The bus smelled like exhaust and hot rubber. It hit Elijah as soon as he walked through the folding door. That afternoon, the air inside smelled like food, too. Doritos, pretzel rods, gritty Nature Valley bars that kids chased with water, stale cereal out of reused ziplock bags. Not reused for the environment. Broke and eco friendly folks in the city had more in common than they’d think.
Driver Grace said Good Afternoon to Elijah and his little brother, Aaron. They were the only words Elijah ever heard her say, apart from Good Morning. She was quiet, which he attributed either to her being unhappy or Asian. He couldn’t decide which. Maybe both.
He could feel Aaron behind him, tugging lightly on his backpack as they walked down the school bus. The kids went from little to older as they passed rows. Fingers digging nostrils to fingers scrolling screens. The front of the bus was all young, like Aaron—who was half of Elijah’s twelve years. Every week, one of the kids would get their second taste of lunch on the way home. From motion sickness or general school day angst, Elijah wasn’t sure. Driver Grace would silently stroke the forearm of the culprit then bring out the sawdust. Everyone would maneuver around the pile like a lava game, as if forgetting what was underneath.
The brothers passed little girls pretending to be mothers with dolls and, as they neared the back of the bus, girls who could become them. Like Sophia B. whose stomach puffed up last fall, just before Gym mutated to Sex Ed for a month. A shame on the boy responsible, Elijah’s mother said, but the teacher seemed giddy for the real life cautionary tale. The older girls never came to school without making their lips shiny. A thick layer of honey was what it looked like. Mostly clear, sometimes pinks or reds. He couldn’t blame them. Not with the videos they’d catch the boys huddling around on their cell phones. Done up women with lips swollen, like a bee just stung. Also glossed. Women of strange proportions, all exposed. Some of the guys said they’ve seen the real thing, not just on a screen. Maybe. Who knows.
The older girls spent more hours gossiping than Elijah wanted to count. Always Ohmahgad -this and -that. And the boys, more time on the screens than he could track if he tried. He wasn’t allowed that kind of phone. Mama was in nursing school, got the idea of pagers from the hospital. For emergencies. The problem was he didn’t know what counted as an emergency. And the obvious ones: getting shot, getting run over by an MTA bus, getting kidnapped, well, too late for your help, ‘Ma. What if an emergency happened some day and he didn’t know it counted as one? Or worse, the opposite. That there wouldn’t be one and he’d think there was. She’d leave work or class for nothing. One lost shift and there goes Christmas.
Elijah walked deeper down the aisle with Aaron to where the bigger kids sat, found an open row, and guided his brother in before sitting down. Aaron was kind of like Elijah’s arm or leg when they were together. Like how the others always wanted their smartphones attached to some part of them.
Across the aisle, Jabari and Caleb Green said their Heys. They were twins a couple years below Elijah, in the fourth grade. Caleb was chomping on sun rays coming through the window. “Look!” He yelled, mock chewing, gulping the light. “Look, I’m swallowing it!”
Sometimes Elijah felt like there hadn’t been enough juice in Mrs.Green’s stomach for both the twins. Like fetus Jabari didn’t share. Little Aaron swung his legs giddily and began imitating Caleb—munching on fake rays in his mouth, eyelids narrowing.
“What’s it taste like?” Elijah asked Aaron with a smirk.
“Taste like…lemons!” Aaron squinted, both he and Caleb scrunched their faces like, Ooph sour. Caleb chewed some more. “It’s fun watching me eat sunlight.” He didn’t say this like asking, but knowing. He wasn’t totally wrong.
Caleb laughed big at Jabari, then back at Aaron across the aisle, his buckteeth ablaze. The guy could fit a Cheeto through his gap. He often did, and he would laugh and laugh, like now. At school the nurse put nail polish on his hands that was supposed to taste like bitter rat trash to keep him from sucking his thumb, but Caleb suffered through it. “Only bad for the first minute,” he’d say. Jabari reminded him to write in his journal and Caleb pulled it out. It was easy to forget they were the same age. Caleb didn’t like writing as much as drawing, so his journal was a hybrid. Confusing images with clarifying words.
