She's a Mean Old H4 Bus, Cpt 2

Chapter Two: The Quiet, Angry-Faced Girl

The girl with the quiet, angry face did not, of course, call herself ‘girl with the quiet, angry face.’ She was Charlotta Phelps, but Charlotta was the kind of young woman who did realize strangers must call her ‘quiet, angry-faced girl’ and she relished having a quiet, menacing demeanor that kept people unseated with her—she was able to project her frustration, sharpen it, and then strangers didn’t approach. A little girl, she looked like one, but she set it up so that men on the street must have been frightened of her. Who needs mace in this city? She was really very good at scaring the men on the METRO, and that was her best defense, and also her favorite game. She reasoned that she had better like doing it to them. Her offense.
 
There were more than the homeless-looking men who stared to play the game with. She played the ‘don’t you dare touch me’ silent treatment with the business-looking men who stared at the way she wore her coat, her purse, her body. Leaning on the silver pole on the METRO train with hips cocked, as if she had had enough. All those business-looking men could not have been from DC, almost no one living in her city was anyways, but Charlotta had learned that these men could hurt her with their misunderstanding, shame her by making obvious the distance she (knew she feared she) saw between them, if she ever allowed them to get near and take her, and tap her number down, and text her later,
 
Ur so beautiful. Nice finally talking to someone on the bus. Wanna get coffee later?