Summary
Part 3 begins on the morning of the event on the 57 bus. We are introduced to Richard's cousin Lloyd, a "goofy and boisterous" (105) kid a couple of years older than Richard. Lloyd was unpopular with the security officers at Oakland High because he was so full of energy, but Richard looked up to him. When the last bell rang at Oakland High on November 4, Richard and Lloyd set off for the bus stop. Sasha and Richard's paths are about to cross as they both board the 57 bus. Sasha gets on before Richard, and on the day in question, they are particularly exhausted after staying up late to write a paper for their Russian literature class. Slater describes Sasha's love of buses and bus routes and her interest in the history of public transit. They are interested in the shape of the routes and the web of organization required to make it work. As the bus approaches MacArthur Boulevard, Richard's stop, Sasha falls asleep.
Richard and Sasha are finally in the same place at the same time. Sasha peacefully sleeps near the back of the bus while Richard and Lloyd clown around up and down the aisle. When they board the bus at MacArthur, they see an acquaintance named Jamal. Jamal's the one who points out Sasha sleeping. He says, "Look at this dude," (111) and hands Richard a lighter. Jamal takes out his phone as if to record. Richard tries to light the hem of Sasha's skirt several times, but nothing happens. Finally, as the bus rolls to a halt at their stop, the skirt catches, and it catches more dramatically than the boys ever anticipated. Sasha's entire skirt erupts in flame, and chaos ensues on the bus. Sasha jumps up, awake now, and screaming in fear. The rest of the bus panics and people trample towards the exit. Two men stay calm enough to help Sasha. One man tells them to get down while the other drapes his jacket over their skirt to tamp it out. Once Sasha is out on the sidewalk, burned and dazed, the ambulance is on its way.
After Richard slips off the 57, he realizes the severity of what he's done. He hears Sasha's screams and turns around. He lingers, seeing the damage he's done to her legs, charred and bare. Lloyd and Jamal start jogging toward another bus and Richard follows. Later than night, his mother notices him acting differently, but he won't tell her what's wrong. In an extremely brief section, Slater shows how the man with the mustache who saved Sasha reacts to the incident, "tears streaming down his face," (119) unable to comprehend why someone would do such a thing.
It takes an ambulance forty-five minutes to reach Sasha on the sidewalk, who, meanwhile, sits shivering in the November cold, legs and crotch exposed because the material of their skirt disintegrated in the fire. Sasha calls their father Karl, who is still in his classroom. He doesn't believe his ears when they tell him they've been set on fire. He rushes to the scene and Debbie meets them there, sobbing at the hateful act that has hurt her child. The ambulance finally arrives and they hook Sasha up to morphine and begin to dress the wounds.
Once in the care of medical professionals, Sasha is actually quite giddy, hopped up on morphine and uncharacteristically social. They refer to the accident as "the Rim Fire's revenge," referring to the time they escaped the Rim Fire, a California wildfire, on a school field trip. But their injuries are fairly severe. Some of the burns were third degree, having reached all the way through their skin and to the flesh beneath. Burns cover twenty-two percent of Sasha's body, but Dr. Grossman, the physician at the Bothin Burn Center, knows that Sasha would survive their injuries.
The next morning at school, Richard asks to be excused from class to talk to Kaprice. Clearly, the matter is urgent. She tells him to come to her office at lunch and clears her office of all the other kids that come to talk to her, but by the time she returns to her office, Richard is being escorted away from the school in handcuffs. The previous evening, Kaprice saw on the news that a local student was set on fire on the 57 bus, and she wondered to herself who would do such a thing.
News of the attack spreads around Maybeck after Nemo finds out what happened from Sasha's parents. The students react with grief and outrage that such a thing would happen in the liberal, LGBTQ-friendly Bay Area. A brief section titled "SHYAM" describes how one of the teachers at Maybeck High reacts to the news of Sasha's attack. Shyam Sundar is generally an unflappable, serious teacher, but his extreme admiration and respect for Sasha makes it impossible for him to teach knowing the trauma they've been through. For a week, all he can do is hand out worksheets for his classes to complete in silence.
Richard's mother Jasmine describes her experience watching the news and realizing, though his face was never shown and his name never said, as soon as she saw the video of the suspect's back, that it was her son. She calls Kaprice who confirms he was arrested at school that day, but she is unable to contact Richard until six days later, by which time he'd been charged as an adult, and his name had been released to the media.
In a series of sections, Slater describes the process of Richard's interrogation. She transcribes his movements in what must've been security footage from the interrogation room. He sat in there alone for two and a half hours before officers finally walked in and started asking questions. Richard was Mirandized but chose to speak without a lawyer present. His mother Jasmine expresses her outrage at the process of interrogating juveniles without a lawyer present, and Slater includes comments from Barry Feld, a juvenile law expert from University of Minnesota, explaining why juvenile suspects tend to submit to questioning before a lawyer is present. He says, “They’re embarrassed, they’re ashamed, they’re thinking in their adolescent brains that somehow their parents won’t find out. They’re thinking, How do I get out of here?” (138)
As the officers prod Richard for a motivation, he admits to being homophobic. Richard says, “I wouldn’t say that I hate gay people, but I’m very homophobic" (140). He explains that he doesn't mind that people are gay, but doesn't like when they are "overly expressive" about it. He doesn't like when people "do too much," like cross-dressing and expressing their gender non-conformity (140). By the end of the interrogation, one of the officers wrote on Richard's file, "DURING SUSP INTERVIEW, THE SUSP STATED HE DID IT BECAUSE HE WAS HOMOPHOBIC" (143).