Elijah watched Caleb’s doodling, recalling when it began. Their school didn’t have a therapist on staff, but one had visited in September. At the assembly he said Guess what, doesn’t take much to improve your mental health. They sat there, pretzel legged on the gym floor, listening to suggestions and picking at the blue-tape basketball boundaries below them. Walks in nature, three servings of fresh veggies a day, journaling, nine hours of sleep, and other tips and tricks. The only trick was that not every student could do those things. Mostly couldn’t. The tip Elijah wanted to give the man was to maybe take this speech to a school downtown. Some of his classmates couldn’t keep up with their Body health and this guy waltzes in talking Mental. At some point the man asked what everyone ate for breakfast. James, the school bully, shouted out, “Your mama!” which got a couple laughs but—Elijah could tell from James’ face—less than he had hoped for. Then a few people shouted normal answers—toast, oatmeal—but most looked too embarrassed after hearing what they should be having for breakfast. A lot more students than that, Elijah thought, didn’t eat breakfast at all. The guy mentioned something called mindful eating too, but even Elijah couldn’t grasp what that meant. Eating with your imagination instead of your mouth? After making the schoolkids realize all the things they should be doing that they probably couldn’t do, the man left them each with a reusable water bottle. Gee, thanks a lot.
Aaron was looking out the window of the school bus. “The shadows are so short,” he said, looking up at Elijah. Elijah turned towards him, “Yeah, because the sun is so high up right now.” Aaron nodded like Yeah of course, but Elijah knew he didn’t really understand. He looked along with his brother, through the smudged window, at the city streets. There was a single, jagged crack in the glass, splitting the scene in two. Storefronts swept past. The Kosher deli, two bars with predictably Irish names, a bank with a fruit vendor set up on its sidewalk. The bus hit a traffic stop outside a school where kids, pale limbs absorbing the daylight, wore all the same thing. Blue bottoms, white tops. Skirts that never went above the knees. Pants always above the belly button. Not on this bus. They both watched closely without comment.
They’d run into kids like this on a recent field trip. They went to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn to shove secrets in the slot of an obelisk. The principal called it installation art. It felt more like cheap therapy for a school that couldn’t offer the real thing. Like, Vent your hearts out to this tower of granite. The other school was there touring the cemetery, finding the grave stones of some famous people they’d learned about in Music class.
Elijah and his classmates spoke to some of the matching-outfit kids while their teachers, who apparently knew each other from college, had a catch up. These kids were real Haves. Had passports. Had seen things Elijah had only learned of at the Harlem Library. It was like they needed a glossary to communicate. One of them mentioned their nanny and Elijah and his friends all thought they meant grandma. How interesting that they all lived with grandmas but not one mention of grandpas. That didn’t take long for Caleb to ask about.
One of the matching kids found an Oregon State quarter in the grass beside the obelisk, and shouted “Last I needed for my Fifty State collection!” So much money they kept some just for staring at. The kid pulled out a ziplock bag and dropped the coin in, the crinkled plastic cloudy with use. Caleb glared at him with what looked like jealousy from not spotting it first.
Elijah could tell there were phrases the matching kids didn’t know. Wouldn’t hear of. Credit card debt. EBT. Bathtub-laundry. Pork-free, cost-free school breakfast. Lock boxes. Bodega Lucy’s. Which Elijah had recently learned was actually spelled Loosies. Like, a loose cigarette. Not named in honor of some devout smoker named Lucy, who particularly loved single-sold cigarettes from their neighborhood bodegas. Elijah had memories standing face-level with M&Ms and Starbursts at the counter, looking up at his dad fidgeting for a Loosie and dropping the cashier some change. The same bodega, according to a classmate who was already addicted to menthols and lamenting the habit’s cost, had increased the price from fifty cents to seventy-five. The matching kids did not get the issue of cost or the chosen item. “Anyway, your quarter collection is worth like twenty loosies, is my point,” he told them. Blank stares all around. These kids had no Grandma Aubrey sleeping in their living room. Their couches were just for sitting. They never watched their single mom silently take food items off the conveyor belt as the cashier hit their budget halfway through a C-Town checkout. None of the local habits.
Passing the private school and staring back into the world of the bus, Elijah noticed his brother repeatedly wiping his new jeans, like there were crumbs, but there weren’t. “You like your new jeans, huh.”
Aaron smiled big and tilted his head. “Yeah. I feel…handsome.” He said it like it was the first time he realized he was. Mama had gotten Aaron the jeans for his sixth birthday. Elijah had gotten him the shiny yo-yo currently in his brother’s hands. It was orange-yellow. Like the sun. Or yellow-orange. All those years reading crayons and Elijah still didn’t get the color order.
