“B26” by Kaitlyn Greenidge
One afternoon, I was reading a book on the bus and suddenly smelled something strange. I looked up and saw a baby, a few seats down, had spit up on himself. He was stuffed into a too-tight snowsuit, the hood close to his round face. He looked absolutely mortified. He squirmed on his mother’s lap and made panicked eye contact with all the other passengers before looking down at the front of his soiled jacket, defeated. Trying to rescue his dignity, he shifted his gaze and stared out the window.
The one person on the bus who was not mortified? The woman sitting beside me who unwrapped a candy bar and began eating it as if the whole bus weren’t filling with the smell of baby sick.
When I got home, I texted my sister about it. “Don’t you wish you had these adventures?” I wrote her. “Don’t you wish you lived here too?” She wrote back “NO.”
My sister still lives in Boston, a town that considers itself New York’s mortal enemy and which New York rarely considers at all. Sometimes when I go home to visit her and my family, I’m struck by something I haven’t experienced in a long time. “What’s wrong with you?” my sister will say, as I freeze on a busy sidewalk in Davis Square. “I just haven’t smelled clean air in a while,” I’ll reply.
“How can you live there?” is the question she asks me again and again, and I cannot answer it. I only know that I think about that baby and the sick and the candy bar, and it makes me laugh. It hasn’t shocked me yet. But I know it will someday.
Greenidge’s debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books, $26), is out now.