The 57 Bus

The 57 Bus

by

Dashka Slater

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The 57 Bus makes teaching easy.

Sasha Character Analysis

The protagonist of The 57 Bus, and Debbie and Karl’s only child. Sasha is agender, meaning they don’t identify as either male or female, and they prefer the nongendered pronouns they/them/their instead of he/she, his/hers, him/her. Sasha identifies as genderqueer, which means that they “question” their gender. In line with this, Sasha wears a skirt everyday so that other people are just as “confused” about their gender as they are. At the age of seven, Sasha is diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and their parents are told that they will never live a “normal” life. Sasha’s life is indeed different, and Sasha must remind their friends to use proper pronouns when addressing them. They also must petition the White House for their gender identity to be validated and represented on official, public forms. Overall, though, Sasha is a happy and well-adjusted teenager from a good family, and they have deep and meaningful relationships with several different friends. Sasha is highly intelligent (they are even accepted to MIT) and thoughtful, and they appreciate life’s subtle nuances and many gray areas. They are obsessed with all things Russian and love public transit, and they even enjoy their commute each day aboard the 57 bus. When Richard lights Sasha’s skirt on fire as a prank, Sasha can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing, but they also appreciate that Richard never intended to hurt them. Their recovery after the fire is long and grueling, but Sasha never waivers in their commitment to their true gender identity, and they manage to show compassion for Richard as well. Within The 57 Bus, Sasha represents the existence of a nonbinary gender identity, an identity that both Sasha and author Dashka Slater demand to be accepted and respected.

Sasha Quotes in The 57 Bus

The The 57 Bus quotes below are all either spoken by Sasha or refer to Sasha. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Gender and Sexuality Theme Icon
).
Oakland, California Quotes

Oakland, California is a city of more than 400,000 people, but it can still feel like a small town. Not small geographically, of course. The city sprawls across seventy-eight square miles, stretching from the shallow, salty estuary at the edge of San Francisco Bay to the undulating green-and-gold hills where bobcats and coyotes roam. What makes it feel small is the web of connections, the way people stories tangle together. Our lives make footprints, tracks in the snows of time. People know each other’s parents or siblings, their aunties and cousins. They go to school together, or worship together. They play sports on the same team, or work in the same building. The tracks cross. The stories overlap.

Related Characters: Sasha, Richard
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Pronouns Quotes

All languages embody the obsessions of the people who speak them, and so Sasha’s language was meant to reflect the interests of people whose world was dominated by growing seasons, grains, and harvests. Instead of pronouns that disguised between male and female, Sasha’s language had pronouns that distinguished between animate and inanimate objects. The word for sun was jejz, which was also the word for day. The difference was that sun was considered animate, a being, and day was considered inanimate, a thing.

Related Characters: Sasha
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Genderqueer Quotes

Most of us see gender and sexuality and romance as one big interconnected tangle of feelings—this is who I am, this is who I’m attracted to, this is who I love. But as Sasha began exploring the topic online, they found that some people had developed language for combing the tangle into individual strands. In these online conversations, the word sex referred purely to biology—the chromosomes, organs, and anatomy that define male and female from the outside. Gender was the word for what people felt about themselves, how they felt inside. Sexuality was the category for who you were physically attracted to. Romantic was the category for who you felt romantic attraction to. And there was a whole array of distinctions within each category as well. It was like a gigantic menu, with columns and columns of choices.

Related Characters: Sasha
Page Number: 32
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Becoming Sasha Quotes

Discovering the existence of genderqueer identity felt like discovering a secret room. All this time there had been just two rooms: male and female. Now it turned out there was another room—one that could be furnished however you wanted. The more time Sasha spent in the room, the more comfortable it felt. But the person who lived in this new room still had a boy’s name—Luke. By the second half of sophomore year, that name clearly no longer fit.

Related Characters: Sasha
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t want for people to think of me as a he, and when they say he, not only does it reinforce in their brains that I am a he, it also reinforces in the brains of the people who are listening,” Sasha explains. “It doesn’t really directly affect me, at least to hear it—it’s more like, Huh, that’s not right. And when people use the right pronoun, it feels validating.”

Related Characters: Sasha (speaker)
Related Symbols: 1001 Blank White Cards
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Bathrooms Quotes

It was tough sometimes, watching Sasha navigate a world that didn’t even have a category for them. Occasionally, Debbie wished Sasha would ease up a little—resist correcting well-meaning relatives who said he instead of they, for example. But there was something admirable about it, too, Karl pointed out. Knowing how shy Sasha was, he admired Sasha’s newfound willingness to speak up, to stand out, to be seen.

