Outside, it’s freezing. It often gets cold here, but this—this is something else. It hasn’t been cold enough for the schools to close yet, but they’ll probably be shut down tomorrow; they don’t want kids getting frostbite while waiting for the bus or walking to class. But at least they’re all inside now, not out here with him, trudging through the piles of snow his dickhead neighbors never bother to shovel off their sidewalks, and by the time he gets to work his feet’ll be soaked through and he won’t be able to feel them until they start to thaw and hurt like hell.
It’s mostly the thought of his feet that makes him decide to take the bus, although he hates everything about public transportation. He hates the extra-long buses the city has, like two worms connected in the center by an accordion, and he hates the fact that even though most of them are brand-new, they still smell like piss. He doesn’t know why that is. The plastic seats are shiny and free of gum and the floors are mostly spotless, but they still smell. Like some guy stood in the middle of the bus, right in the springy thing that keeps the whole thing connected, and unzipped, spraying urine everywhere.
But what does Jimmy Galen hate most about the bus? That anyone can see him riding it. Anyone. And riding a bus is even worse than walking, especially if your friends see you doing it, and they blast by while you’re waiting inside the clear plastic walls of the bus stop and shoot you the finger, screaming and laughing, because their parents bought them a car to drive, and you’re the fucking loser waiting to take a bus to your job at the mall, where you sell shitty sports memorabilia to lame kids or single old guys with nothing better to spend their money on.
“If you signed up at the community college I might let you take my car to class,” his mother said that fall, after everyone went back to school and the streets seemed empty.
“I just graduated.”
“Two years ago,” his mother said, snorting. “If you want to get a good job, you have to go to college these days.”
“You never did.”
“Things were different back then,” she said. “Times have changed.”
“I’ll think about it.”
But he didn’t think about it, because he had no interest in college. College was for smart kids, kids with brains, and Jimmy isn’t all that bright. At least that’s what his dad had always told him, and that’s what the teachers in high school had said too. Actually, the teachers had usually said something about him not living up to his full potential, which in real-speak meant he was a fucking numbnuts, which was how his dad always put it. And even though his mom told him not to believe it, told him that no one understood him, he thought all those people were probably right. He’d spent an entire year in middle school wondering if he was retarded, like full-on short-bus retarded, but then realized he was stupid. Not stupid enough to actually benefit from the lack of brain cells, but pretty stupid. So why waste the money on college? He figured he’d stay at the store, work his way up. It wasn’t a bad gig, and he liked most of the other employees. They were nice to him, didn’t make him feel like an asshole. He doesn’t need those dipshits he went to school with, who just want a punching bag. He’ll make new friends, work his way up into management. Get an apartment, a girlfriend.
He’s thinking about these things while he waits at the bus stop, huddled in a corner, the sleeves of his coat coiled over his hands and his face nuzzled into the collar, his breath leaving a damp patch on the fabric. He’s alone in the plastic booth, because everyone else is either too smart to be out on a day like this or has a car. He’s so occupied with this, so furious that his mother will spend hundreds of dollars on boxed wine every month and not even consider cosigning a car loan for him, that he barely notices the person come into the booth and sit right beside him, even though there’re three other metal benches, all of them empty. He doesn’t notice anything until there’s a sharp point digging into his side, poking all the way through his coat and T-shirt and into his skin.
“What the fuck’s your problem, man?” he says, trying to jump up, but the guy has one hand on the back of his neck and the other pushing the knife deeper into his side. The year before, one of Jimmy’s friends had been accidentally stabbed in the thigh at a house party, and he’d told everyone that it’d taken a while to feel the pain, that he hadn’t felt anything until he looked down and saw the steak knife sticking out of his leg. But now Jimmy knows that’s bullshit, because the pain is immediate, even though the knife can’t be very far in, an inch, maybe not even that.
“There’s no problem,” the guy hisses. “No problem at all.”
“I don’t have any money, man,” Jimmy says. He’s sweating, big beads of it running down his back and into the crack of his ass. “I’ll give you my wallet, but there’s nothing in it.”
“I don’t want your money.” The hand tightened when Jimmy tried to turn his head, so he was left staring out at the falling snow. The guy’s breath smelled like cigarettes, and he was wearing a cologne that smelled familiar, or an aftershave. Jimmy didn’t know.
“Then what do you want?”