She's a Mean Old H4 Bus, Cpt 4

Chapter Four: Moi "Emperor Crush" Romero

Emperor Crush had once been a fat little boy named Moises in the fifth grade at Sacred Heart School, between Mount Pleasant Street and Park Road and also Sixteenth and Park. He and Charlotta had played in the Mount Pleasant soccer League together, both the yellow team, the best team. Every Saturday, for hours on la polvosa, the little kids played dusty soccer while their parents shouted and watched. Vietnamese children, Haitian kids, children from El Salvador, from the Dominican Republic, from the Philippines, black kids, white kids, kids from everywhere liked to play. Mostly, those playing fútbol were Latino with a few of the others on one team or the other. It was how the neighborhood worked out. The coaches coached in English, or they could, but they were happier and proud to shout directions in Spanish.

Charlotta and Moises were both fullbacks and they were both good. Once, Moi threw himself almost at a

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?

She's a Mean Old H4 Bus

Chapter One: Marlin

It should have been a normal rush hour ride from Brookland Station, past Georgia Avenue, through Columbia Heights, then down through that damnable bottleneck—a place some of the drivers still secretly called Spanish Town, though it wasn’t much of that anymore. But Marlin noticed, as he worked the lever for the door and let people in all through Mount Pleasant, that something was powerfully wrong.

At Mount Pleasant and Irving Streets, the mean teenager (Marlin had been there himself and swore the kid was a gangbanger) got on the bus. Then, at Mount Pleasant and Hobart, the Asian guy (Marlin was sure he had two girlfriends) got on. He was the one always leaving gum on the seat. At Mount Pleasant and Park Road, the angry black girl with the quiet face (probably something to do with her always staring at the young Asian guy) got on, and she was the one who blocked the back door. At Eighteenth Street and Park Road, the old lady who could barely speak to him through her other language, but kept on speaking to him anyways when he was trying to drive (she was far too skinny for an old lady, even)… all of these people were his worst costumers,