Make no bones about it—Steven Fisk was the biggest bully in town, so a lot of people thought he deserved every single bad thing that was coming his way.
Fisk wasn't big in size or bulk—only in attitude and style, like in the ways he picked on anyone who was different than him, and how he was always destroying property that he hated or swiping property he didn't. In fact, you could count on the fingers on your right hand how many times he was actually nice to someone he's met. And you could count on one finger on your left the number of people who really and truly liked him back, but she had a funny way of showing it.
So on this one day—the first day of his junior year of high school—he was living in his high prime of bullydom. The day's mayhem began as Steve waited at the school bus stop, pitching baseball-sized rocks into the newly re-installed school bus stop sign, bending the corners of the metal, and leaving some hefty dents on the black school bus icon.
"Why am I even waiting for this stupid bus?" he wondered, before he lunged for the sign pole. Choking it with both hands, he shook it violently, trying to uproot it from its cement hole. The pole loosened up a little, but Steve couldn't extract it. As he nervously paced, he kicked the brown dirt ground that was everywhere in his run-down part of town of Lone Star City, Texas. Steve looked through the rusted chain link fence, back at his ramshackled, disheveled trailer-trash housing development—rows of mud lawns, dead auto parts and abandoned furniture. "Man, this really really sucks," he thought. "There's got to be a better life out there. When I go pro, man, everything's gonna change. When I go pro, I’m gonna be a star. I'm gonna get out of this place and never look back!"
Steve’s daydreaming was cut short when the bus came to him, squealing something awful as it slowed down to a halt. Its doors swung wide open for him, like a mouth ready to eat him up. Begrudgingly, he stepped up onto the vehicle, and lowered the hood of his dark green sweatshirt.
The overweight busdriver, whose bulging and undulating fat was too large to be contained by her uniform, turned and smiled at her new passenger, showing him the gap where one of her front teeth was missing. "Mornin', dear-y!" she said, with a cackling laugh.
"What the freak are you looking at? Keep your eyes on the road. You don't want to get into an accident and lose any more of your precious pearly yellows."
The busdriver harrumphed at him and jerked the lever that swung shut the bus doors, and she continued the journey to school.
He turned to see the menagerie of kids on the bus, who all looked a summer older than the last time he saw them, and he realized that he didn't miss them one iota. "What a bunch of losers," he said, through his own gritting teeth, out loud to everyone on the bus, but no one in particular.
Steve shouted, "Atten-hut!" and began his walk down the aisle, inspecting his troops. "Smelly. Stinky. Jerk. Loser. Mo. Turd." He stopped at Yono Matsamura, an Asian artist with a dozen long pointy earrings in each ear, dangling just above her off-white one-piece canvas jumpsuit. "Hey, Yoni, nice outfit. Where'dju get it? Thrifttown on prison uniform bargain day? Hey, how's yer mom? Still barking up the wrong tree? Hahahahaha!" For all Steve's anger towards going back to school, he did really enjoy being in his element—having an outlet for his so-called creativity. For Steve, the long hot Texas summer meant nothing but slow days with his bully buddies, wondering what to bust apart next.
Many kids on the bus were put off and offended by Steve's rude antics and others simply ignored his royal nastiness. These people had known him for many years; they grew up with him, so they all remembered the time he threw a chair at Mr. Green, all those mailboxes he and his friends destroyed, and all the items he'd bragged about stealing. Lone Star City was a small town; everyone knew each other's secrets. They were as plain as the pimple on acne-ridden Mark Staccato's nose.
