IF YOU WANT A FRIEND, FEED ANY ANIMAL

In 9th grade the high school was so overcrowded that they built a “9th grade center” which was a whole school made out of trailers, and we would drag our asses to the bus stop at 6:30am to ride a packed bus over dirt roads through the redneck outskirts of Orlando to get there. On this bus I fell in love with a Latino girl named Raydelynn Perra and would try to sit near her. Amazingly she would talk to me and even let me sit next to her sometimes. I distinctly remember her telling me it was good for girls to have as much sex as possible before puberty because they couldn’t get pregnant, a thought that totally disturbed me but also made me want to have sex with her.  We never spoke outside of those bus rides, but I fantasized that I was making headway and she would be my girlfriend. I was crushed when she started going with junior gang member Carlos who had a bunch of older brothers who were Latin kings. I warned Raydelynn about hanging out with those guys and said they were morons. She told him, and they put me on the “hit list” which was literally a list of people they were going to punch in the face with a modified fingerless glove with metal pieces added like brass knuckles. I was fucking terrified and started skipping school to avoid getting destroyed by these guys. With the early bus I would leave the house before my mom was awake, so I would make the sounds of getting ready for school, open and close the front door, tiptoe back to my room, and hide in the closet. This worked for about a week. 

The last memory I have of Raydelynn was listening to “Summertime Rolls” on the bus with shared headphones in the early morning darkness.