12 February 2018 THE 57 BUS: A TRUE STORY OF TWO TEENAGERS AND THE CRIME THAT CHANGED THEIR LIVES by Dashka Slater, FSG, October 2017, 320p., ISBN: 978-0-374-30323-1

“Found my coat and grabbed my hat

Made the bus in seconds flat”

--Lennon/McCartney, “A Day in the Life” (1967)

Born to a fourteen-year-old single mom, Richard was a jokester, a black teen who had a poor attendance record and lousy grades. He attended Oakland High School:

“The finish line was marked with a cap and gown and a march across the stage. That year, two-thirds of O High’s students made it. You could get there, if nothing knocked you down. But life had a way of sticking its foot out, sending you sprawling. And then you were part of the other one-third, hanging in the hallways instead of going to class, or just drifting away altogether, away from school, away from that march across the stage, into a future that was as hazy as weed smoke.

Of course, you rarely notice when you come to the fork in the road. It just feels like another day. A day when you didn’t go to school because you were sick or your baby sister was sick, or you didn’t study for that test so why bother taking it, or your clothes looked ratty and you were tired of hearing about it, or someone was looking for you and you needed to lay low for a few days, or any of a hundred other reasons that made not going to class seem like a better choice than going. Only once you stopped going it just seemed too hard to start again. Days rolled into weeks. Weeks into months. And then at some point you realized you’d entered the future. The one you never planned on. The one where everything was going to be that much harder.”

Once diagnosed with Asperger’s as a child, Sasha was a white, agendered, physiologically male teenager who preferred to wear skirts and did well at school. He attended Maybeck High:

“Kids who weren’t into school were unlikely to choose Maybeck, a private high school with roughly a hundred kids that rented space on two floors of a Presbyterian church in Berkeley. In the tiny classrooms, students gathered around conference tables and critiqued the concept of America as a shining city on a hill, or compared the writings of Charles Darwin and Ursula K. Le Guin.”

Award-winning journalist Dashka Slater closely examines the lives of these two adolescents from Oakland whose paths fatefully cross for a few minutes on the AC Transit 57 bus in November, 2013. The key to this exceptional piece of nonfiction is the that we really get to know all of the central and peripheral characters, come to understand what makes the two main characters tick, and come to feel something for both of them. This complex story interweaves key issues of our time: gender questioning and fluidity, bullying, class privileges, racial oppression, and the shortcomings of the juvenile justice system.

Oakland is a city that contains wildly disparate populations and cultures, and in this situation, they tragically collide when Richard’s buddies persuade him to set afire the edge of the skirt Sasha is wearing as Sasha, heading home from school, dozes on the bus.

When the skirt burst into flames. Sasha suffered extensive third-degree burns and had to undergo weeks of surgeries and skin grafts. Cameras on the AC Transit 57 bus caught what happened, so Richard was identified and later arrested at his school. A decision was made to charge Richard with hate crimes and to try him as an adult.

We come to understand that, although Richard and Sasha live just miles apart, their lives, possibilities, and peer groups are completely different. Maybeck High is four miles--and a universe--away from Oakland High. Richard has lost friends and close relatives to gun violence, and you have to constantly be on guard at school. In contrast, Maybeck is a place where adolescents are free to be themselves, and where Sasha’s schoolmates all participated in a wear-a-skirt day to demonstrate their solidarity when he was hospitalized.

The one thing the pair of adolescents have in common is supportive parents who love them.

Particularly compelling is what we learn about the school-to-prison pipeline in California as Richard becomes part of the system. It didn’t matter how remorseful Richard was, nor how strongly Sasha’s parents objected to their child’s attacker being tried as an adult. The wheels of the system ground on and, sometimes, as we may well conclude, society is worse off for it.

Perhaps, you faintly recall the headlines about the incident on the 57 bus. What many readers will learn here is that you may really change your thinking once the immediate tendency to judge gives way to learning the entirety of the story. THE 57 BUS is one eye-opener of a book.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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