Scared To Ask

When it comes to asking weird or stupid questions, I’m the one who is always doing it. Since I do it so often, it’s hard to remember a specific time when I did ask a “stupid question”. But I do remember a day when I wanted to ask a question so badly but I was afraid of hurting someone’s feelings.

It was my first day riding a new bus to school since I was getting picked up and dropped off at home, instead of daycare. I wasn’t very familiar with all of the other kids on the bus because it ranged from kids in kindergarten, to the high schoolers. I knew one girl that first day because she was in the same grade as me and we sat at the same table during lunch. She sat towards the back of the bus which was somewhat intimidating as an elementary or middle school kid because once you got towards the back; that was where the high schoolers sat. Once I walked onto the bus, I made my way towards the back to sit with my friend. We had a pretty long bus ride since both my friend and I were the last stops.

I was able to meet all of the “older kids” when I finally made my way to the back of the bus and found where my friend was sitting. When I sat down, she was turned around talking to the girl in the seat behind us. Not much longer, the girl she was talking to had to get off the bus. As she was getting off, I noticed something different. She only had one hand.

I quickly turned my head back to my friend and she asked me, “What?”. I didn’t know what to say. Whenever I would go out into town with my parents, and I saw something different than usual, they always told me not to stare or point to be rude. So, I didn’t want to sound rude and ask what happened to her arm, so I just held it in. The next day when I got on the bus, I was nervous at first because I didn’t know if I should ask her what happened and sound rude, or if she would end up talking about it once a conversation started going.

As the days passed, I started getting more and more comfortable with her because when my friend wasn’t on the bus, she would have me sit with her. We would always have the most random conversations about anything all the way from when we got on the bus to go to school, and all the way from school until one of us got off the bus. But one day, our conversation wasn’t our usual normal talk. When my older friend got on the bus from the middle school, she sat in the same seat as me and was holding her arm. I asked her what happened and someone hit her with the corner of their binder and it hurt her arm. At this point, I was really curious as to what really happened with her arm, and if she has had that since birth but I still was too nervous to ask her.