Some Kind of Hell
The school-bus driver slogged up the steps back onto the bus like she was crawling out of a ditch. Her hand slid down the steel rail, until she wiped the blood from her hands onto her uniform. She relayed that Mikey had called her mom before he died. She said it should comfort us to know he thought he was with his mother at the time. It was strangely comforting, especially after what happened between me and Mikey the day before the shooting.
Mikey and I weren’t friends, but I kept him close enough to avoid having an enemy. The day before the incident I had called him a bully in Mr. Coletti’s 10th grade Geometry class. I walked to the teacher’s desk to turn in my assignment while he sat sideways in his to my right, not doing his own. As usual, Mr. Coletti was sneaking smokes in the adjacent teachers’ lounge: Marlboro reds wafted through the vent. I told Mikey he was going to hell for harassing a girl who used a wheelchair. I didn’t mean a religious hell, but some metaphorical kind, or maybe the one we were living in. (Hell, I’m not sure what I meant.) He was a new kid who had moved from Chicago to Texas a couple of months after the school year had begun. We tried to warn him back then that this was going to happen. We told him he was in a blue affiliated neighborhood, but he refused to compromise his allegiance to the gang he belonged to in Chicago. Being a Bulls fan wasn’t popular like where he was from, but he wore those Jordans and red jerseys anyway. He said he was connected and untouchable because of his cousins. I knew he was bluffing. The day after my snarky quips, we sat on the bus, waiting for all the students to join. When the pops of gunfire echoed, we ducked under the seats, as we had been instructed in our drive-by drills. It was a part of life that we prepared for, like a conventional fire. The protocol was to run to the bus if we weren’t already in it, and duck under a seat. That day, my hands slid on grime and grease from many feet. When the air went quiet, we sat back up. Mikey’s upper half was draped like a throw blanket across the bus driver’s lap. She rocked him across the street, on the curb where she sat. From inside the bus, and through a small crowd, I watched as their lips volleyed inaudibly until his spurt went still in a jersey the color of oxygenated blood. We already had two full-time city police officers on-site. Sirens wailed as more police approached. We didn’t have cell phones back then, so we waited a couple of hours for a new bus. Most of us were latch key kids. Our parents wouldn’t have been home from work to notice we were late. The police likely interviewed us. As we stepped off the first bus, we avoided the scabbed over rail. Our eyes were blank from shock as we boarded the new bus. These things happened, but they usually occurred in someone’s dark backyard or somewhere near Comanche Park. We took our usual route home. Chairs rattled their plastic, but the bus was otherwise silent as we passed the usual landmarks. First, was the Dairy Queen I often visited with friends to eat ice-cream cones coated in hard chocolate shells. Next, was the tagged-up Burger King.When I got home, I watched MTV, Nirvana, on channel 27 and Nickelodeon on channel 12. I was torn between the two. One-off school shootings were just gang-affiliated homicides. On our side of town, those were old news: nothing for Mikey on prime time. To be vulnerable at school was to be a weak target. At home, my parents couldn’t afford to coddle me. They were living paycheck to paycheck. Things that didn’t bleed weren’t injured. I was too hardened to show a bruise, anyway.
A week later, I went to Mikey’s wake. That’s just something the kids did. Whether we liked the person or not, we piled into someone’s mom’s car and made the trip. Mikey was as handsome as he always was, and peaceful, a first. His mother was put-together and classy. She looked like a businesswoman in her black tweed skirt-suit and pearls. She greeted each of us with a hug, and though she was trembling, she was consoling us. She probably thought we were Mikey’s friends. When my turn came, her arms were like a blanket: a respite from hell—the one we were living in. When my cheek scraped across the tweed on her shoulder, my shell shattered. I was finally sixteen. Everything hard and cold tumbled down, and in that moment, I could have called her mom.Crystal Taylor is a dis/abled Latina writer and poet from Texas. Outside of work, she enjoys birdwatching with her dogs. Her non-fiction writing has been featured in Book of Matches, Maudlin House, Anti-heroin Chic, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and other sacred spaces. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, 2025. Find her on BSky and Twitter @CrystalTaylorSA, and Instagram @cj_taylor_writes.