The bus hit a red light and bully James walked back towards them from the middle of the bus. Anyone he’d ever messed with on the bus got a bit quieter. Which was everyone past the first four rows. Elijah and Jabari shared a nervous look across the aisle. When he passed their row, Elijah said Hey James in a low voice, like they were cool. Like if Elijah greeted him like a bud maybe he’d act like a bud. Fake it ‘till you make it kinda stuff. Aaron turned his whole body the opposite direction when he saw the guy. Practically pressed his face against the window.
Teachers said, stay in school to stay out of trouble, but James stayed in school for the trouble. James was most dangerous when he was riding the bus. No teachers around. Driver Grace wasn’t really one to chime in. It had been last winter on the school bus that James told little Aaron Santa wasn’t real. James had been in the row behind Elijah when he overheard the brothers speaking. Aaron said he’d ask Santa for the expensive Millenium Falcon Lego set, not Mama, because she couldn’t pay so much. Elijah knew Santa and Mama were the same. He came up with a way to keep the gifts cheap. “Actually, Lego is trademarked.” Elijah explained what that meant and that those capitalist Lego owners made it illegal for the elves in Santa’s workshop to, in Lego’s words, rip them off. As soon as Aaron changed his Lego request to Spider Man sneakers, James chimed in and broke the news. Aaron gawked across the aisle at Jabari and Caleb to confirm. They both shrugged like, Brother it is true. Aaron cried the whole ride home. He kept asking If Santa doesn’t exist, does that mean that God is fake too? Fair question. One thing is invisible, all knowing, judges right from wrong, and so is the other. But Elijah assured him, It’s different and Yes, God is real. James kept his mouth shut then. Their mothers walked to the same church most Sundays, so even he drew a line there.
Caleb, having seen the whole thing, journaled about it. Ten minutes later he showed Elijah. The drawing was rough. No surprise. A very alien-like man with a beard who he wouldn’t have known was Santa if not for the all-capitalised SANTA above the drawing. All Caleb’s drawings were in black pen, so that didn’t help either. Alien-Santa was surrounded by a giant circle with an X drawn through it. A simple, three-line sad face was next to it. Elijah acknowledged Caleb’s rendition of the event with a nod-and-frown.
Now, months later, James sat with a thud in the row behind Elijah and Aaron. Again. “I can’t wait to get the fucking hell out of here,” he muttered behind them. Elijah overheard him whisper this not-so-under his breath every day. The “here” James wanted to escape from seemed, to Elijah, less a place than a circumstance. Then he heard James sigh the word Dammit at nothing in particular. James showed off his collection of curse words daily, whether to himself or others. N-word, c-word, b-word. Name it. Once a t-word that Elijah had never heard but knew better than to ask. A search he saved for computer class. Incognito mode.
A bodiless arm reached back from in front of Jabari and stuck gum on the ground. Cinnamon red. No amount of NO CHEWING signs could make them stop—the gum-chewers. They chewed gum for the Gum Graffiti. That’s what Elijah heard them call it. Gum Graffiti. It was just globs of fresh, gooey gum overlapping globs of old, rubber-hard gum. Sometimes with a color-theme. They’d chew it just until it was sticky enough, flavor still in it and all. Elijah watched sometimes. He and Jabari shrugged at the new addition to the growing red-and-white pile stretching across the narrow aisle.
Jabari leaned over the aisle to see Aaron’s new yo-yo. “What you got there?” he asked. Aaron looked happy to show it off. He didn’t really know how to play with it yet. But he told Elijah he liked carrying it around. Just holding it. Jabari stared at Elijah like, Well can I see it? “I’m sure he won’t break it,” Elijah told Aaron, though he wasn’t. Aaron got the wink of it, handed it over.
Jabari played with the yo-yo, actually knew how. Up and down. Even side-to-side. Elijah noticed his brother’s look of concern, seeing the yo-yo in another’s hands. He distracted Aaron with a game of tic-tac-toe on the back of the bus seat. In spots where there wasn’t duct tape, the seats were already covered in Xs and Os. Elijah had to lose each time because anytime he won, his little brother would stop playing. “I don’t like this game,” Aaron whined when he lost. At what age would Aaron realize he was letting him win? Wondering this brought Elijah down. Having a brother six years younger made him grow up at a pace beyond time.
