8:17 p.m.- September 7th, 2007

I'd been on the bus for hours, and I was beginning to doubt my choice of seating. Being away from the other few sweaty passengers and their shrieking children had seemed to me the obvious choice, even at the price of sitting near the bathroom. But the bus rocked on rickety axles, and the contents of the septic tank sloshed and frothed in the broiling heat that the pavement below had absorbed from the glowing sun.

The poor bus driver had been recently emasculated by one very fat woman whose child had yanked the emergency break. It hadn't fully deployed, though the bus it had given sickening lurch. The had boy tumbled backward from the inertia of the sudden brake. He laughed maniacally, earning the frustrated outcry from the bus driver.

Cars screeched and blared around the us, narrowly missing the temporary roadblock that the bus had become. The woman had whipped her seatbelt from one of the many folds of fat on her stomach as she stood. I vaguely wondered how she'd been impregnated in the first place; or if she'd snatched the boy from his real parents and replaced him with a changeling before he was old enough to register that this walking heart-attack of a woman couldn't possibly be his mother.

"What was that you said to my son?" she spat. The kid in question rubbed at the snot caked under his nose and tugged on his mother's nightgown. She swatted at him.

"I… I asked…" The poor driver swallowed hard in lieu of repeating the phrase that had so angered the woman, perhaps wisely.

The woman nodded, approving of his answer. She cocked her fat head to the side, scanning the bus menacingly. I was quietly embarrassed for the driver, and wanted to provide him with as much dignity as he could reclaim from this bus-full of gawking passengers by paying him the least amount of attention possible. My mother had tucked an expired box of raisins into my knapsack as an afterthought, though I think we'd both acknowledged that there was no chance I'd be eating them. I had been feeding them to a hole torn into the side of the aluminum shell of the bus, then trying to peer out the window in time to see my mother's good intentions bouncing across the shimmering pavement.

The bus shook as the woman squeezed back into her seat, and once again, we were off. Her child continued to shriek. The bus driver turned the radio volume up a notch every time the child squealed, silently rejoicing in his small rebellion.

I recognized the smooth voice of Frank Sinatra. Not my favorite, but it would do in a pinch- and this definitely qualified as a pinch. My mind recessed into the sweet crooning of the radio, trying to recall the exact circumstances that'd landed me in this strange predicament.

)()(

My mother had chartered the godforsaken bus. She'd been tense during the ride to the bus station. I began to realize that it must have been due in part to the dire state of affairs the bus was in; though it had been because of the anger I was attempting to burn her alive with as we rolled through Motown.

The air conditioner was busted, and the windows were rolled all the way down in the humidity of the September morning. She hated driving in the city, and her jaw clenched and unclenched as she gripped the steering wheel precisely at 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock, and squeezed until her knuckles were white. She'd been watching me more often than the road, and my willfulness was battling hard with my screaming sense of self-preservation as she slid in and out of the bike lane.

I hadn't spoken a word to her the entire morning, and it was driving her crazy. I could almost see the fissures erupting along her skull and her self control leaking out of her ears.

She eyed me, and bit her lip as her the broiling heat of the car melted away the last of her resolve.

"You haven't said a word to me since yesterday." Her statement was backed by a chorus of car horns. She waved an apologetic hand out the window before she continued. "Cat got your tongue?" She laughed at herself to spite me.

"No." My angry answer had squelched out before I'd thought. I silently cursed myself. I'd broken, and she took it as an opening.

"Ah, so she speaks! I thought I was going to have to make a detour to Providence Hospital." Her infamous wit was only charming or funny when it wasn't directed at me. She'd always told me that her sharp tongue was the reason that my mysterious father had fallen for her. Sometimes I thought that it must have been why he'd left her, too. I heaved a sigh, and her eyes lit up at the prospect of an argument. I couldn't stop the rush that I felt, either. Fuck it.

"A double admittance?"

"Oh-ho, clever girl!"

"I didn't get it from just anywhere."

