughter, Yale Ma's quiet presence at the bus stop, Kate's helpfulness, Laurent's gentle admonitions.
Then came the sports day disaster. My class insisted on walking in those pink shirts, and I felt like a cartoon. People in other sections pointed and laughed. The boys who had started the idea suddenly froze when the principal beamed from the platform. David clapped politely.
After the parade I changed into my own clothes and wandered the track. I had volunteered to help with the logistics for the 1500-meter women's race. I stood at the side and handed water to runners and helped them slow down so they didn't crumple.
Delphine's cheeks were red with effort, and when their classmate, an outgoing boy named Baylor Ruiz, ran alongside one of our class champions, his face showed what I would later call "the game face of a person convinced he loved someone."
"He's overly dramatic," Delphine whispered.
"Who?"
"Baylor," she said.
We watched him support Gemma Youssef for the race, holding her steady, fetching water, propping her up. For the first time I saw how someone could be very visible and seem sincere. Baylor looked like the kind of person who practiced being warm.
Weeks after that, I started to see more of how people changed. Baylor and Gemma were an "it" couple; they were visible, affectionate. Later, without much warning, they were not together anymore. Baylor walked with another girl in a way that made my stomach drop.
"Did they break up?" I asked Delphine one late afternoon.
"Yes. I think so," she said, surprised. "That was fast."
"Fast is the word."
Two months later, I saw Delphine texting furiously. "What are you doing?" I asked.
"I met someone," she said. "He seems nice."
"Where did you meet him?" I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.
"Online. We've been talking for a while."
"Online?" My brain cataloged reasons to be cautious. "Have you seen him? Photos? Who is he?"
Delphine sent a photo. He was ordinary—round glasses, plain hair, a quiet smile. He said he liked fishing. He said he was in a distant city. I looked at the photo and felt a small, protective alarm in my chest. But Delphine was giddy. She said his name quietly into the phone and laughed when I teased.
"Call him today," I said, only half joking. "Ask lots of questions."
"I did," she answered. "He is nice. We play games together. He makes me laugh."
"Okay," I decided. "Just—don't disappear."
She promised. She always did.
University came fast. Delphine went away to another city and we texted and played games across weeks. I went to a city a few hours away and tried to wake myself up to possibility. Dorms smelled like detergent and excitement. I tried to be bold—joined an environmental group at college because people there were all girls and it felt safe.
One afternoon in the campus garden I discovered something too intimate: a couple on a bench. They were wrapped into each other in a way I had seen in movies and not in the middle of a quiet shrubbery. I walked away and counted my own heartbeat.
At home for the holidays, Delphine messaged me several times until, finally, a feed of messages arrived like fireworks: she and this online boy were together. They played games together and texted and shared silly stickers. Her happiness glowed through the screen. I felt both glad and oddly bereft as if something in my life had been repainted.
Then college life shifted. Delphine's messages grew thick with affection and often with small things like "He says he misses me" or "He sent me seeds because I said my roommate loved plants." I tried to be supportive. I wanted her to be happy.
But then the rumor came back—Baylor Ruiz, the boy from high school who had once been with Gemma, had never stopped being the kind of person who threatened to break what was whole and replace it quickly. People started to whisper about him at the student center. Gemma's face, once bright with athletic pride, had gone dull for a while. I learned that Baylor had been seen with a new girl from another class, Carolina Casey, who laughed at his jokes in a way that seemed practiced.
"Is he a bad man?" Delphine asked one night when she called.
"A little reckless," I said. "But people change."
"No," she said sharply. "He left Gemma in a storm of words."
I started to collect the noises of school life, the small disasters and dramas. The truth arrives sometimes in bits. A friend forwarded a screenshot she had rescued. It showed messages: Baylor calling Gemma a "drama king" and writing things that smelled of calculation. The friend who sent it said she had no patience for boys who used people.
We decided, slowly, quietly, to act. Gemma had been hurt. She deserved more than whispers.
The day we pulled it into the open was one of those gray afternoons that felt like the eye of a storm. Our entire year gathered in the auditorium for the graduation rehearsal. Chairs were full. The stage was wide, and the principal's words echoed in the room. Students lounged with phones in their hands. Parents and teachers sat in the front.
"Layne?" Delphine squeezed my hand. "Are you sure?"
"Yes," I said.
I had the screenshots on my phone. Gemma had agreed. She sat near the front with her hands folded like a calm harbor.
"Baylor is here," she said quietly. "He will probably notice."
He was. He stood with Carolina Casey, leaning on the back of a chair, smiling like he had already conquered whatever he wanted to conquer. For months he had played a part—handsome, eloquent, outraged on behalf of anyone he deigned to protect. Now his smile was real, and Carolina hung on his arm.
I walked to the podium because the deputy head asked for volunteer speeches and Delphine had arranged for me to speak about kindness that day. I cleared my throat, and a hush rolled forward.
"This is about being honest," I said into the microphone.
"Yes?" a dozen voices called.
"Yes," I repeated. "Sometimes the truth is messy. But we have to speak."
I put my phone on the podium and connected it to the projector. The auditorium stirred. I had the minutes prepared. I tapped play.
The big screen splashed with text messages.
"Look," I said. "These messages were meant for private ears. They were not private."
Baylor's expression changed. He went from a half-smile to a narrow mouth.
He had texted Gemma, in a time when they were supposedly going strong, things like, "You're just the convenient option right now" and "Wait till I get what I need." The messages were cold and clever. They were not words spoken in the heat of argument. They were calculation.
"Who sent this?" Baylor blurted across the auditorium.
"I did," I said. "Gemma asked me to show these."
He laughed at first like it was a joke. "Fake," he said. "Anyone can make screenshots."
"Then deny them," I said. "Silence is not a good look."
His face hardened. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Here are the timestamps," I said. "Here is a message where you promise one thing and then talk about something else. The pattern is the proof."
"You're making a scene," he said, and his voice tried for righteous. "This is harassment."
People around us shifted. Phones came up. Someone whispered, "Is that him?" and another snapped, "Dude, what an idiot."
"Look at him," Delphine whispered to me. "He is getting small."
"Please, Baylor," Gemma said, her voice low but steady. "Don't deny it. It's all here."
He tried the old tricks. He laughed, said the screenshots were altered. He accused Gemma of lying. He called me a meddler. He tried to charm the crowd. He pointed to himself: "I'm a nice guy, everyone—look—"
"Stop," I said. "Listen to yourself."
The auditorium's air was thick. Phones circled like moths. Students began to talk, and the murmur became a roar. Someone filmed with a phone. A voice rose, "Play it again!"
We replayed the screen. The messages played like accusation arrows, and each one landed. Baylor's face went from a practiced smirk to true shock.
"It can't be real," he said at last, with cracks. "This—this is not me."
A student in the back laughed and asked, "So you stole hearts like you stole time?"
He stepped down from his swagger to a smaller man, a man who fumbled for defense and found cowardice instead.
"This is not a fair thing," he said. "You all—this is manipulation."
"Manipulation?" Gemma's voice was quiet but sharp. "You told me I was just convenient. I believed you. I trusted you."
He clenched a bit. "You went too far—public shaming—"
"No," I said. "You went too far when you told her you only wanted convenience."
His denial shattered. The faces in the auditorium turned: the ones who had once applauded him were now looking away. The phone-wielders were not gentle. Cameras captured his breakdown. He tried to laugh it off and failed.
"Please!" His voice broke like ice. "Please, I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"Say it to her," someone shouted.
He took a step toward Gemma—then stalled—then fell to something like confession. He dropped to his knees there in the aisle, his expensive jacket bunched awkwardly.
"Please," he begged. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Don't do this to me."
Around him, people recorded. Some of the crowd clapped, not in approval but in a shocked chorus. Others shouted, "Leave her alone," or "Get up!" Cameras caught everything. A teacher stepped forward—Laurent, always patient—then another teacher, and they held him back.
Baylor's face went from smug to shocked, from shaky denial to frantic pleading. His voice shook. He crawled on knees and begged: "Please, don't post this. I'm sorry. Please—"
Gemma stood with a slow dignity. "You hurt me," she said. "You used me when it suited you. I won't take it back."
"You can't—" Baylor protested, but his voice sounded small.
Around us the reactions split. Some applauded. Others whispered. Kids laughed quietly, and some filmed with their phones, their faces bright with a cruel curiosity. A girl in the third row started shouting, "Shame!" The audience parted like a sea in motion.
The sight of him kneeling, his suit dirty from the auditorium floor, was like a private joke made public. He tried to rise and was held back by his own flailing words. "I didn't— I didn't mean to— please—" he begged, but the weight of those messages pulled at him. People took videos. Voices repeated his words. The principal looked on with a face like thunder and called security.
He lost composure. He tried to deny again and again, then finally he collapsed into a heap of excuses and pleas.
"Please!" he said. "I can explain! I can explain!"
"No," Gemma said. Her voice was small and bright, like a bell. "Don't explain."
Someone in the aisle shouted, "Get a life!" Another student shouted, "Liar!"
Baylor's reaction moved in stages: the arrogant smile, the confused blink, the furious denial, the frantic begging, the final collapse. The crowd shifted like weather. Phones recorded, voices rose and fell, and students around the auditorium looked on in a dozen ways: shocked, silent, amused, vindictive, sympathetic. Some applauded when Gemma stood tall.
He was escorted out. He begged one last time and then was swallowed by the hallway. The corridor swallowed his protests. Students trended the videos online. For three days the school feeds lit up with evidence and commentary. People rewatched the clip. Baylor's face—red, pleading, pathetic—became something to point at. People called him out in the cafeteria and at the bus stop. He, who had once stood tall and jocular, shrank.
"Did you feel bad?" Delphine asked me after.
"I did," I said. "But he needed to be held accountable."
"He was public before," she said. "Now he's public in truth."
For weeks the fallout was loud. He tried to explain at home to parents who had once been proud. He went quiet on social media. People whispered. He did not have the grace to accept shame quickly; shame embarrassed him because he had never expected consequences.
After that, the school felt different. People looked at each other with cleaner eyes. Gemma mended. Delphine and I grew closer. I had found, in a strange way, that I could speak and be heard.
The years rolled like buses. I finished high school and later college. Delphine and I kept our bond. She told me about the small seeds he planted in her life—text messages full of affection that lasted long after the romance settled into something else. We had both learned how messy people could be, and how important it was to stand up.
One evening, years later, I found myself back at the old bus stop where I had first watched him—the tall boy in the white shirt, Yale Ma. This time I did not recognize the crowd, but I recognized the yellow leaves that had fallen from the big plane tree outside the school gate. I had once stolen a leaf, pressed it into my pocket, and then thrown it away in a flush of embarrassment. Tonight I took out my phone and scrolled through photographs: the bus stop, the pink shirts from a decade before, a screenshot of a small child's drawing of a leaf.
"Remember that leaf?" Delphine asked me over the phone.
"Which one?" I said.
"The one you once kept and then tossed."
"Oh," I said. "Yes. I remember."
I walked past the tree and picked up a single browned leaf and folded it into my palm. It fit like a small, tired boat. I thought about all the moments that had made me both small and brave—the first day in Class 23, the pink shirt, the late-night study sessions, the bus jerks that made me fall into Yale Ma's warm shape, the auditorium and the screen, the way a crowd can change a person.
"It's funny," I said into my phone. "That leaf was nothing, and yet I kept it in my pocket for a while. Maybe I thought I could carry a part of the past with me."
"You did," Delphine said. "You carried a lot more than a leaf."
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe the leaf was a promise. Not to someone else, but to myself."
I folded the leaf slowly and slid it into the inside pocket of my jacket. It was small and creased and already fragile. I tucked it near the edge and walked away from the bus stop.
"Where are you going?" Delphine asked.
"Home," I said. "Back to the small apartment where my parents still make the same dinner. Back to the kitchen that smells like garlic and oil. Back to the place that kept a girl small and then let her grow."
"Will you come back?" she asked.
"I will," I said. "But not for the bus stop. For the way the light hits the leaves."
We both laughed.
"One last thing," I said. "If you ever wonder about Baylor—"
"I do, sometimes," she interrupted.
"He's been taught his lesson," I said. "I don't enjoy other people's downfall, but I don't regret that day. People who hurt others deserve to be known. That doesn't make me cruel. It makes me a witness."
"Wise," she said.
I looked up at the plane tree. Its branches were bareing their history like a map. The pink shirts were long washed and faded. The auditorium screens had been replaced. The world moved on.
"I kept the leaf," I said. "Folded it into my pocket like a small, private thing."
"That's a good ending," Delphine said.
We hung up. I walked home with the leaf pressed against my heart and a quiet satisfaction: the school, the bus stop, the pink shirt, and the plane tree were all part of me. They were the small, stubborn pieces that formed me.
I opened the front door, and for a moment the smell of dinner wrapped around my shoulders. I put my hand into the inner pocket and touched the leaf—warm and brittle as late summer. I smiled.
"Welcome home," I said to the kitchen.
The End
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