In the news, the story circulating nationally is that a man on the 57 bus in Oakland was severely burned when someone set his kilt on fire. Not only is the news misgendering Sasha, but it is removing the possible role that hate may have played in the crime. When reporters show up at Sasha's house, Debbie tries to clear up some misconceptions. “My son considers himself agender,” she said. “He likes to wear a skirt. It’s his statement. That’s how he feels comfortable dressing," (145). Slater follows up with a transcription of a text conversation between Sasha's friend's Healy and Michael. They discuss how hard it is to focus with all that's happening. They're worried about Sasha and feel helpless without contact with them.
Slater describes Alameda County Juvenile Hall in great detail in a section titled "BOOKED IN." The section takes on the second-person voice and describes not only the physical space of the jail, but the play-by-play process of being booked in. Slater then describes Sasha's emotional state the night before their surgery. They are extremely anxious and undereating because they can't keep anything down. They resist the feeding tube because the nutritional supplement isn't vegan, but are convinced by their parents to set aside their principles for the good of their health. The media clamors at the hospital, trying to infiltrate to visit Sasha under false pretenses. Debbie and Karl make a list of approved visitors. One of the interrogating officers informs Debbie that the suspect, Richard, actually admitted to being homophobic.
In the middle of Part 3, Slater includes a second transcription of a text conversation between Healy and Michael, Sasha's close friends. They discuss their recent contact with Sasha, the strange media coverage of the attack, and people's reactions to the news at Maybeck. Healy tells Michael that the school is having a "Sasha Skirt Day" the following day in solidarity with Sasha as they heal from surgery.
Analysis
While Parts 1 and 2 focused on the separate stories of Sasha and Richard, Part 3 shows the fateful moment their lives intersect, and from that point on, switches back and forth from Sasha's to Richard's perspectives and the perspectives of people in both of their worlds. Slater incorporates different perspectives through formal choices like switching into the second person, describing recorded evidence like video and audio recordings, and providing transcriptions of actual text conversations between Sasha's friends. By departing from the objective third-person, Slater provides the reader with more complete and more complex access to the "truth" of the matter, which of course will always be inconclusive. For example, Healy and Michael's conversations give the reader an impression of what it must have been like for those closest to Sasha—how they reacted, emotionally, to the news of her attack. Healy, referring to the news coverage, texts Michael, "We 'Don’t know for sure' but I’m pretty sure it was a hate crime, IDK about you weirdo," (150) demonstrating the frustration felt by those closest to Sasha as the news reveals a pervasive bias towards gender norms, explaning Sasha's dress as a "kilt" rather than a skirt.
Meanwhile, Slater's choice to describe the booking process in the second person invites the reader to imagine the isolation one must feel when entering the facility, especially for kids being charged as adults. Slater's description of the security footage on the bus and the audio samples portrays Richard in a light to which we haven't really had access up to this point, which is Richard, in his own words, with his friends. This portrayal certainly isn't favorable, and it differs starkly from the version of Richard we see interact with adults from whom he seeks approval, like Kaprice. When he's with Lloyd and Jamal, Richard seems senseless and cruel, viewing Sasha as a target rather than as a person.
Regardless, Richard may not understand the gravity of his words to the interrogating officers. He calls himself homophobic without considering whether or not his actions were motivated by hate. Certainly, Sasha's appearance made them the target of the boys' violence, and Sasha's dress was what initially caught Jamal's attention. There is little doubt that their appearance was what motivated the boys to act. But perhaps the conclusion would be different had Richard understood his Miranda rights, had he waited for a lawyer to be present or had a chance to talk to a counselor about his feelings towards people who identify outside of the gender binary. Perhaps Richard's actions were motivated by hate, and the loving version of him, capable of compassion and restraint, is only reserved for those who fall into social categories with which he is comfortable. Some of these questions may be answered with further reading; some may never be answered.
By showing the reactions of "peripheral" characters in this situation, people like the mustachioed man who saved Sasha and her teacher, Shyam, Slater demonstrates the private effects of the attack against them and the emotional toll it takes on the community at large. Shyam, portrayed as an unflappable science teacher who never lets his emotions get in the way of his instruction, cannot continue teaching in his usual way after he learns what happened to Sasha. The example Slater gives is that even when Shyam learned that his grandmother died in the middle of a lecture, he finished the lecture, because that's how important teaching is to him. But Sasha's effect on her community is so great that when her wellbeing is threatened through an act of hate, it simply can't function.
The theme of community response comes up both in the way the news cycle portrays the attack, and on a more local basis with Maybeck's observation of "Sasha Skirt Day." While the news cycle misrepresents the attack, misgenders Sasha, and mischaracterizes the way they present themselves, it reveals a widespread bias toward traditional gender norms. Whereas, Maybeck's response, a "spirit day" of sorts, risks turning something meant to show solidarity into a reductive display. Whether or not "Sasha Skirt Day" is successful remains to be seen in future chapters.