Related Characters: Sasha, Debbie, Karl
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: The 57 Bus Quotes

Sasha’s bus ride to and from Maybeck High School took an hour and involved as many as two transfers, but Sasha didn’t mind. They had always loved the bus. Loved the intersecting lines of transit routes on the map, the crisp procession of times on the schedule. In their spare time, they drew maps of new bus, subway, and streetcar lines, or read up on historical public transit systems.

Related Characters: Sasha
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: Fire Quotes

“That boy was on fire, wasn’t he?” a man remarks as Sasha pushes through the back doors to the sidewalk. Behind him, Sasha’s mustached rescuer paces the aisle. “Call an ambulance,” he croaks. He goes to the door of the bus and calls to Sasha, who roams the sidewalk with a cell phone, charred legs. “You need to call an ambulance, man.”

Related Characters: The Man with a Mustache / Dan Gale (speaker), Sasha
Related Symbols: Sasha’s Skirt
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: A Man in a Kilt Quotes

“A passenger on an Oakland, Calif., public bus received burns to his legs after his kilt was set on fire,” UPI wrote. The word kilt seemed to have gotten lodged in the minds of reporters. It was in every report, as if Sasha had been on the way home from bagpipe practice. The Daily Mail, in the United Kingdom, even illustrated the report with a photo of a kilt, explaining a kilt is “the national dress of Scotland.”

Related Characters: Sasha
Related Symbols: Sasha’s Skirt
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: The Second Letter Quotes

“I am not a thug, gangster, hoodlum, nor monster. Im a young African American male who’s made a terrible mistake. Not only did I hurt you but I hurt your family & friends and also my family & friends for I have brought shame to them and our country and I shall be punished which is going to be hard for me because I’m not made to be incarcerated.”

Related Characters: Richard (speaker), Sasha, Bill Du Bois
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Dancing Quotes

“What I want is for people to be confused about what gender I am,” Sasha explained later. That didn’t happen too often—people tended to see Sasha as male. So it was a nice change to be seen as female.

Related Characters: Sasha (speaker)
Related Symbols: Sasha’s Skirt
Page Number: 233
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Restorative Justice Quotes

“RJ isn’t a guarantee of leniency,” Baliga cautioned. “It’s about dispensing with punitiveness for its own sake and trying to produce an outcome that will be more healing for everyone involved.”

Still, Baliga knew that there was little hope of diverting Richard from the criminal justice system entirely. “Given the severity of the harm to Sasha, we didn’t expect that the DA would allow the case to be diverted to restorative justice,” she said.

But if anyone seemed right for restorative justice, it was these two families, who had already expressed compassion for one another. “They were perfect candidates for this dialogue,” she said. “All of them were such gorgeously enlightened, beautiful people.”

Related Characters: Sujatha Baliga (speaker), Sasha, Richard, Debbie, Karl, Jasmine
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Maybe Quotes

The fire was becoming a more distant memory, even though Sasha still wore compression stockings. “Apart from some scars, I’m all healed, basically,” Sasha said. It was hard for people to believe it, but Sasha didn’t feel traumatized by what had happened. When the physical pain faded, the emotional pain did as well.

“I don’t really feel hated, Sasha explained. “Especially since after I was attacked, the whole world was supporting me. I felt like one person hates me—maybe.”

Related Characters: Sasha (speaker), Richard
Page Number: 248
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Victim-Impact Statement Quotes

“We do not understand your actions,” Debbie went on. “But we also think that hatred only leads to more hatred and anger. We don’t want you to come out of prison full of hate. Following the incident, communities near and far affirmed Sasha’s—and everyone’s—right to not be harassed or hurt or bullied for how they dress, or whether they are gay or trans or agender. We truly hope that you will gain some understanding and empathy in the years to come. Maybe sometime in the future you will be the one coming to the aid of someone being bullied.”

Related Characters: Debbie (speaker), Sasha, Richard
Page Number: 264
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Progress Report Quotes

“From the start we have been opposed to Richard’s being tried as an adult,” he said. “His actions appear to have been impulsive, immature, and unpremeditated. He did make a big mistake and recognizes that. He asked for our forgiveness.” Karl’s voice broke. “Sasha, Debbie, and I have forgiven Richard,” he whispered. “We hope the state will focus more on preparing him for the world beyond incarceration than on punishing him.”

