The bus was thick with resignation, like a prison bus. Some kids slept. Others—the boys mostly—seemed to actually be stimulated by the atmosphere of despair; they ran feral, like being on a school bus meant they were in international waters. A kid named Evan Standard grabbed my bag and then made a big show of handing it back to me. Evan was notorious for having been accused—but never convicted!—of stealing embalmed dead rats from the bio lab.
