After the first sixty minutes, I was already wishing for the end of my twelve-hour shift. There was a manufacturing facility on my route, and the passengers were rowdy. Probably trying to wake themselves up. Still, I had to tell them to keep it down a couple of times and even threatened to throw one of the riders off the bus.
When they saw I wasn’t kidding, they calmed down a bit. Twenty degrees Celsius was not the kind of temperature you wanted to be walking to work in, if you could help it.
One the regulars, Damion—his name was stitched into his shirt—made the comment as he was about to step off the bus, “Didn’t get f****d last night for Christmas?”
Everyone knew I was gay. I made no bones about it and even had a rainbow flag tattooed like a bar code on my neck where it was visible to
