bus ride

     I hate school buses.  And it's not only because of the stinking black smoke billowing out of exhaust pipes when I'm sitting in my car behind one of them at a traffic light.  It isn't just the irritation I feel when I follow one all the way to my house, coming to a stop each of the fifteen times it drops off a load of kids.  No, the main reason I hate school buses is the unpleasant memories they dredge up from my childhood.  Up until 8th grade I didn't have to ride a bus.  I walked to school because I lived close by.  This was fine by me.  However, when I started high school I had to commute to the next town for my next four years of education, which meant riding the bus until I was a senior and would hopefully have a car.

    Kids on a school bus develop a well-defined hierarchy. I'm fairly certain it happens on all buses in every place that buses exist.  Bus drivers are well aware of this hierarchy and that is why they are usually hostile embittered old men and women who have developed their hatred of children into an art form.

    I think my bus was a little worse than the average bus in terms of the amount of evil kids that haunted the back of it.  The way our bus hierarchy was constructed was fairly simple.  In the rear of the bus sat all the troublemakers, aka the "cool" kids.  The middle section was kind of a gray area, it included some cool kids who were smart enough to stay out of the back but cool enough not to get heckled for it, as well as the average kids whose invisibility worked to their advantage.  Finally, there was the front of the bus: Loser Central.  If you sat in the front you were a dork, a nerd, or hopelessly obese.  There was no way of getting around it.  The only consolation was that you were too far away from the deadbeats in the back to get hit by any flying objects or have any hateful insults hurled at you.

    I generally sat in the middle of the bus and occasionally got harassed.  I wasn't average enough to blend in with the bile green-colored bus seats.  To put it bluntly, I was a dork.  I had no fashion sense, I got good grades (which at that time was more of a curse than a plus), and I kept to myself.  All three of these factors make a kid into a prime target for abuse.  If you had no clique to belong to in my high school you were condemned to a life of loneliness.  There were always a couple of kids ready to attack and the rest backed them up by laughing at you.  This included supposed friends; after all, defending a loser makes one into a loser and no one wants that label pinned onto them.

    The first bus driver we had was this crusty old man who wasn't quite the socializing type.  I don't think I heard more than five words from him; if he hadn't been driving the bus I would've thought he was dead.  One day he disappeared and we had a new bus driver.  We figured the old guy kicked the bucket.  Or maybe he got smart and retired or had a breakdown from putting up with all the rotten kids on the bus. They tore the foam out of the seats and threw it around, they screamed and yelled constantly at the top of their lungs, and verbally harassed whoever was in listening range. 

    Anyway, after that guy left we were stuck with this rough-looking woman who, to put it mildly, was on the surly side.  I never saw her smile - if she had her brittle face probably would have crumbled to dust.  She hated us, particularly the back of the bus crowd.  They tormented her, completely ignoring commands to sit down and shut up.  Their outrageous behavior continued unabated until she began to make the inevitable threat to turn the bus around and head back to school.  These threats were usually made once we were within five minutes of the stop.  That increased the effectiveness, seeing as it was about 15 minutes back to the school.

    Well, these kids kept pushing her, feigning fear and respect when she told us she'd take us back to school and let the dreaded vice-principal chat with us.  All year it went on, some days were worse than others but through it all the tension kept building.  Once the warm weather set in those kids were in high gear and the stage was set for a showdown.

    It had been a particularly rough ride home, anything not tied down was soon airborne.  In the wide mirror above the driver's head I could see her beady eyes darting back and forth under those stress lines carved up and down across her forehead.  She was at the end of her rope.  Already she had pulled over to the side of the road once, giving us the same speech.  When things didn't improve, she gave it to us straight.  When we got to the stop no one was to leave the bus.  She would radio the school and tell them we were on our way back.

    So that's what happened.  By about 3 PM we were back where we started 45 minutes earlier, parked at the curb outside the school.  Mr. Wickstein came out and gave us his hard-ass ex-warmonger speech and then sent us on our way.

    It was quiet for a while on the way home.  But those pranksters in the back couldn't help themselves.  They were pissed off about getting home even later and they just didn't care.  They raised hell, screaming obscenities at the driver.  Her face went white in the mirror.  It was all over for us.  She clearly stated in her most authoritative bus driver voice that she was radioing the cops and that no one shall leave the bus until they got there and took the names of the troublemakers.  The bus fell quiet, deathly quiet, and then all of a sudden as we got close to the stop a sharp alarm buzzed, slicing through the silence.  Heads turned and mouths fell open as we stared at the emergency exit door swinging open in the wind and saw the figure of Chris Thompson running swiftly up the road to his house a few hundred yards away.

    The bus slowed to a stop and we waited in silence for the police to arrive.  Perhaps it was some instinctual desire to defy authority that caused him to do it or maybe he was just scared to death.  There was no way to tell for sure, but ironically I think Thompson ended up on the police force after high school.

Home    Weblog    News    Order    Writings    Booklist    Zines    Links