By Kelly O’Grady 

It was like any other day, my friend Jacob and I were day drunk on cheap scotch and on our way to go theatre hopping at the multiplex; we were having a grand ol’ time talking about Star Trek and shit like that.

Suddenly the drone of the bus noise was broken by a shout of “hey fatboy!” It wasn’t necessary to look around and see who was being addressed. I knew I was the “fatboy” in question. The person addressing me was this teenager standing by the exit door, clearly very drunk.

From seven feet away you could smell the raspberry vodka on his breath and he was swaying like a flag in the wind. He was eating from a bag of gummy bears with one hand and holding a packaged crab leg with the other.

Being called a “fatboy” is pretty tame even by middle school standards so I used some verbal Aikido and told him to have a nice day, which threw him off for a second. Then he shot back with an incredibly crass comment about my Mom. It would have been to easy to fire back with a “Well I fucked your Mom!” but instead I took the high road and vaguely suggested I had sexual relations with his grandmother.

That’s when things escalated and he said that he had a gun and was going to shoot me, and nobody on the bus did a goddamn thing.  But my intuition told me he did not have a gun, besides, what’s he going to do, drop his candy and crab legs to pull his pistol out? I made a finger gun and went “Pew, pew, pew!” at him. My gun shoots ridicule, asshole. Later my friend Jacob told me that when someone says they have a gun you don’t make fun of them and I could have been shot on a bus. But it was worth it.

After the finger gun thing he gave up trying to upset me and turned his attention to my friend Jacob, he called him not a very nice word, which seemed really dumb on his part because Jacob is built like a hockey goon.

I’ve known Jacob since high-school and I’ve seen what he’s capable of; one time he dangled a kid over second story terrace for hissing at him during home ec.

After failing to insight violence with Jacob the kid got off the bus, and you know what? I felt bad for him a little bit; his life sucks so much that he has to go around being an asshole just to get some kind of attention from people. As the bus turned the corner I pulled down my pants and pressed ham against the window and yelled “Kiss my ass, YOU’RE THE FAT-BOY!”  You can’t call someone a fatboy when you’re eating gummy bears from a bag while your holding a crab leg, you moron.

The end