“Hey. Hey!”
“What?”
“See that kid over there with the red hair?”
There were two people on the bus that had red hair. I didn’t know, or care about, which one he was talking about.
“Which one?” I sighed.
“The one on the bus across from ours,” he replied, pointing to kid with arms folded on the edge of his open window. The first thing I noticed was that his hair was actually burgundy.
“What about him?” I asked, seeing nothing particularly interesting about the boy.
“He’s Mexican!”
I blinked, “How do you know?” From where we were sitting it would have been hard to distinguish skin tone.
“His parents speak Spanish,” he said excitedly, like this was a big deal.
“And that automatically makes him Mexican?”
“Well no, but-”
I cut him off, “Then why did you assume that?”
“I don’t know. I just assumed th-”
“Exactly. You just assumed. Besides, his hair is burgundy,” I said, cutting him off again.
This caught him off guard, “What?”
“I said his hair is burgundy,” I repeated, “What am I? A Parrot?”
“Where did that come from?” he asked, slightly confused at my train of thought.
“I just noticed that his hair isn’t red, it’s burgundy,” I shrugged.
He looked to the bus across from ours but the boy had pulled himself back inside. My friend watched the window for a moment before he turned back to me.
“It was red,” he said with an edge of finality in his voice. He obviously didn’t know me. Otherwise he would have remembered that I liked to argue.
“It was burgundy. You saw the red tint. Burgundy is a dark red and purple. You were seeing the red tint. That does not mean his hair was red.”
He turned and glared at me for a moment before shrugging.
“You can think whatever you want but I still it’s red.”
Before I could say anything else he plugged his earpbuds into his ears and turned his music all the way up.
“It’s still not going to change the fact that it’s burgundy,” I said with smirk before I turned my own music up. He must have heard otherwise he wouldn’t have tensed up as defensively as he had. Ah, sweet, sweet victory.