The following text is adapted from Jason Reynolds’s 2016 novel Ghost. The narrator, who is in middle school, is at a bus stop.

I just go there [to the bus stop] to look at the people working out. See, the gym across the street has this big window—like the whole wall is a window—and they have those machines that make you feel like you walking up steps and so everybody just be facing the bus stop, looking all crazy like they’re about to pass out. And trust me, there ain’t nothing funnier than that. So I check that out for a little while like it’s some kind of movie: The About to Pass Out Show, starring stair-stepper person one through ten.

©2016 by Jason Reynolds