I wake up. I hate everything. My basement bedroom gets no sunlight. There's a small window, facing the wrong direction for morning sun. That's okay, I hate the sun.

I go back to sleep, warmed by the many hours I have between me and school. I'm careful to avoid looking at the clock. Plausible deniability.

My father wakes me after minutes that feel like uprooted hours. His voice travels down the stairs he thinks he's so god damned cool. He's the "cool dad." Everyone's dad thinks they're cool. It sucks when they actually are.

My father DJs a radio show in the middle of the night. He plays jazz, old rock, new rock, street music from obscure parts of the world where the economy is still based on opium. He takes black & white photographs, or he used to. He can keep a complex rhythm going on a drum. He rode freight trains as a kid. He picks up women like pennies off the ground. Cool. I can't stand him.

It's all there, in his voice. In the timbre. All that coolness. He's got to go to work now though, so he's starting to lose it. His cool reminders that I have to go to school are becoming less indifferent, more hurried. An edge of panic.

I refuse to walk him through it again. For one thing, that would require starting my brain enough to form sentences. For another, I have explained too many times, that I am capable of existing without instruction.

My morning routine is carefully planned and executed, every day, to the minute. And it all starts after he leaves the house. He knows this. I have told him. If I try to explain it again, one of my emphatic illustrative hand-gestures will be plunging a knife into his eye without warning.

I have my alarm clock just in case, and nothing of consequence happens within the first fifteen minutes of any given school day.

Besides, I will probably drop out. If my father's an idiot; school is insufferable.

I'm waiting at a metro bus stop staring into the dead street. The wind is sharp, the sting of it on my fingers and nose makes the sky seem greyer. The air is surprisingly dry for all the clouds.

I hate this intersection. It's a mess of streets intersecting at odd angles, including a freeway offramp that means everyone drives too fast. The pavement and concrete are still, the dust and garbage are airborne in the wake of Sports Utility Vehicles.

I live near a freight train yard. I don't go there as often as I'd like. The tracks run about fifteen feet behind my bus stop. I consider hopping onto train as I hear it approach, and riding it down-town. I'd be closer to school. I'd be alone.

The bus comes, two minutes late, like clockwork. The bus driver hates me. That's comfortable, I hate him back. I am one of those delinquent youths he's heard about on the AM band. He's an ignorant old failure who believes what he hears on AM radio. We know each other.

We avoid contact as much as possible while he glances at my monthly bus pass. He must be in a mood today, because he double-takes at the color-coded card, eyeing it suspiciously for the fleetingest moment. It's the same one I had yesterday, and the day before. But today he needs to make super double sure it's not counterfeit.

As I walk to the back of the bus I make up stories. His wife is a rageaholic. This morning she screamed at him about something he didn't know he'd done wrong the night before. She said awful things, calculated things, capitalizing on twelve years of research into her husband's fears, inadequacy, loneliness.

Or maybe he's not married. He lives alone and his daughters never call and he knows why. Or maybe new neighbors just moved in, and they have a teenage son. Coming and going at odd hours, long, dyed hair, torn clothes, obvious gang member. Or maybe he's the one who moved. Can't afford his old house, forced to move to an inner-city apartment, he can't adapt.

He's gone from my mind the moment my butt hits the seat. I always sit at the back of the bus. It's safe back there, because Good People won't cross the political border; the exit door halfway back. The only people who enter that country are drunks, minorities, and teenagers. Scary people.

It's a cold war, the front and the back. There's a iron curtain just behind the exit door. I see it in their faces whenever they're forced to exit by that door. The furtive sidelong glance towards the back of the bus. Is anyone getting up to follow me? Will I be mugged when I step off this bus? Who knows?

Who knows how they think? What they do, how they live?

Don't give me that simpering look you besuited imbecile. Nobody back here gives two fucks about you. The back of the bus is for the lower class. And the lower class have more important things to think about than the fact that your briefcase is real imported leather and valued at $2,000. Things like hunger, court-dates, impossible bills.

I hate the lower-class. Wilfully ignorant anti-intellectual anti-art self-defeating alcoholic apes. At the moment of this thought, as if cued by a film director, my eyes fall across a billboard. It's some ridiculous depiction of infantile cupids with the heads of a fully-grown man. They all have the same head, in fact. Before I can switch off the part of my brain that interprets the product in advertisements, I notice someone has covered the product entirely, with a large graffiti burner. It's beautiful. Thank fuck, someone is alive in this city. I am moved almost to tears by the sight, and suddenly realize happily that I am smiling a melancholy smile out the window.

I must look like an idiot, or maybe a teen in young love. The fact that this tender smile comes only due to a relief from the spite I feel for most other people causes me to smile wider. This is mine. This happiness is mine, it can't be taken by the Good People because it is my hatred of them. This happiness is because my heart is untouchable. Unmarketable, unteachable, unreprimandable. As the bus reaches my stop I wonder if I'm in a good mood today. I wonder if I know the difference.

Crowds of fellow students reach the school at roughly the same time. Many are on my bus, having collected here and there en route like morning dew. As I exit the bus last, I decide: No experiments with being social today. If I can stay away from people for the most part, the risk of someone saying something mind-meltingly stupid is reduced to a manageable level. Because I want to keep this warmth in my heart for as long as possible. I want to tend and stoke it. If I'm lucky maybe I can make it into something substantial.