The Wrong Bus

It was around 9:30 pm and I started to home from my University after finishing some work at the library. I had to change two buses to reach home from school and I boarded the first bus and got down from it and boarded the second one (at least I thought so). My brain was thinking about something and suddenly realized that the streets looked very unfamiliar. It took me 2-3 minutes to come out of my thoughts and realize that I have boarded the wrong bus with the same number as the one I was supposed to. When I asked my bus driver, she said she would drop me at a stop from where I can take the right bus.

When that stop approached I got down, though it was just 10:00 pm the roads were as deserted as they should be at midnight. Then, I realized it was one of those crazy African-American neighborhoods. Soon I found out that the next bus would be after 30min. The place looked very unnatural and the darkness added its portion of weirdness to intensify my situation.

Then happened this sudden incident. A dark, huge guy walked towards me from nowhere. I still don’t know if my eyesight was so bad not to recognize him approaching me or he came from a sharp corner of the street. As he was nearing me I froze and was trying my best to hide my girl identity inside my sweatshirt hoodie. Finally, he came very close to me and said with a rough voice coated with the typical Thick Texan accent, “Girl, what u doing here at this time? Go home!” and walked away.

Even though we know it’s completely wrong to judge someone just by the looks, sometimes, we can’t help but think negative when circumstances induce extra flavors to the already worsened ambience. I still don’t know if that man could be harmful or not but his huge physique and his stony voice were definitely capable of scaring the people who are lost in the darkness on a lonely street. I can attribute a bit of the credit to the impact that lots of stories I heard from my friends in the past had on me and the news I read about a lot of people held at gunpoint.