"WONT you TELL me DEAR
the SIZE of your brassIERE?"

Melissa jammed her back hard against the back of her seat so that Robert couldn't get his hand into position to snap her bra strap. She felt that tight rage tying up her breathing again and so she threw the iron bands of self control around all the weak parts of her personality. She was not going to come close to crying.

Her arms grasped her math books close against her chest. All the assignmens were done in them but every smart girl from Central School's grade seven class took homework home even when it was done. Books were armour against Robert and Richard.

Melissa glanced at Selena, the girl riding beside her in the window seat, that she usually tried to get for herself. She claimed it not just so that one side was safely pressed against the wall, but so she could stare at the scenery going past, familiar though it was. She liked to sit so she could watch the farmyards and fields go by and be somewhere else than on this school bus, but she had let the new girl sit there this time, and now she noticed that Selena was writing something on a page of notepaper she had slipped from her binder.

In a few seconds, Selena had passed it to her. It was lavender coloured stationary, not regular notepaper. In neat handwriting, with black ink it said 'Boys are pigs.' It felt good inside to have a girl who could sympathize with her on the bus. For the last four years, Melissa had been the only girl her age who lived on the last three miles of the bus route she had to ride every school day. Selena was offering her the pen.

One of the boys, not necessarily Robert this time, it could be Richard with his ragged long fingernails, was touching her hair in back. She knew it was to make her lean forward and didn't budge except to take the pen and print, "I KNOW." Then she drew an arrow that pointed backwards and printed, "Oink oink." The joke made her feel better.

"Don't flick your booger into Mel's hair," Robert said with delight. They were now being extra gross. They were showing off for Selena. Some sadistic brilliance had told them that they'd have much more effect on the new girl by showing her what was in store for her rather than harassing her for real the first day.

"Won't you tell me dear..."

Robert would keep that refrain up til Melissa and Selena got off. He seemed to love it so much. The only thing he seemed to like more was snapping her bra strap so hard that it stung and left red marks on her back.

Selena was writing again. She showed it to her. There was a human skull and the two words: "Death wish" with an arrow pointing backwards again.

Melissa let her guard books down from her chest long enough to print, "THAT GOES DOUBLE FOR ME."

"Help me concentrate on it," the shorter girl wrote, as Melissa clutched her books again. Then Selena looked at her for a second, and closed her eyes turning to face the front.

Death wish. Melissa faced front and squeezed her eyes shut too. The tension and anger that she had kept controled within her responded to the opportunity as soon as she let herself think the words, "Death wish." She felt a sensation of power, of really being able to do harm with her mind and a part of her, maybe a quarter of herself, was shocked as the rest of her so easily turned the two words into one even more horrible one: "Die!"

Die, die, die. She really wished it. There was a better than fifty-fifty chance that the creep behind her had put snot in her hair! The emotional release of letting her hate go back to her tormentor was making her heart hammer under her ribs.

She looked at Selena's clear black eyes and high cheekbones. The new girl was biting her lower lip with two perfect front teeth and looking back with a secret half smile. She wore a dark shirt with warm vertical stripes and she had a necklace on with tiny black stones that shone against the light coffee and cream skin just below her throat.

The bus slowed for their stop.

"We get off here."

"Good."

The boys were silent. No. They weren't dead, but...

"They looked kind of sick, didn't you think?" she said to Selena as the two stood on the gravel road that separated their houses.

"Yeah. I did think so. You've got strong powers. I could feel them. Come over to my house and we'll go for a little walk."

"Okay, but I want to drop off my books first and change into some old jeans."

Two black crows passed overhead, winging stark and sinister toward the tangled brush that nobody ever thought of anymore.

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