Memoir: The Bus Stop by Lauren

The winter I was seven, I had to walk by myself to the bus stop every morning, zipped into my snowsuit, with an itchy wool scarf across my mouth, musty from catching my breath, and wearing awkward rubber boots buttoned over my shoes.

Every morning the kids would slowly gather at the stop. All the children from our tiny town met there to ride to the county school in the next town over. It was a mixed group, some who egged each other on toward the line between mischief and mayhem, others just minding their business and waiting. I was one of the youngest of the eight or ten kids at the stop, and certainly the quietest. I rarely spoke, and was never noticed.

There was an old barn across the road and if the wind was cutting, we'd huddle inside it. In the spring, some kids would climb into the rafters and balance or jump but in the winter it was too cold for bravado and we huddled together to wait for the bus.

One day, when the bus was a little later than usual, and the wind had blown a drift of snow into the doorway of the barn, one of the older boys gathered some snow and packed a snowball. He grinned around the group, looking for who he'd like to peg. I stepped quickly behind a taller girl, knowing that this particular kid would take great pleasure in filling the wool scarf and the snowsuit neck of a timid little girl like me, with wet, cold snow.

Just then a car came down the road, slowing to take the right turn at the bus stop, and the boy spun around and pelted his snowball at the car, hitting it squarely on the windshield. We all froze in horror, expecting terrible consequences, terrible punishment. But the car kept going. The driver probably never knew where the snowball came from, never saw us inside the barn door, and the snow exploded harmlessly and blew away as he drove.

Now it was open season. Everyone began packing snowballs and waiting in anticipation for the next car. When it came, a light green station wagon, the snowballs rained down, mostly missing, but a few, lobbed by older kids, found their mark. I threw a snowball that fell well short. I didn't know how to pack it densely enough to make it fly and so it fell apart not long after it left my hand. I was disappointed but determined to make an impact. When I reached down to scoop up more snow, I found a rock, about the size of an egg and I had a thought. I didn't know physics, but I instinctively understood that I would be able to throw that rock more accurately and farther than I could a loosely packed snowball. As the next car came down the road toward the intersection, my arm rose, and without very much thought about consequences, I threw that rock with all my might.

There was a load “crack!” and the black lines zig-zagged across the windshield of the car.