"Snippy today." It was quiet for a few moments. I could feel her expanding, as if she would burst."You'll write?" She asked sardonically. Indulgently, even.

"What is it, fucking 1842? Maybe I'll call you when I get there." I wiggled my cellphone at her mockingly, and couldn't help the twinge of satisfaction when her mouth tightened at my vulgarity.

"What am I supposed to do Mel, actively participate in your anger? It's been weeks, and that maladjusted look on your face hasn't budged an inch. I'm not sure how, from a parental standpoint, you think I'd be okay with you roaming the streets for another entire year?" My stony silence had returned. "I'm beginning to think that this is going to be good for both of us." Her palms squeaked against the leather of the steering wheel as she angrily wrung her hands.

That one twinged a bit. I gripped my cellphone more tightly, and the keypad lit up, as if in protest. "Sure is, Eileen." She blanched when I used her first name, and stopped prodding after a less-than-parental huff. My anger smoldered as we rode in silence.

Eventually she stopped watching me. I slyly looked at her profile, tracing the familiar silhouette of her nose, mentally tweezing her bushy eyebrows; and for one fleeting moment, I almost felt bad.

Then the signs for the bus station started speeding by, and the wretched anger flared up in my chest again.

"Why are you shipping me off, again?" I goaded.

"It's one of the best schools in the country. At least, it was when I was there." She answered me curtly, neatly clipping the ends of each word in her rehearsed answer.

"Why am I going now?"

Her face darkened. "You know why."

And I did know why. But I wanted to hear her say it. She bit her tongue, though. Possibly literally. My protest had been half-hearted, anyway. It wasn't that I didn't want to go. I was, in some base, cro-magnon portion of my brain, excited. It was something new; and something mysterious. I couldn't help being at least a little curious. That said, I didn't so much mind the going as the leaving.

Silence lingered nastily in the stuffy car until we pulled into the bus station, and before I knew it, we'd exited the car and approached a bus that rattled and belched toxic exhaust fumes into the air. I stood facing her, a dufflebag in my hands and my knapsack strapped across my back.

The thing looked as if it were ready to fall apart. My mother, too, looked strangely fragile. She chewed at her fingernails, and smiled at me through her bad habit, despite my rudeness in the car. My mother was a woman of few vices, chewing her nails being the most prevalent- and one of the few similarities between us.

As I watched her, I realized that this was it. I wouldn't see her, or her nose, or her bad habits for close to a year. I acknowledged somewhere in the back of my mind that I'd miss her later, but every bit of sentimentality evaporated when the bus driver leaned down to speak at my mother.

"Hate to rush you folks along, but we're on a tight schedule here, and it's like to take a few minutes before she's up and running." He patted the dashboard affectionately. "Best to be on and ready a little ahead of time. I can take your ticket now, if you like." The man smiled cordially.

I turned back to my mother, who smiled and handed the ticket to the man, uncharacteristically silent.

"Well then," she sighed.

"Well." I answered.

She stepped forward to embrace me, catching me off guard. Her knees knocked into my dufflebag, and she reached around me awkwardly with one arm. Despite myself, I leaned into her neck. I sniffed her childishly, wanting to linger in the laundromat smell that clung to her blouse.

"Y'know, I might actually miss you." I laughed, even as I felt my eyes prickling with tears, and quickly pulled away. The gross, sad, guilt-trip mom was disappearing as quickly as she'd appeared. I felt a little more capable as she wiped a few tears from her own eyes. She straightened up and stepped back, appraising me. She nodded.

"Don't fight. Be good. You can do this. I love you." And strangely enough, I believed her, even as her voice trembled. She kissed her fingers and touched my forehead, then stepped away.

I got a little panicky as she stood back- she'd let me go, and was letting me go even now. She wasn't calling me back; she wasn't grabbing my bags from my hands and dragging me, pouting, to the car. She just looked at me, waiting in front of the humming bus, feeling small and very vulnerable. I stood there, shocked, and blinked at her a few times.

