Off the Avenue

The little girl across the street lives in her house with her mom and dad and some cats I can see in the upstairs windows. She’s the only child on the block that gets a bus to take her to School on the Avenue. We live too close to School on the Avenue so I have to walk, which I don’t mind if my brother walks with me and doesn’t let his friends mess with me, which is most of the time. The girl has a very very very very white face and wears a big sun hat or her mother carries an umbrella, walking from their front door to the bus in front of the house. The girl also has very very very skinny legs and holds her mother’s hand and skips on the sidewalk and almost falls sometimes, her mother yanking at her to keep her skinny legs upright. The lady with chunky arms and cheeks who drives the bus always looks like she just had a permanent, but also looks like she doesn’t have a lot of hair and you can see her scalp. She always wears a blue or green sweatshirt for a football team that she must like, and her arm always hangs out the driver’s window, as if she thought she could if she wanted to stop the bus with her hand along the ground. The windows of the bus are dark but I imagine children exactly like the little girl are already sitting on the seats when she gets on. Most days I like to walk to School, it’s thrilling and there’s a lot to see on the Avenue, around the corner, a lot of smokers in cars driving downtown, puffing hard on their cigarettes, a regular guy named Billy with red eyes who stumbles and sways along the sidewalk holding a paper cup with coffee in it, my shadow as long as a whole block walking in front of me, the tip of my head crossing the street way before my legs reach the corner. But just one day I’d like to take that bus, really see the children who are like her who I know must be seated on it and see if they are at all like me, too.