A Day on The Red Line

IT WAS A hot Friday and the commuters crowding into the Central Square station had spent the past three hours dreaming of going home. Amidst the suits and briefcases sticky with sweat, a tall teenager and shorter companion stood, watching and waiting. When the moment was right, they seized it, slipping halfway under the turnstile, seemingly unnoticed by the people they were using as their cover. But the older one was too tall, or too lethargic from the heat. The token seller spotted him, wriggling through a pair of pinstriped legs.

"Hey," she rasped, "Come back here." Arrested by her voice, the younger one reluctantly turned around and followed his friend out to face the law. "If you don't pay, you can't ride," she said. The taller boy opened his shiny new Adidas jacket to display a smooth, bare chest. A blonde toddler dressed in overalls with nothing underneath stared interested at the altercation, but no one else noticed the fracas.

"I paid, hey man, I paid, you saw me pay, didn't you?" the boy appealed to his younger friend. "Man, you're just doing this 'cause we're Black. This isn't fair." His companion smiled charmingly at the ticket seller and said in a tone, perhaps meant to remind her of her own son, "Aw com'on, it's hot. Our mother wants us home. Don't make us walk." But the ticket seller held her ground and the older boy started screaming again.

By now, the toddler had lost interest and was running alongside the track; the executives deliberately looked away from the screaming match. "I saw them. I saw them--they paid. Whatcha you talking about," said a girl about the age of the older boy who appeared behind them. "Your thing, it just doesn't work right. It's not fair." The ticket seller glared at her, and grudgingly let the kids through to catch the train.

The younger boy made for a seat but his older friend pulled him away by the collar of his yellow Lacoste and gestured for the girl to sit; she deferred to an elderly man with a cane. The older boy smiled encouragingly and leaned back against the side of the car, but the girl was too involved with her watch to notice.

She stared at the window, tapping her heel impatiently as the train came to a stop in between stations. The boy kept jabbing his friend just above his Jams shorts and the elderly man nodded off to sleep. A baby started crying and its mother wiped the perspiration from its brow. Through the thick air, the conductor announced, "We ah experiencing a delay. Sorry for the inconvenience. A train should be along soon to push us to Kendall."

The boy smiled again, broadly, at the girl and this time she caught his glance. "They're so stupid," said the girl, "They'll believe anything."

"Yeah. That's the way things are," the boy returned. "Man, if it wasn't so hot today I would have gotten myself some new Adidases. We went to this store which just have the shoes laid out and you can just take whatever you want. Hey, those guys, they must want you to take somethin' they make it so fucking easy."

"I got a new shirt today--23 bucks--think I would pay that for this?" she pointed to a white T which she sported under her tight black and white sundress. "What a rip-off. It's not fair. When is this train going to get moving? God were those shop people dumb. They like thought I was actually wearing this out of the store, not lifting it. Boy. Oh well, can't expect people in these ritzy stores to have too many smarts."

"Yah gotta watch out though," the boy cautioned. "Like, you ever hear about Ronald? Man, that was such a drag. Ronald, he went into this really fancy store and goes upstairs. There are only two people up there, right, and then they go like into this other room. Ronald, he, thinks hey they're gone, so he like takes something and slips it under his shirt.

"At the door this like watchman guy stops him and arrests him. So Ronald thought those guys were gone, but they were really watching him through the door. So they book him and let him go, but now he don't want to have any more fun. Jeez," he said. The boy finished, "Got to be careful these days."

"It just ain't fair," replied the girl. "They should make a law against allowing people to do that. That's cheating. They just can't trick you that way and arrest you. That's not fair."

The elderly man lowered his newspaper and stared at her. The baby commenced wailing again, its mother sighed and stared out the window of the un-moving train. The girl shook her head at her watch. The auxiliary train came up behind the filled train and as it moved towards Kendall Square, the boy said, "Man, this is really rotten service...I can't believe she wanted us to pay for it. That just ain't fair."