Then I turned to board the bus, and didn't look back.

I scouted out my ill- fated seat, shambling to the rear in a daze. I stowed my things in the overhead compartment, and sat down near a window. I sad fiddling with my phone as the front of the bus slowly filled with passengers, avoiding the teasing draw of the window. I could just see her out of the corner of my eye, and I wondered briefly if she could see me through the layer of dirt and insect viscera coating the window.

Apparently, the bus was in working order, and it lurched unceremoniously to life. Only then did I look back at my mother. She had turned to leave, and as her retreating form shrank, my view of the smoggy Detroit skyline widened.

)()(

And so I was seated in the speeding metal deathtrap, watching the reds and golds of the famed New England countryside burn a vomit like-streak into my periphery. When I bothered to watch, to truly see out of the window, there were water-color worthy panoramas framed there. Gullies painted with the colors of autumn; chromatic farmhouses; rolling fields dotted with portly, amiable looking cows; and the deep, endless lake that I'd never seen; that, to me, looked very like an ocean.

The scenery may have been nauseatingly picturesque; at that point, though, I was harboring a unique hatred for anything that would put so much distance between me and Detroit.

I tried to occupy myself with counting the mile-markers that lined the muddy, yellow highway; singing softly to myself, tapping my fingers to the tempo of songs on the radio; fiddling with my phone until it was almost out of charge- anything to distract from the stench seeping from the bathroom stall. It grew increasingly worse, and I soon forfeited.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and stood unsteadily on knees. The grimy coating on the window caused it to jam about halfway when I tried to open it. Sighing, I stuck my head, and then my arms, out of the small opening, letting the wind whip my hair away from my face.

I squinted into the horizon as evening sun beamed down onto my neck and shoulders. I could almost hear my mother's aggravated voice telling me to sit back down- I ignored it. I saw the driver looking at me pleadingly in one of his rearview mirrors; I ignored him too. I reasoned that we both sat in separate circles of hell on this bus- the radio relieved him of his; and the open air that deafened me and stung my eyes gave me reprieve from mine- especially since we hadn't seen a town- or a cop- for at least a few hours. He must have been thinking along the same lines; and even if he wasn't, he gave a nod and waved his hand at me resignedly anyway.

I was growing tired, but there was no complex in my mind that would let me relax enough for sleep. Every portion of my brain was buzzing at least dully as I searched the dark highway for signs of proximity to the school. It made me nervous, due to a combination of sleep deprivation and the eerily quiet dead zone that the front of the bus had devolved into.

I started restlessly picking at a hole in my jeans. The bus was steadily bowling down some nameless highway. The bus driver glanced at me sleepily, and smiled when we made eye contact.

I reasoned that if I knew where we were, I'd be more at ease. With most of the passengers asleep or uninterested, it would be easy enough to navigate to the front of the bus and ask the driver. I brought my head and shoulders back into the bus and slid out into the aisle.

The driver watched me hobble up to him, but I had to tap his shoulder for his attention once I reached him. I leaned down so that he could hear my question over the roaring of the engine.

"Are we there yet?" I asked, giving the man a small, weary smile.

He laughed a little. "We're about an hour outside of Liberty City."

"Really?"

"Really. We'll be there in about three hours." He said, yawning.

"Okay. I'll get some sleep. Don't pass out on us, buddy." I was only half joking.

"I'll try my best," He answered, and I would've sworn that I felt the bus swerve an inch or two.

I plopped back into my seat, suddenly exhausted. It had been dark for several hours now, and the passengers eventually conceded again to the slumber inspired by the velvety darkness just outside the bus.

As the night lessened the heat of the day, the stench from the toilets became- at most- bearable. My window was still open a crack, and I angled my face toward it, breathing deeply. The air had begun to taste salty. We were getting closer. I hadn't read the brochure my mother provided out of spite; though I vaguely remembered her mentioning the ocean. We'd made to the coast, at least. A sleepy, dreamy tune that I didn't recognize warbled from the speakers. That awful mother and her equally awful son had dozed, and she snored softly as we careened down the highway. Soon, my mind began to power down, and I drifted off to sleep too.