“Beat you! Again!” Aaron cried. He looked outside the window, suddenly distracted. Elijah peeked to see what he was looking at, noticing a homeless person with a hat held out for change.
“Hey ‘Lijah” he looked up and asked, “Why’s that man on our corner always asking for baby formula? For people to buy him baby formula? Never seen him with a baby.”
Elijah thought the s-word. This is one of those things he learned so young, it felt like he was born knowing. Like how the littlest kids know to stay at the front of the bus. He didn’t know who told him. And he didn’t want to tell his six year old brother about crackheads getting people to buy them baby formula. For the receipt, to return it for crack money from the bodega workers, who always accepted formula returns. Couldn’t tell him that. Even if he could, Elijah didn’t want to explain drugs or addiction. Or how some people won’t be helped, even if everyone wants to help them—not even their own dad. One day Santa. Next day the rest of the world. Not on his watch.
“You never see the baby because the baby’s with its Mama. Plus Mamas can make their own milk, so the baby’s fine,” Elijah replied confidently.
“Wait. What did you just ask, Aaron?” James sneered from behind them. And just like that. Elijah thought the f-word. Anger and anxiety and fear flared in his stomach. Almost enough to make his own pile of sawdust. James stood in the aisle and hovered over them, winking at Elijah not to worry. Elijah wished he could turn himself and Aaron invisible. Like Miles Morales. Like Doctor Strange.
James began. “It’s too bad your dad had to go off. Not here to teach you about things like crack.”
He lived across the hall from them at the George Washington Houses. By the sounds coming from his family’s apartment, maybe James wished his own dad would go off, too. Didn’t matter how light or dark out, his father was yelling whenever. And yelling wasn’t the worst sound Elijah would hear coming out of there. Sometimes it sounded like James might be put out of his misery.
James went on, looking at Elijah. “Didn’t he leave when you was six? When this was born?” He said this pointing to Aaron. “Didn’t he learn a little too much about crack when he cooked at the diner? The fancy powder kind? Isn’t that why your mom finally kicked him out? Our fam heard it all through the walls.” Everything Elijah was taught not to say or do was flying out of the open bus windows. “Little Aaron, I’ll tell you all about that man asking for baby formula…”
Aaron’s eyebrows scrunched with confusion, his eyes wide on Elijah like, What is this guy saying? Elijah had no plan, no words. So he stood up and held onto James’ shoulders like handlebars. He considered what he could physically do to him without it being done back worse. Not much. James paused in confusion and gasped at him like Are you really fucking touching me. His voice began again. Louder. “So. There are these things called crackheads…” He leaned and looked past Elijah, yelling down at Aaron.
Did this count as an emergency yet? Elijah pushed his hand over James’ mouth. Every muscle in his hand wanted to curl his flat palm into a thick fist. But Aaron was there, watching. James lost balance from the pressure of Elijah’s grip. Fell back from the aisle into Jabari’s row. His butt sank right between Jabari’s yo-yo-ing hands. Right in the middle of a side to side trick. Broke the thin string in two. The yo-yo fell to the ground and James landed on top. Crack. Elijah knew what the sound was. Shiny new yo-yo, no more. Shattered before his brother could even learn how to use it. He looked down and saw its broken pieces—all smashed and sunken into a fresh pile of red-and-white gum—and, for the first time in his life, let out a few of James’ curse words in full. Aaron saw the yo-yo and began to cry. Who wouldn’t.
Elijah had seen it play out in slow motion. Behind Jabari’s startled, gaping mouth and James’ falling body was Caleb. Caleb done drawing his journal entry. Caleb back to eating daylight. Chewing on it. As if seeing something means you can have it. Squinting at Elijah, still, like It’s sooo sour.
Stevie Chedid is a Lebanese-American writer from the Northeast currently based in Montana. She received her MFA from the University of Montana, where she held the Truman Capote Fellowship and studied both fiction and creative nonfiction. Chedid has been invited to serve as the nonfiction editor of New Orleans Review beginning in September 2026.
Her work has appeared in Longreads, The New York Times Magazine,New Orleans Review, Plentitudes Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Adirondack Life Magazine, Edge Effects, Greenpointers, and elsewhere. Recent works of hers have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, John Burroughs Award, The Best American Essays, and named a finalist for Best of Net 2026.