Related Characters: Karl (speaker), Sasha, Richard, Debbie
Page Number: 286
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Andrew and the Binary Quotes

“Actually,” [Andrew] said, “I’m starting to identify a little bit as—I don’t even know the word I want to use yet. I like androgynous. I like genderqueer.” What held him back? Fear. Fear of other people’s judgements, their questions, their hostility, their fascination. “Because I fall neatly within the binary, I feel comfortable right now,” he explained. “But if I were to radically shift my appearance in a way that more androgynous, I don’t know how comfortable that would be for me. I mean, I’ve already been asked enough questions about my genitals. I’m just done with that.”

Related Characters: Andrew / Samantha (speaker), Sasha
Page Number: 290
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The 57 Bus LitChart as a printable PDF.
The 57 Bus PDF

Sasha Quotes in The 57 Bus

The The 57 Bus quotes below are all either spoken by Sasha or refer to Sasha. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Gender and Sexuality Theme Icon
).
Oakland, California Quotes

Oakland, California is a city of more than 400,000 people, but it can still feel like a small town. Not small geographically, of course. The city sprawls across seventy-eight square miles, stretching from the shallow, salty estuary at the edge of San Francisco Bay to the undulating green-and-gold hills where bobcats and coyotes roam. What makes it feel small is the web of connections, the way people stories tangle together. Our lives make footprints, tracks in the snows of time. People know each other’s parents or siblings, their aunties and cousins. They go to school together, or worship together. They play sports on the same team, or work in the same building. The tracks cross. The stories overlap.

Related Characters: Sasha, Richard
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Pronouns Quotes

All languages embody the obsessions of the people who speak them, and so Sasha’s language was meant to reflect the interests of people whose world was dominated by growing seasons, grains, and harvests. Instead of pronouns that disguised between male and female, Sasha’s language had pronouns that distinguished between animate and inanimate objects. The word for sun was jejz, which was also the word for day. The difference was that sun was considered animate, a being, and day was considered inanimate, a thing.

Related Characters: Sasha
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Genderqueer Quotes

Most of us see gender and sexuality and romance as one big interconnected tangle of feelings—this is who I am, this is who I’m attracted to, this is who I love. But as Sasha began exploring the topic online, they found that some people had developed language for combing the tangle into individual strands. In these online conversations, the word sex referred purely to biology—the chromosomes, organs, and anatomy that define male and female from the outside. Gender was the word for what people felt about themselves, how they felt inside. Sexuality was the category for who you were physically attracted to. Romantic was the category for who you felt romantic attraction to. And there was a whole array of distinctions within each category as well. It was like a gigantic menu, with columns and columns of choices.

Related Characters: Sasha
Page Number: 32
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Becoming Sasha Quotes

Discovering the existence of genderqueer identity felt like discovering a secret room. All this time there had been just two rooms: male and female. Now it turned out there was another room—one that could be furnished however you wanted. The more time Sasha spent in the room, the more comfortable it felt. But the person who lived in this new room still had a boy’s name—Luke. By the second half of sophomore year, that name clearly no longer fit.

Related Characters: Sasha
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:

“I don’t want for people to think of me as a he, and when they say he, not only does it reinforce in their brains that I am a he, it also reinforces in the brains of the people who are listening,” Sasha explains. “It doesn’t really directly affect me, at least to hear it—it’s more like, Huh, that’s not right. And when people use the right pronoun, it feels validating.”

Related Characters: Sasha (speaker)
Related Symbols: 1001 Blank White Cards
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Bathrooms Quotes

It was tough sometimes, watching Sasha navigate a world that didn’t even have a category for them. Occasionally, Debbie wished Sasha would ease up a little—resist correcting well-meaning relatives who said he instead of they, for example. But there was something admirable about it, too, Karl pointed out. Knowing how shy Sasha was, he admired Sasha’s newfound willingness to speak up, to stand out, to be seen.

Related Characters: Sasha, Debbie, Karl
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: The 57 Bus Quotes

Sasha’s bus ride to and from Maybeck High School took an hour and involved as many as two transfers, but Sasha didn’t mind. They had always loved the bus. Loved the intersecting lines of transit routes on the map, the crisp procession of times on the schedule. In their spare time, they drew maps of new bus, subway, and streetcar lines, or read up on historical public transit systems.