)()(

I woke to a chorus of screeching brakes that rose from somewhere beneath me. We'd stopped.

I'd contorted myself into a ball while I slept. My cheek was pressed to my knee, and it felt uncomfortably hot as I sat up and stretched.

It was still dark outside my window. "He said three hours..." I thought. I groggily counted on my fingers. "It must be nearly 2:00." Two. What was I going to do here at two in the morning?

The passengers at the front of the bus had roused, as the bus driver put his radio to his lips with relish.

"We've reached our destination, ladies and gentlemen. Please exit the bus in an orderly fashion. Thank you."

I silently panicked when I detected no movement from the front of the bus.

I waited as long as I could manage, peering out of the window at the large wrought iron gates inscribed with "Bullworth Academy". This was really my stop then. I waited until the driver brought his radio to his lips to make one last call for my departure. I strapped myself into my knapsack and slid my luggage out of the overhead compartment. I banged up the aisle, forcing myself to move- the only plan I had to go on ended once I stepped out of those doors.

I reached the end of the aisle, pausing to ask the time.

"2:23. Have a nice morning, and enjoy your stay in Bullworth." the driver cheerily intoned. I wanted to punch him. He seemed to sit imperiously upon his driver's seat, and pulled the handle that released the doors with gusto.

They swung wide, gaping menacingly at me. I swallowed, manically contemplating going back to my seat and trying to hitch a ride back home. Maybe even stop off at Liberty city. I laughed a dry, short laugh. The bus driver didn't look at me like I was crazy, as I had expected- he actually looked almost apologetic.

"Thanks." My mouth was sticky.

I was about to take the first step out of the door when something caught my ankle. My dufflebag went tumbling down the steps, and I went after it, painfully skidding to a stop on the sidewalk in front of the bus.

The snot- nosed boy stood at the top of the steps, smirking at me.

Before I could stop my reaction, I grabbed at the boy, who jumped back. I managed to snatch his untied tennis shoe off of his foot. I gripped the lace and whipped it around my head like a lasso, and chucked it down the darkened street with as much force as I could muster. He started bawling immediately, but as I turned to stare smugly into the boy's faced, the doors slammed shut and the bus pulled away from the curb.

I reveled in my small victory, for all of its childishness. I'd nearly throttled the kid. Somewhere between my annoyance and smugness, I found room to be relieved that I hadn't.

When I kneeled down to retrieve my dufflebag, I noticed two small but noticeably dark patches of blood staining the knees of my jeans. My palms stung, too. Damned kid.

I picked gravel out of my scrapes, and couldn't stop myself from feeling a little helpless. Was I supposed to knock at the gate? Maybe on the comically oversized padlock? This was ridiculous. All the time I'd spent on the bus was time that other students had spent in the school, orienting themselves with their classes, picking their lockers and avoiding one another. I found myself feeling angry at my mother; she'd never had a head for dates, and booking the tickets a day late had been an innocent enough mistake- but it had thrown a serious wrench in things for me.

A few frustrated tears managed squeaked out; I shook my head, the sudden force sobering. It was no use hating my mother from a thousand miles away, when it seemed that I'd been padlocked out of the school.

I looked around again, strategizing. There was a large, imposing building somewhere off in the distance, backlit by dimly burning lamp posts. There was a building that I could barely see over the brick half-wall that stood between me and the rest of the campus. The stately script over the doorway read, "BOYS DORM".

"That's no use." I was becoming more and more vexed by the moment. I peered at the impressively domed building directly opposite the Boy's Dorm, and wasn't disappointed- this time, it read, "GIRLS DORM". My relief was short lived, however, as I realized that I had no feasible way of getting over the fence.

