It’s Obviously The Girls’ Fault For Having Legs

There was a boy on my school bus who was at least four years older than me. He always gave me the creeps and I hated seeing him in the bus window every day. Whenever any girl boarded the bus, he would scoot to the edge of the seat and put his hand out. The aisles weren’t wide so more often than not, he would brush their legs as they passed. Of course, the bus driver never saw it because of the girls’ legs blocking her view, so there was nothing she could do but to tell the boy to keep his hands to himself again and again.

My younger sister was in first grade when she started riding the bus with me; I was about ten years old at the time. She never wanted to board first because she didn’t want the boy to touch her. I always walked through first, putting my backpack between my legs and his arm. She scurried behind me, trying to stay out of his reach.

One day, we didn’t see him in the window so we thought he wasn’t riding that day. My sister went first, only to see the boy crouched between the seats, hand at the ready. She backed up, refusing to go forward. The bus driver told her to keep moving, despite her protests and asking the driver to tell the boy to go back to the window. I warned the driver that if he touched either of us, I would hit him. The bus driver told us to go, the boy grinning.

My sister tried to run by the boy. I watched him stick his hand out just as she passed, grabbing her upper inner thigh (and possibly touching other parts, but she never said) and squeezing. She screamed and ran to her seat.

I don’t really remember the next part, but the bus driver and the boy both said I basically went feral. I swung my backpack at the boy, screaming “PERVERT!” and screeching at the top of my lungs. The bag hit the boy on top of the head, then upward to catch him under the chin. I pulled back for another blow when the driver grabbed me and shoved me back down the aisle.

When we got to school, the boy’s parents, my parents, the guidance counselor, and the police were all there. His parents were threatening to press charges against everyone on the bus and the school. Several other girls who rode the same bus barged in the office and told their stories. His parents stopped threatening to sue and instead argued he shouldn’t be punished because he had an undiagnosed learning disability and didn’t know what he was doing.

I was suspended from school for a whole week and told to write an apology to the boy and his family. My parents enlisted extended family and changed their schedules to drive us to school until I got my license at 16.

The boy was punished by being moved to an assigned seat directly behind the bus driver. I never got my apology, but I wasn’t forced to write one either.

About fifteen years after all this happened, I came back to my hometown and decided to attend a carnival. When we got to the gate, my sister shrunk behind me. I looked up and locked eyes with the same boy, taking money and stamping hands at the entrance. He turned dead white and excused himself before darting in the bathroom. He didn’t come out until after we left. I saw him walking the grounds while we were there, but he never approached us.