_{Her name is Sarah, but Jude doesn’t know that yet.}

It’s Sunday afternoon in the shallow entrails of a hazy March, and the bus he rides is furiously cold. The seasons are mulling together, windy and dull, and the sun struggles to shine through an unrelenting curtain of post-winter storm clouds. But today — today is different. The sun is determined, and the clouds submit lazily. Breezes are scarce. The unraveling leather seats brand reddish, fleshy imprints onto the bare parts of his legs, and he loves it.
He’s nine, and his hair tickles his neck childishly. Ward had recently begun to smoke something acrid and unnatural in a homemade paper tube behind the bleachers at school, and Jude felt obliged to ask about it one day. The older boy merely replied with a rigid scoff and a shake of his head – it was the last time he was ever asked.
Jude’s mother comes around sometimes. When she does return - usually on hilariously opportune occasions - she brings her black-rimmed eyelids and her busy hands with her. She toys with her youngest son’s overgrown strands while they sit on the couch, her mumbling something about poker chips. Jude resists a scoff of his own.
His father is complacent and only speaks when he’s spoken to and hides behind his newspapers. Both sons notice a change in his behavior with the periodical comings-and-goings of their mother, but say nothing about it.
This is the second time Jude has rode the bus alone. He’s found, quickly, that he enamors himself with watching strangers. New Jersey commoners aren’t really commoners at all; it’s rare he sees the same person more than once. It’s funny, he thinks, because they all appear to have a collective destination. These are common, more forced thoughts when he’s alone. He’s made an expert out of himself when it comes to resisting his urges to pry and complain, and he’s not going to loosen just because no one is present to protest against it.
The first thing he notices about her is the voice she speaks with when she talks to her brother. Her accent is of tainted English and fragments of adoptive Southern housewives; nothing he’s ever heard before in his lifetime. The younger sounding male seated next to her speaks in full Jersey dialect, and it makes Jude smile.
They’re seated, fidgety, in front of him, but Jude doesn’t look up until they progress into something of a full-blown debate, so they don’t notice his curious stare.
He used to do this when his father took him to Branberry Park, when he was a nicer man and in his family’s favor. He would hang on the chain links of the toddler swings and watch the older kids play games his young mind never registered, waiting until he bothered them into incredulous eye contact to return to his father’s trustful side. Jude stopped playing there when a strange girl with lopsided eyes and a perpetually limp right arm begged him to push her on the tire swing, and he was terrified. That was before he knew the world for what it was. And before Ward convinced him to get a better hobby.
Jude can tell that they are siblings, because they talk of their family the way some people talk about the weather. Conversational and customary, like dressing up for a funeral. As his gaze ascends from the tattered leather upholstery to the barely visible crowns of their heads, he can see a scalp of scruffy brown hair, starch white specks fireworking from the hairline; and another full head of vivid blonde hair, parted unevenly and in gentle, natural waves from the tip down. It’s wonderful, he thinks with a exuberance only a child can possess. All the differences, the individual hairs, everything created so lovely and thoughtfully.
He had visited the local cathedral earlier that day. Stolen his bus fare from one of the offering baskets. He didn’t feel bad. God and sin were very real things to him; guilt was not.
Ward had introduced Jude to the organ player perched in the forefront of the church a few months ago, and they had developed an odd, temporary friendship that involved the young boy sneaking up into the organ pit every Sunday for some lowly conversation with a man he barely knew. Jude knew that his name was Stanley - last name being either Smith or Jones, it was difficult to recall, so he simply referred to the male as Old Stan - and that he had lived in suburban New Jersey since he was cut out of the womb of his dead mother. Old Stan told Jude of his dreams to conquer New Orleans and Santa Monica with his musical forte, and would begin to laugh an odd little chortle every time he came across a blip in his literary timeline. Another wish that never came true. Another man lost in the endless chronicles of the Saint Helena Cathedral.
Jude had spent several weekends tucked into the box seating, head daring to waver above the only barrier that prevented him from jumping just to see how many bones he could break. The sermons bored him with their redundancy; he liked to listen to the choir practice. Their voices, soulful and angelic, lured him in each time he passed the church on the way back home from Branberry Park. Jude used to accommodate Old Stan before they practiced, and managed to convince the older man to allow him to watch him play while they sung faintly familiar hymns and new-age crap he would never adjust to. But eventually Stan started to feel eyes on him, and began shooing Jude into the box seats to listen from a blurry, miserable distance.
Needless to say, he feels vaguely nostalgic contemplating something as simple as the hairs that grace a stranger’s head.
He learns her name when the bus staggers to a sudden halt, heat flooding into the stillness where wind no longer felt obligated to reach. Two adults Jude had neglected to notice beckon the children towards the exit. The blonde turns her gaze towards the curious boy, watching him blankly and unemotionally while a parent’s hand settles on her back.
And Jude swears she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen in his minute excuse of a lifetime.
He jerks up a little, almost startled, and she continues to stare. The moment feels longer than it should, drawn out like cinematic lover’s gazes, and it is broken by an impatient, “Sarah,” directed her way.
Sarah looks away, all blue eyes and only-when-the-light-hits-it pale skin and hair that looks good in a second-long glance.
“Sarah,” her brother repeats, “it’s not polite to stare. C'mon.”
And she does. And Jude is still staring. He watches her sneakers meet the ground as she hops off the bus, and her knee-jerk reaction when the concrete catches up with her. He struggles to find details where he never will, and Sarah the stranger has already forgotten about the weird boy who stared and kicked her seat.
The bus jolts, and is off again. Jude gazes at her distant figure until they’re too far out to be seen. He wishes for a pit in his stomach. He wants to feel wreckingly disappointed.
Jude does not know what love is. At the age of nine, all he has seen are unrealistic trailers for unrealistic movies that trope ‘love at first sight’ like a religious mantra, and stock pictures in magazines that show off couples as if they’re prizes to be won. His father is a shamefully quiet spectator and his mother a casual visitor. The couple, though still very much married, have not touched since Jude learned to speak. Old Stan has shared nothing with the boy but glances and shy pats on the shoulder. Jude has never kissed a girl, or ever really touched one (even in an impersonal way, like brushing shoulders or butting heads). Love is a word so common it has lost all meaning.
So, when he finally gets around to thinking about it, he decides that he is in love with Sarah. It’s stronger, better. He feels purpose.
But this feeling is fleeting. As is his attachment to the girl on the bus he thought he loved. Everything he thinks he feels, everything he does truly feel, all the people who make him feel it – they disappear. Sometimes they cough and choke out until they’re nothing but dwindling smoke, or flicker until the light is out completely. But they still leave him.
Jude still has not realized this when he thinks he loves a girl named Annie.