I dropped my dufflebag in front of the gates, and walked down the sidewalk until there was a break. There was a short driveway that ran directly behind the girl's dorm. A smaller version of the main gate barred the pathway, but this one had a fatal flaw; there was a gap large enough for me to squeeze beneath. It was something that someone else may have overlooked; but I thrived on small details. I traversed the streets and rooftops of Detroit using openings and shortcuts just like this one- Something so easily over sighted by an untrained eye inspired ridiculous excitement in me. I quickly retrieved my duffle and jogged triumphantly to the bars, army crawling to salvation.

The girl's dorm was still visible over the maze of fences that barred me from it. I crept around the corner- and froze. A large and menacing someone stood sentinel in the center of the path between the girls and boys dormitories. He took large, strident steps, and wielded his flashlight like a weapon. I didn't need to convince myself to stay in the shadows- and out of this guy's sight. I clung, crouching, to the half wall that bordered the perimeter of the plaza in front of the main building.

The beam from the guard's light whipped around; he seemed to be progressing toward me. If I lingered, he'd walk right into me. I glanced at the shortcut again, and decided to take a chance.

I shoved my dufflebag through a gap in the chain- link fence that still barred me from the girl's dorm. The fence rattled, and the beam of the flashlight snapped up into the branches of the apple tree that shielded me from his sight.

It hovered there for a moment, before drifting back down. I began to carefully squeeze myself through the gap after my bag. I'd managed to get almost all the way through the opening- when my shoe snagged, and thumped onto the ground.

That certainly caught the guard's attention. I gave up trying to sneak my way through- and my shoe. I snatched up my duffle and ran unevenly toward the second break in the fence. The light flew around to where I'd been moments before, but all he'd be able to find was my lonely, solitary shoe.

I hopped down from the raised area and streaked to the front door of the girl's dorm. I almost began to cry with relief when I found it unlocked.

I shut it quickly and quietly behind me, and slumped to the floor. I sat there breathing for a few moments, unable to believe what I'd just gotten away with. My bare toes wiggled at me. Maybe it was karma for the shoe I'd taken from the boy; if so, the fates were cruel, indeed.

I slid my backpack over my shoulders, and dug my crumpled, stained schedule out of the front pocket. I got to my feet when I finally found what I'd been searching for. I was in room 14.

I stepped out into a spacious seating area. Everything seemed to be very, very pink. It was a little overwhelming. There was a white staircase, a fuchsia lounge area, and a hallway that only contained utility closets and a fire exit (the doors of which were painted a soft, feminine pink). No rooms down here. I crossed to the staircase on the other side of the room.

The door to room 14 was slightly ajar, and soft snores issued from within. A placard next to the door read, "BEARTICE T." I blinked again at the obviously misspelled name. My schedule hadn't said anything about a roommate. I slowly pushed the door open with my duffle, and tiptoed inside. Moonlight slanted in through the slats of some dusty aluminum shutters, revealing a neatly made bed that was separated from an occupied one by a nightstand.

I slowly walked around the empty bed, so as to avoid waking my new roommate. I slid my pack from my shoulder, and stowed my dufflebag under the dust ruffle of my new bed.

I kicked off my shoe, and sat on my new sheets with my knees tucked under my chin. I looked around my new room, and listened to Beartice snore. Other than her breathing, the dorms had an eerily still quality to them- as if we were the only occupants in the building.

The excitement I'd felt from the danger of sneaking around an unfamiliar campus was fading, and feelings of anxiety and loneliness dug away at my euphoria until I was nothing but a twitching heap of anticipation.


I've been editing the crap out of "Misfit Youth". Nothing about the story has changed, it's just sped up a lot. I don't think I should've published this when I did- it wasn't ready yet. Hopefully this will be the last re-configuration. Thanks for reading, and any extra reviews you find laying around.

I've been thinking about adding a few shorter chapters written from the P.O.V.'s of the other main characters- Zoe, Gary, Petey. The story will still be centered around Melanie, and the other chapters would probably be in third person. Stupid? Genius? Let me know in a review, you non-existent reader you ;)

The title of this chapter is a lyric from "New Slang" by The Shins, which I do not own.