The school bus picks you up twenty minutes before you get to school.
There is a system.
Hispanics and Hispanics go together. black with black, white with white. As someone who doesn’t quite fit those parameters, you call forth your Colombian heritage and sit with the Hispanics, morning after morning.
“What’s new?” you ask your friend as you move your backpack into your lap.
“Nothing,” the girl replies, sending another selfie away into the air.
You realize you have almost nothing in common except your heritage.
Lake Forest is a rich school, full of rich teachers and richer kids. For the first ten minutes on the bus however, we are a collective group of the opposite. The Hispanics and Hispanics sit together, the black with the black, the white with the white but you’re all linked together by the lack of what’s green and real. The bus picks you up and in the ten minutes before you enter the richer neighborhoods everyone knows what it’s like to be an imposter at an expensive school. Everyone knows what it's like to rifle through a bag of spare change, looking for quarters and dimes to put in the vending machine. They know what it's like to worry about money for food and the cost of community college. They know and it's awful.
It’s not even the lack of money that’s the bad thing. It’s the fact that even though we’re all united in the same predicament, we still sit two rows apart in our own little group.
Yours is not the only school bus, but yours appears to be the only bus with this amount of posers on it. Posers as in pretenders, fakes, and phonies. For the first ten minutes on the bus, before the turn onto manicured streets, you can relate with the mobile home kids and the two room apartment crew. For ten minutes your secret is shared with everyone.
But then the bus turns on the eleventh minute and there is no secret, because you're a rich kid going to a rich school and that's all there is to it.
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139,907 Literary Works • 672,732 Reviews
Wow. This piece took me two or three readthroughs to understand well enough, and I am glad to have done that.
The first thing that pops out for me is the second-person POV. Is is an interesting stylistic choice to begin with, as second-person is difficult to use to proper impact. It also calls forth feelings of choose-your-own-adventure novels of yore.
The opening is strong and the ending is strong. The paragraph 'Lake Forest... it's awful.' drags, and compared to the rest of the work, is hard to get through. Why this is I'm not sure, but that's how I experienced it.
There are individual statements that make strong impressions. Within the claustrophobic larger paragraph, every line feels like a whammy moment buried in a pile of them.
My favorite part to read is the quick one-off dialogues in the first half. It lends this otherwise internal monologue-y piece a sense of grounding.
Indeed, if there were anything I would advise you to do to improve, it would be to follow the lead of those dialogue sets and ground this monologue in pseudo-narrative more, as opposed to thoughts, as you're already using the second-person, which as opposed to third-person is difficult to use to establish setting.
The reason these lines come off as strong, in my opinion, is the simplicity of the language used to convey them. There's no mess and no fuss around it. The lines that are crowded as the ones that get caught up in themselves and excess.
Overall, this is an easy to read work built out a series of successive punches.
Thank you! I'll keep your input in mind.
Hey, Daniel here for your review.
I like your story. I really can relate to it because my bus is the same way. The only difference is that I go to a poor school and the secrets spread a lot over one day. I like how it is very relatable to so many people, not only in the United States, but in almost every country in the world. I saw a couple of grammar mistakes. Instead of saying "Yours" I would say your bus because in my opinion it would sound better, but it's your story. I also really like how when I was reading your story I could picture it in my mind very clearly. Overall I really liked your story and am looking forward to reading some more of your stories.
Thanks for your review~! I'll keep your suggestions in mind.
this was very, very good. short but sweet ( or maybe sour? ). i haven't quite experienced such a situation on bus rides to school myself, but i can see that this might happen at a lot of schools. you've created a good picture of the scene without using an excessive amount of details. i do see a few grammar mistakes, so i recommend you edit before publishing.
Thanks for your review~! I'll check it for grammar mistakes. :>