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It is 6:35 AM.
It is always 6:35 AM.
Sometimes the world gives the appearance of it being not 6:35 AM--being, for instance, 6:36 AM, or 3:45 post meridiem--but you're wise to its tricks. Any non-6:35 o'clock you see is a ploy to trick you into lowering your guard. You hear a noise in the bushes, you go to investigate, and bam, it's 6:35 AM again.
There's no rest, no respite, there is only 6:35 AM.
Day after day after day.
It isn't okay if the answer is no, and no one can make that the case just through asserting it.
You are forced to conclude that giraffe-girl thinks "personal space" a term as refers to a patch of the infinite cosmos enclosed within a chain link fence. Behind, perhaps, posted signs which read "Private Property" and "Beware of the DOG"--the Boötes Void, maybe.
You flatten yourself against your window-seat wall and let the hate flow through you.
While it's true that you've never actually read George Orwell's 1984, it's also true that never since the year he wrote it--not a single time, as the generations churn and nations rise and fall--has not having read George Orwell's 1984 given even one Homo sapiens pause in comparing their situation to it. The wisdom of your ancestors is in the simile, which your unhallowed hands dare not disturb: this is literally 1984.
You'd rather giraffe-girl simply said, "I'm sitting here." Or, if she wanted to be polite, she could have said, "I'm sitting here, sorry."
Or just sat without a word.
At least then you wouldn't be complicit.
If a question only allows one answer, it's not a question at all--it's some entirely different maneuver.
And you hate being pushed around. You'd trade in all your own people-pushing privileges if that's a trade you could make.
You'll live in the Boötes Void, autarkic.
Feeling angry and righteous is a warning to check your thinking--twice.
Zooming out:
This random kid--fresh from nearly missing the bus--went for the first available seat because said bus was moving underneath her, mouthed the appropriate social nicety, but was met with silent condemnation, while the bus was still moving, and voiced the first mentally available apology.
And here you are, frothing over with resentment, spitting castigations and renouncing the whole human species.
You've clearly lost the plot.
The inflexible bus fights free of your tangled neighborhood's twisty streets.
It's dark outside the window.
You live your life according to a clock, and it's The Man's clock, not Nature's.
You boarded the bus at 7:05 AM--that's what 7:05 AM means.
The bus trip takes something like half an hour--starting and stopping and plodding along--starting from, as you've said, 7:05 exactly. Although sometimes the bus arrives twenty minutes into 7:05, or, more rarely but much worse, 7:05 comes quicker than you feel it really ought.
The sun rises today at 7:36--one minute later than it did yesterday. The cafeteria closes at 7:40. Classes begin at 7:50.
It's dark outside the window: on Tuesdays the sun rises at a quarter to four post meridiem.
And in November the sun sets by six.
...But it's ridiculous to feel sorry for yourself: you're riding the same bus as kids who live a five-minutes' drive from the school--and the bus picks them up first.
Not to mention, like, there are people starving in Africa and soldiers dying on the moon.
The sky grays.
Some irrepressible hominid part of you is cheered by the light.
You're waking up; you feel it in your bones.
Your ancestors worshiped this lightening sky, and it's easy to sympathize: left to your own devices you'd probably build a monolith or a ring of a stones or something.
Finally free of winding residential streets, the yellow bus trundles powerfully down Cross Traffic Does Not Stop Avenue.
Scrub brush and corn fields are split by tracts of housing old and new--separated from Traffic Does Not Stop Street by old wooden fences with missing slats, or shiny white plastic ones, or weathered chain link, or stone or steel or iridescent forcefields. Nature is healing; the older and more dilapidated the houses the taller and less ruly the trees--and the yellower the lawns the more biodiverse the underbrush.
Four-story apartment buildings are scattered hither and thither in no discernible pattern. Here's the LDS church, sparkling-white and spiky. Now cows and cows and cows--you're too phobic to look right at them. Horses. There, towering tree-houses that must have been grown by a licensed biokinetic. A church sign says RELOAD FROM HIS SAVE POINT and the flip side sign reads VISITORS WELCOME, MEMBERS EXPECTED, SUNDAY SERVICE 1030.
Giraffe-girl never ceases to exists on the periphery of your awareness.
She's too close, and keeps making weird noises.
Is she trying not to laugh? A sidelong glance confirms it; she's reading something on her phone.
She catches your eye, which is awkward, and you look away.
You're nearly at the school.
You want to draw her hat.
After three and a half billion years of evolution, the results are in: allegedly thinking creatures who, on confirming that whispering works, shout.
You press your tragii into your skull and rue every act of meiosis which brought you to this point.
Your rule is that, for fairness' sake, what you contempt in others you excise from yourself. Most people, when they get upset, are led along by the emotion--like a thousand pound bovine with an itty bitty nosering; a little force goes a long way against someone who isn't trying to resist it. Wrath is a pro wrestler; it needs your help with the throw. Kids, you can just say no to chokeslams.
So you try to be reasonable.
But at the end of the day you can't say that it's made you any happier than the average person.
You read a book in class called A Monster Calls where the protagonist goes on a rampage--ripping down shelves and destroying furniture and smashing a clock into little pieces. (Not that you're comparing your life to his. You're well-aware that your life's objectively great. It's just--somehow the knowing doesn't help.) And, after, he has regrets--but also found it therapeutic. He shouldn't have done it and wishes he hadn't, but he was at his breaking point before, and beneath his breaking point after.
Wouldn't it be interesting if having greater self-control just means that you go longer and endure misery more before you snap? On this model, life continues happening to people until they reach their breaking point, and fly into a cathartic rage, and from that point on they wobble back and forth across the threshold. The difference between you and those with quicker tempers (or with less control over themselves; you're a hard act to follow when it comes to quick tempers) is that you'll fill your bigger glass with more misery before it overflows, and be forever more miserable.
This model, if true, would justify your every irate action, which is like being correct.
Obvious solution is obvious: scream at and hit giraffe-girl.
...And now you're imagining what would happen if you actually did that--the face she'd make--the noises--would she try to fight back how and how would you prevent her from preventing you from hurting her--and your brain bounces like a beach ball in the way of a locomotive.
You guess you're not cut out to randomly attack people.
That might close off some careers.
"It's fine," you say, because it isn't that big a deal.
You're aware that she might not hear your exact words over the din inside the school bus but you're not about to shout over it to be heard.
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