The 57 Bus

Never let your obstacles become more important than your goal.

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.

To forgive, you have to forget,” he counseled. “Because otherwise you haven’t truly forgiven.

Because I’m going to make you understand the family motto: Never let your obstacles become more important than your goal.

Two tongues in their mouths, the one they use to promise and the one they use to lie.

Even the brightest, best-meaning teenager doesn’t tend to think much beyond the moment, especially when they’re with their friends,” observes Gerstenfeld. As people grow

On her walls she’d posted the family slogan: Never let your obstacles become more important than your goal. The goals: go to class, get your grades up, graduate, stay out of jail, survive.

For me at least, genderqueer includes an aspect of questioning,” Sasha explains. “The fact that I was questioning my gender meant that I was genderqueer.

That was the thing about restorative justice. It allowed you to hold two things in your head at the same time--that butt-slapping was funny, and also that it wasn't. That asking permission to touch somebody was funny, but that you really didn't want to be touched by somebody who didn't ask. That the girls wanted Jeff to dial back the ass-smacking thing, but that they still liked joking around with him. That the whole thing wasn't a big deal, and that it kind of was (239).

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.

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.

Restorative justice is more interested in relationships. A crime is not act against a rule, it's an act against a person. When you harm somebody, you owe it to them to make things right. By making things right, you begin to heal your relationship with the community. Our system is focused on blame and punishment and not on healing and learning. - Lauren Abramson (RJ Program in Baltimore, MD)

Studies show that more than 90 percent of juveniles who are interrogated by police don't wait to talk to a lawyer and don't understand the rights the police have read them.

That’s not how the system works.

Our system is focused on blame and punishment and not on healing and learning,

The proponents of hate-crime laws are liberals, and yet they are the ones who are the biggest critics of mass incarceration,” observes James B. Jacobs, director of New York University’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice, and an expert on hate-crime laws. “So there are ironies piled on ironies. The remedy here is imprisonment, and prisons are the ultimate incubators of antisocial attitudes.

Transgender people are the victims of an astonishing amount of violence. One out of every four trans people has experienced a bias-driven assault, and the numbers are higher for trans women, trans people of color, and nonbinary people. Of the 860 nonbinary people who responded to the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 32 percent had been physically assaulted.

The very last part of the brain to get myelinated is the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for reason, planning, and deliberation. So while teenage emotions have gone into hyperdrive, reason and logic are still obeying the speed limit. The result is that while teenagers can make decisions that are just as mature, reasoned, and rational as adults’ decisions in normal circumstances, their judgment can be fairly awful when they are feeling intense emotions or stress, conditions that psychologists call hot cognition. In those situations, teens are more likely to make decisions with the limbic system rather than the prefrontal cortex.

Lynchings—they’re hate crimes,” he said. “But the kid who thinks that [wearing a skirt] is anomalous and decides to play a prank is not committing a hate crime.

The result is that while teenagers can make decisions that are just as mature, reasoned, and rational as adults’ decisions in normal circumstances, their judgment can be fairly awful when they are feeling intense emotions or stress, conditions that psychologists call hot cognition. In those situations, teens are more likely to make decisions with the limbic system rather than the prefrontal cortex. The presence of peers is one of the things that raises the emotional stakes, making it more likely that teens will seek out risk and short-term reward without pausing to consider the consequences.

[Dan, Sasha's savior on the bus visits after the accident] 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 ones that had your back. (YOU had my back -Sasha said. Dan shut his eyes for a moment.)

but there are many languages on earth that are basically gender neutral, using the same word for he, she, and it, or not using pronouns at all. You’ve probably heard of some of them. They include: Armenian, Comanche, Finnish, Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Quechua, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yoruba.

It doesn't really directly affect me, at least to hear it - it's more like 'Huh, that's not right'. And when people use the right pronouns, whey they use 'they' or another gender-neutral pronoun, it feels validating.

The idea of not having a gender wasn't frightening to Sasha, but it wasn't a relief either. Maybe this is just a phase, Sasha thought. Maybe I'm just overthinking things. But maybe not. Maybe the question was its own kind of answer. Maybe the place in between was a real place.

Two young women stood back-to-back performing a slam poem called "Hir," rotating to face the mic as they gave voice to a girl named Melissa and the boy inside her named James. 'Sometimes she wishes she could rip the skin off her back, Every moment of every day she feels trapped in the flesh of a stranger.

held in correctional facilities on any given day: 54,148. Average cost of juvenile incarceration for one twelve-month stay: $146,302. Percentage of juveniles who are African American: 16. Percentage of incarcerated youths who are African American: 41. Percentage of African American youths who do their time in an adult prison: 58. Number of people currently serving life sentences

Sasha sleeps as Richard and his companions goof around, play fighting. Sleeps as Richard’s cousin Lloyd bounds up and down the aisle flirting with a girl up front. Sleeps as Richard surreptitiously flicks a lighter and touches it to the hem of that gauzy white skirt. Wait. In a moment, Sasha will wake inside a ball of flame and begin to scream. In a moment, everything will be set in motion. Taken by ambulance to a San Francisco burn unit, Sasha will spend the next three and a half weeks undergoing multiple surgeries to treat second- and third-degree burns running from calf to thigh. Arrested at school the following day, Richard will be charged with two felonies, each with a hate-crime clause that will add time to his sentence if he is convicted. Citing the severity of the crime, the district attorney will charge him as an adult, stripping him of the protections normally given to juveniles. Before the week is out, he will be facing the possibility of life imprisonment. But none of that has happened yet. For now, both teenagers are just taking the bus home from school. Surely it’s not too late to stop things from going wrong. There must be some way to wake Sasha. Divert Richard. Get the driver to stop the bus. There must be something you can do.

If you have a lot of obsessions, a lot of things you really like, the opportunity for best days ever increases.

But she had never had a best friend. She was used to being an outcast, to feeling both smarter than the other kids, and stupider.