I’m going to recycle it
I only saw the hand that tossed the bottle; the face and body were obscured by a traffic light, or moving pedestrians at the crowded Chinatown intersection. The plastic bottle bounced off the rim of the garbage barrel and plunked down to the street, inches from where I held my bike still, waiting for the light to change. The body attached to the hand moved on, oblivious.
I began to lean over to reach for it when a small, geeky boy in oversized glasses and oversized T-shirt leaped from the sidewalk to the front of the garbage bin and swooped up the bottle.
He noticed me watching up and gawked up at me self-consciously. “Well done,” I said. “I was about to pick it up and throw it away.”
“I’m going to recycle it,” he said, then hopped back onto the sidewalk and disappeared into the crowd.
