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CHAPTER 8
The bus shelter on Forest Park Avenue was a more-than-familiar place to Su
Boys in the neighborhood, indifferent to the bus shelter’s efforts, had scrawled rude graffiti on the walls in chalk and paint. Someone had come behind them and tried to remove the worst of it, but a few stubborn curses and character assassinations remained. Heather inspected these solemnly.
“Do they ever-” she began.
“No,” Su
“Oh.” Heather’s tone sounded almost as if she felt sorry for Su
“They don’t like me because of the fight. The kids on the bus.”
“But they don’t live here,” Heather said. “The graffiti is done by people who live here, right?”
“I’m the only one who goes to Rock Glen. Everyone else is older or younger, by a lot. That was the problem, remember? ‘We had right, but they had might.’ Majority rules.”
Bored with this family story in which she had played no part, Heather sat on the bench, opened her purse, and examined its contents, humming to herself. The bus was not due for another fifteen minutes, but Su
The battle over the school bus route had been Su
Last summer the parents at the far end of the route began to grumble that their children would have a much shorter trip if the bus didn’t have to stop on the lower part of Forest Park Avenue for Su
The mass-transit system, unlike Mercer Transportation, could not be bullied. If it took twenty-five minutes to get to Security Square, with stops, then it took twenty-five minutes to get home again. The MTA was egalitarian, a word that she picked up from her father and particularly liked because it reminded her of The Three Musketeers with Michael York. When Su
But Heather, who had never taken a public bus anywhere, bounced with excitement on the wooden bench, one hand clutching her fare, the other wrapped around the handle of her new purse. Su
Su
Heather, of course, was going to be enriched when she entered Rock Glen next year, not that the placements had been a
“If you want to support Gerald Ford in next year’s election, then by all means do it,” he told her just a few weeks ago. “All I ask is that you have reasoned positions, that you research his positions on the issues.”
Su