The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

by Dashka Slater

What makes it feel small is the web of connections, the way people’s stories tangle together. Our lives make footprints, tracks in the snows of time.

I don’t really keep track of disappointments.

Sasha, like many gender-nonconforming people, wants to be referred to with the pronoun they. It might feel awkward at first, but you’ll get used to it.

Sasha didn’t seem to need other people much; in fact, they often said that the world would be better off without humans in it at all. The world inside their head was fascinating enough. They thought about numbers a lot, and shapes, and the size of the universe. They drew imaginary subway maps and worked out math problems on a whiteboard the family kept in the breakfast nook. They were interested in space and Legos and trains and the ancient Greeks and they noticed things most people didn’t, like the subtle shades within the green of a leaf, or the geometric shapes within a sculpture. They loved cats and had a habit of meowing. Sasha couldn’t say whether any of this was because they had Asperger’s, because, of course, they’d never not had Asperger’s. The only mind they’d ever been inside was their own.

But that wasn’t the issue for Sasha. They weren’t all that interested in having sex with anyone, actually. And anyway, terms like homosexual or heterosexual made no sense if you didn’t identify as one gender or another. Most of us see gender and sexuality and romance as one big interconnected tangle of feelings—this is who I am, this is who I’m attracted to, this is who I love. But as Sasha began exploring the topic online, they found that some people had developed language for combing the tangle into individual strands.

Because language is evolving rapidly, and because different people have different preferences, always adopt the language individuals use about themselves, even if it differs from what’s here.

“I don’t want for people to think of me as a he, and when they say he, not only does it reinforce in their brains that I am a he, it also reinforces it in the brains of the people who are listening,” Sasha explains. “It doesn’t really directly affect me, at least to hear it—it’s more like, Huh, that’s not right. And when people use the right pronouns, when they use they or another gender-neutral pronoun, it feels validating.”

None of it captures how he looks in conversation how his eyes hold your eyes, seeing you see him. His own secret power: that paying attention.

Nine months after the passage of Proposition 21, 30 percent of all teen offenders in California were being charged as adults. In some counties the percentage was much higher—in San Diego County, for example, three out of every four young people were charged as adults by the end of that first year. This wasn’t because more juveniles were committing crimes. Juvenile arrest rates began to fall in 1994, and they have continued to fall ever since. Today the FBI’s juvenile violent-crime index, which measures arrests for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, is lower than it was in 1980, and that’s true across racial lines. The violent-crime rate among black youths, in fact, has dropped by 60 percent in the past two decades, and the homicide rate has dropped by 82 percent.

A 2012 analysis by California’s Department of Justice found that cases against black youths were more than twice as likely to be directly filed in adult court than cases against white youths, and cases against Latino youths were more than six times as likely. And the disparity didn’t end there. Once they landed in adult court, young black and brown offenders were also much more likely to serve time. Just one-third of white youths were sentenced to adult or juvenile state correctional facilities in 2012, while two-thirds were given probation or sentenced to serve time in county jails. For kids of color, the ratios were reversed—two-thirds served time in state facilities, while one-third received probation or jail. Nationally, 58 percent of all incarcerated African American youths are serving their time in adult prisons.

Many hate crimes, according to Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, a criminal-justice professor at California State University, Stanislaus, “don’t have as much to do with the victim as they do with the offender and their own insecurity—which of course is a lot of what’s going on with adolescents in general.”