Related Characters: Sasha
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: Fire Quotes

“That boy was on fire, wasn’t he?” a man remarks as Sasha pushes through the back doors to the sidewalk. Behind him, Sasha’s mustached rescuer paces the aisle. “Call an ambulance,” he croaks. He goes to the door of the bus and calls to Sasha, who roams the sidewalk with a cell phone, charred legs. “You need to call an ambulance, man.”

Related Characters: The Man with a Mustache / Dan Gale (speaker), Sasha
Related Symbols: Sasha’s Skirt
Page Number: 115
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: A Man in a Kilt Quotes

“A passenger on an Oakland, Calif., public bus received burns to his legs after his kilt was set on fire,” UPI wrote. The word kilt seemed to have gotten lodged in the minds of reporters. It was in every report, as if Sasha had been on the way home from bagpipe practice. The Daily Mail, in the United Kingdom, even illustrated the report with a photo of a kilt, explaining a kilt is “the national dress of Scotland.”

Related Characters: Sasha
Related Symbols: Sasha’s Skirt
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3: The Second Letter Quotes

“I am not a thug, gangster, hoodlum, nor monster. Im a young African American male who’s made a terrible mistake. Not only did I hurt you but I hurt your family & friends and also my family & friends for I have brought shame to them and our country and I shall be punished which is going to be hard for me because I’m not made to be incarcerated.”

Related Characters: Richard (speaker), Sasha, Bill Du Bois
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Dancing Quotes

“What I want is for people to be confused about what gender I am,” Sasha explained later. That didn’t happen too often—people tended to see Sasha as male. So it was a nice change to be seen as female.

Related Characters: Sasha (speaker)
Related Symbols: Sasha’s Skirt
Page Number: 233
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Restorative Justice Quotes

“RJ isn’t a guarantee of leniency,” Baliga cautioned. “It’s about dispensing with punitiveness for its own sake and trying to produce an outcome that will be more healing for everyone involved.”

Still, Baliga knew that there was little hope of diverting Richard from the criminal justice system entirely. “Given the severity of the harm to Sasha, we didn’t expect that the DA would allow the case to be diverted to restorative justice,” she said.

But if anyone seemed right for restorative justice, it was these two families, who had already expressed compassion for one another. “They were perfect candidates for this dialogue,” she said. “All of them were such gorgeously enlightened, beautiful people.”

Related Characters: Sujatha Baliga (speaker), Sasha, Richard, Debbie, Karl, Jasmine
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Maybe Quotes

The fire was becoming a more distant memory, even though Sasha still wore compression stockings. “Apart from some scars, I’m all healed, basically,” Sasha said. It was hard for people to believe it, but Sasha didn’t feel traumatized by what had happened. When the physical pain faded, the emotional pain did as well.

“I don’t really feel hated, Sasha explained. “Especially since after I was attacked, the whole world was supporting me. I felt like one person hates me—maybe.”

Related Characters: Sasha (speaker), Richard
Page Number: 248
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Victim-Impact Statement Quotes

“We do not understand your actions,” Debbie went on. “But we also think that hatred only leads to more hatred and anger. We don’t want you to come out of prison full of hate. Following the incident, communities near and far affirmed Sasha’s—and everyone’s—right to not be harassed or hurt or bullied for how they dress, or whether they are gay or trans or agender. We truly hope that you will gain some understanding and empathy in the years to come. Maybe sometime in the future you will be the one coming to the aid of someone being bullied.”

Related Characters: Debbie (speaker), Sasha, Richard
Page Number: 264
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Progress Report Quotes

“From the start we have been opposed to Richard’s being tried as an adult,” he said. “His actions appear to have been impulsive, immature, and unpremeditated. He did make a big mistake and recognizes that. He asked for our forgiveness.” Karl’s voice broke. “Sasha, Debbie, and I have forgiven Richard,” he whispered. “We hope the state will focus more on preparing him for the world beyond incarceration than on punishing him.”

Related Characters: Karl (speaker), Sasha, Richard, Debbie
Page Number: 286
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Andrew and the Binary Quotes

“Actually,” [Andrew] said, “I’m starting to identify a little bit as—I don’t even know the word I want to use yet. I like androgynous. I like genderqueer.” What held him back? Fear. Fear of other people’s judgements, their questions, their hostility, their fascination. “Because I fall neatly within the binary, I feel comfortable right now,” he explained. “But if I were to radically shift my appearance in a way that more androgynous, I don’t know how comfortable that would be for me. I mean, I’ve already been asked enough questions about my genitals. I’m just done with that.”

Related Characters: Andrew / Samantha (speaker), Sasha
Page Number: 290
Explanation and Analysis: