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The 57 Bus
Dashka Slater
Part One: Sasha
One
The most important part of the section was when Sasha found out the terms that described who they were. These were the terms:
- Agender: Doesn't identify as any gender
- Gray-cupiosexual: Doesn't feel sexual attraction, but is still interested in sex/mostly doesn't feel sexual attraction but does occasionally
- Quoiromantic: Doesn't understand the difference between between romantic and platonic love
- Also: Vegan
Characters
Sasha: Sasha is an agender teenager, who attends a private school in Oakland and comes from an upper-middle class family. Sasha has a tight group of friends. Together they invent languages and work on computer programming. Sasha’s parents, supportive of Sasha’s non-binary identity. Sasha started identifying using “they/them” pronouns, preferring to live between genders rather than subscribing to one.
Richard: Richard attends a public school in Oakland. He is a mischievous teenage black boy from a poor high school where only two-thirds of the students are expected to graduate, and where many of his friends will find themselves pregnant, in jail, or dead before they turn twenty-one. Living with his mother, Richard experienced a great deal of financial hardship growing up. Despite the criminal activity with which many of his classmates have become involved, Richard has remained clear of a record, other than some minor issues goofing around at school.
Part Two: Richard
Two
The most important part was when Richard met Miss Kaprice. She was able to mentor him and help him be the good kid he wants to be. The story then has a flashback to April 2012. Richard and his friends went to the beach. There they got involved in a fight and they had to go to court for a detention hearing. One of them got out on probation with a GPS monitor on the ankle, the other two were sent to group homes, and Richard was released on GPS early on but was sent to a group home in Redding, California. One of them was shot and Richard was crying and could not stop. Richard later returned to Oakland and got a job. It was now two months into junior year. Richard and his cousin stopped at a liquor store on their way to a friend's house and that is when he ran into a boy he knew. He soon had two guns pointed at his head and was being stripped of his belongings. Soon after he started having trust issues.
Part Three: Fire
Three
The fire took happened at 4:52 p.m. Both Richard and Sasha were on the bus. Sasha drifted off to sleep and Richard was goofing off with his cousin, Lloyd, and his friend Jamal. Jamal had pointed out Sasha and their skirt. In the video you can see Jamal taking out his phone as if he was planning on recording. Richard showed the lighter to Llyod and swung it closer to Sasha. He flicked it by the hem of their skirt but nothing happened. Later Richard would say that it was supposed to be funny, that he thought the fabric would smolder for a minute and they would wake up and slap it out. He did this a few times but nothing would happen and in the background the other two boys kept on playing around. Richard held the lighter for the 4th time and the fire got onto their skirt. The boys ran out from the back door.
The Interview
Four
Richard was called in to have an interview with a police officer. The officer showed him a small part of the video, but it wasn't enough. Officer Anderson asked him why he set the skirt on fire and he said he was being stupid. What was going through your mind? Nothing. Have you done this before? No. Officer Anderson said Sasha got seriously burned and was sent to the San Francisco burn center. Richard at last said that he was a homophobic and that he does not like gay people(but he doesn't hate them). The officer asked him if he got angry seeing them wearing a skirt but Richard just said that he didn't know their skirt would go up in flames. But it was too late to backpedal. Officer Anderson wrote: DURING SUSP INTERVIEW, THE SUSP STATED HE DID IT BECAUSE HE WAS HOMOPHOBIC.
Part Four: Justice
Five
It was now September of 2014, nearly a year after the fire, and the case was still not setlled. The district attorney's office had made a plea bargain. They would drop the mayhem charge and the hate-crime charge enhancements if Richard agreed to accept a five-year sentence on the assult charge. With credit for time and good behavior the 17 year old Richard would be released just before his 21st birthday.That meant even though he was being charged as an adult, he could still serve his time in juvenile facilities. A month later(11 months and 12 days after the fire) Richard decided to take the deal. His sentence was reduced to five years and after 3 months the judge would recieve an evaluation of his conduct. He would then return for a 2nd evalluation before his 18th birthday. If the 2nd evaltuation was positive he could stay at the juvinile facility for his whole sentence. If bad he would be transferred into an adult prison when he turned 18.
Favorite Part
My favorite part was desribing Richard's life at juvie. He was thinking back to when he was sharing a 15 person living unit with the kid who had robbed him at gunpoint, the one he had thought of as a friend. The boy apologized for robbing him and Richard forgave him. He told Jasmine that he had accepted the apology because he knew what it was like to have wronged someone and he, too, had hoped to be forgiven. "Forgive, but never forget." Jasmine had liked to say. But Richard had told her to stop saying that. "To forgive, you have to forget beacuse otherwise you haven't truly forgiven." A week after the fire Richard had wrote 2 letters to Sasha and they had not opened them. Fourteen months later Sasha, Debbie, and Karl opened them and in front of a crowd finally forgave Richard and said that he was not a bad kid at all.