A new school
Means a new school bus
Littered everywhere with crumbled,
sticky wrappers,
The smell of children's body odor,
Absolutely suffocating.
Piles of unspoken rules,
Soon accidentally learning the first one:
Stay out of the high schoolers' section.
Quickly redirected a few seats toward
the middle,
I get stuffed in a seat with two other girls,
Not even enough room to take a breath
Makes me overwhelmingly self-conscious in the crampedness.
So I waste endless time watching the
other riders
'Cause that's all I do,
Just watch, and see
First, a kid throwing pennies at the driver.
Stupid.
Then, two girls trying to hide in the back making out.
And finally, the boy glaring, without a doubt, directly at me
Three seats back, and to the left.

Two years later,
Exactly,
Three seats back, and to the left
Now I sit
With that guy who stared at me that day,
And many after,
But only because he liked my mangy-
looking hair.
We turned out being best friends,
Every day, ignoring the blaring pop music
For Asking Alexandria, Black Veil Brides,
And especially System of a Down
Screaming from costly headphones,
Absolutely perfect.
Until the traveling gas chamber reached
his stop,
And he reluctantly trudged off the bus,
Every agonizing day,
Away from me.

Two years later,
Vacancy,
Not only beside me,
But inside me, too.
The guy who once sat next to me,
Cuddled against me,
Showed love for me,
Has long since graduated,
Left me behind,
And he didn't even know it,
Did he?
Now, I gaze lazily out a window,
A scratch-covered, dingy window
To see a man
Driving his cool, ugly-white car,
A glance absently toward our school bus,
But that's all he does,
Not even a second thought.
And that was the second,
The sole, distinct moment
That I crushingly realized,
Like a kick to the chest,
That I still sit
Three seats back, and to the left
But he doesn't
Anymore.