Sixth grade was a year of waiting alone at the rural school bus stop like a runaway who might welcome the car of a stranger. Twice, on rainy mornings, men offered rides, and Darren shook his head, afraid to reveal his high-pitched, obedient voice. Because he always left his glasses in his desk at school, he had no idea whether or not it had been the same man twice.

On the last day, dismissed at noon, Darren forgot those glasses in their brown case he’d opened only for blackboard quiz emergencies. His mother drove him the four and a half miles to where they lay inside the desk no longer his. The building was cleared, he thought, and he looked into every upstairs room, two of each for grades four through six.

After he found his glasses, he stuffed them in his jacket pocket. He sat in his teacher’s padded chair and decided that he wouldn’t recognize anyone in the last two rows. For three years, he had hardly worn his glasses, his vision gradually worsening until, even with them on, he squinted at the blackboard.

After Darren left that unoccupied room, he heard voices as he went downstairs. At the bottom, he stopped to put on his glasses. He nearly tiptoed as he passed what was called the primary activities room. The twelve teachers, all women, were sitting around two tables, their lunches spread on wax paper or paper towels. Four were smoking and two were laughing in a breathy way that sounded as if they were sharing a secret. None of them, even the ones who looked his way, seemed to recognize him.

In three months, eight schools like his emptied into a building large enough for grades seven through twelve. Darren walked to a bus stop where ten older boys and girls bunched in groups of two or three. The oldest boys talked loudly about cars and beer. When they switched to girls, both of them said, “got laid” as if it was a test they’d passed. From room to room seven times that day, Darren carried his glasses like a wallet as he learned to behave like he knew how small he had become.

Each Saturday, his mother was busy with work from six to six; his father slept after twelve hours of night shift. Though Darren understood the risk, he sought rides, not wearing the glasses, not once bringing them with him when he walked backwards to face traffic, thumb extended, and climbed into every car that stopped because he needed to cover five miles to where boys he wanted as friends lived in houses he could see were better than his, their landscaped yards walking distance from his consolidated school.

Half of the dashboards displayed St. Christopher, the other half were bare or wrapper-littered. Women drove immaculate cars that smelled like cigarettes, their eyes leaving the road each time they talked; the men stared straight ahead, even the two, that year, who suggested he might share their desires, not ashamed to describe them aloud. Before they dropped him off, one asked a second time and the other offered cash.

“Well?” that second driver said, his eyes fixed on the road. Unable to speak, Darren concentrated on sensing if the car would slow for the street he’d named. He stared at the passing fog of landscape as if he could recognize anything more than a few feet from where he squinted, calculating how demanding loneliness and longing could be for a driver he would never be able to describe. For half a mile, he added and subtracted until, as they neared his school, the single stop light near it turned from green to yellow to red as if he’d learned the secret code for escape and knew enough to fling open the door and use it.

Bio: Gary Fincke