bus kids

short story

For the longest time, it had been easy for me and my wife Rachel to forget that the world was full of children who needed to get to and from school, but since we would soon have one of our own, the universe conspired to have a school bus pull out in front of us while we drove, just as a reminder.

I winced at the thought of my pregnant wife inhaling the bus fumes.

“Great, now we’ll be late. Should have considered the school traffic before making a 3pm appointment,” I said, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel.

“David, stop, it was the only time we could make it work,” Rachel said.

We were on the way to our first OBGYN appointment, a thing I knew my peers in nascent fatherhood also attended, but for some reason could never imagine doing myself, despite knowing for a while that my wife would soon be expecting.

It was one of those things that made the pregnancy seem more real, as if even though we had told all our friends and family about the new little human about to join our ranks, meeting with someone who would reveal unknown secrets of the health and condition of said human would confirm that we had not lied to ourselves or to others—there was, in fact, someone else growing in my wife’s uterus.

“I just saw on the Washington Post Instagram something about how fewer and fewer kids are riding the bus to school these days. Since COVID especially. It’s become one of the first things on the chopping block for a lot of districts, budget-wise,” Rachel told me.

Apparently, some kids did not get the memo, as it seemed that every child in the world was on the bus in front of us and needed dropping off at every other block.

“Mhm,” I said, tapping the wheel some more, my neuroticism ready to bare itself.

“Did you ever ride the bus to school?” she asked me. Rachel knew that getting me going on some kind of story was the best way to distract me from my impatience.

“Me? Only every day of my public-school life.”

She tilted her head, hand on her stomach in a way I was sure she was unconscious of.

“Really? I never thought of you as someone who rode the bus.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “I was a bus kid.”

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As a bus kid, you learn more on the way to and from school than you do at school. Which I guess is a cliched allegory for life: it’s not about the destination, it's about the journey.

How quaint, but true.

The bus had many instructors in Life 101, one of the foremost being Sean, a kid in my grade with what should have been a terminal amount of earwax. It didn’t stop him from listening to his Sony Walkman every day.

I didn’t usually sit by Sean. Every bus kid will know there was a hierarchy to the seating of the bus—the back of the bus was a place associated with ne’er-do-wells and rascals, farther from the watchful eyes of the driver, while the front was for the little kids and nerds who needed protection or a quiet place to do their homework.

As a new kid, I sat somewhere in the middle, not to be seen as fragile or vulnerable, at the very least ephemeral enough in my social standing as to hopefully be scooped up by whatever in-group I would come to find appropriate.

Sean always sat at the very back of the bus. But one day he had gotten in trouble for something or other and been ordered to take up the seat in front of me. He got up on his knees and turned around to ask me over the seat:

“Do you like Ginuwine?”

I didn’t know if Ginuwine was a person, an animal, a drug, or what.

“I don’t know.”

“Listen to this,” he said, and he put the headphones of his Sony Walkman over my ears.

‘Sex, I want it. I crave it. I need it all the time.’

It was the most horrible song I’d ever heard.

“What’s sex?” I asked Sean the Earwax Kid, giving back the headphones.

“Sex is when you pee in a girl’s mouth,” he said, with as much authority as someone our age could.

“SEAN! SIT THE HELL DOWN!” the bus driver yelled. The bus drivers always employed an authoritative tone that differed from that of our teachers.

I often imagine the moment when Sean found out his definition of sex was incorrect. How he came to this ridiculous conclusion at all was more obvious after I attended my first-ever health class, and the definition of sex as outlined in our textbook and supposed to be answered on a test was rather vague, mystifying, and perhaps technically correct in a way that did not encapsulate the entire meaning:

The exchange of bodily fluids between people.

So, I guess, if you don’t know much else about anatomy, i.e., you only know that you have a penis and know of no other orifice for the collection of fluids on another person other than the mouth, nor the ability of any body to create a fluid to share other than pee, perhaps this wasn’t such a strange assumption.

I knew, though, that sex was unlikely to be as Sean thought. It was soon after that I learned that kissing counts as swapping fluids, and then from The Sims that sex is actually when you make out enough with a woman to get her pregnant.

If Sean was the professor of Sexual Education, then Rebecca was the head of the Art department.

Rebecca was a fifth-grader. The bus was a place that allowed for the co-mingling of grades in a way that other areas did not, and those without older brothers or sisters like me quickly learned that the older kids were keepers of worldly knowledge somewhere between what I knew and what my parents knew, arbiters of cool in a way parents or younger kids never could be and offering guidance parents could never give.

Especially older girls like Rebecca, within whose judgment I lived in fear of and perhaps still do.

Naturally, I was in love with her.

“You like to draw?” she asked me from the seat next to mine between snaps of gum. A strange question, considering I was sitting there drawing in my sketchbook on my own volition.

I told her yes, and she asked to see my sketches. I handed it to her across the aisle and she started from the beginning. Sketches of stuff like a baseball, a pigeon, a tree. With each flip of the page, she slammed her finger down to give the verdict:

“Crap!...crap!…crap!”

One made her pause and instead she said, “This one is alright. But all the rest are crap.”

I took the sketchbook back and saw the one she thought was good was of a beetle. I knew in my heart it was the only good one because insects were, and maybe still are, easy to draw.

Thus, I learned I was probably not a very good artist. It wasn’t the only exam I failed on the bus.

One day I had to sit closer to the front than I would have liked, the natural routine and order of our seating disrupted by the random chaos of someone being sick that day or an irregular rider whose parents couldn’t take them to school.

A kid who was a couple of years younger sat down beside me in the same seat. He had a perfect blond little comb-over, khaki pants, a blue Tommy Hilfiger shirt buttoned all the way to his neck.

He sat as far away from me as possible and put his backpack between us as a partition. He introduced himself as Brent.

“Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior?” Brent asked me in his earnest little voice.

Everyone had questions for the new kid, I guess. Every question was a quiz. I knew the right answer to this one, at least.

“Sure,” I said. I know now this was an unconventional way to answer that question.

He narrowed his eyes at me and made conversation sparse for the rest of the ride. My error was not so much in what I said, but how I said it.

He never sat by me again. The only kid who consistently sat next to me was Latrell.

Latrell was a fat kid with an interest in anime and comics; he was the only kid I ever remember having comic books. He’d tell me the deep lore of lesser-known heroes like Aztek or Doom Patrol, stuff I’d never known otherwise. His favorite was Steel, a guy named John Henry Irons who created a suit that mimicked Superman’s powers and was played by Shaq in some trash late nineties movie.

After it became established that Latrell and I were kind of seatmates, a kid from my class named Toby took it upon himself to set me straight. He approached me after Latrell and I parted ways in the hallway when we got to school.

Toby was a kid with extremely premature upper lip hair, who wore the same three Dale Earnhardt Jr. t-shirts in heavy rotation and drank a plastic bottle of Mountain Dew every morning.

“You want me to show you how to give someone a knuckle sandwich?” he asked.

Finally, a rhetorical question. He clenched his fist such that his middle finger was slightly arched above the rest.

He pointed to the pointer, the ring, and pinky and said, “Here’s the bread,”

Then, to his arched middle finger: “This is the meat.”

I’ve since realized that this would be an extremely inadvisable way to punch someone.

“Why would I want to give someone a knuckle sandwich?” I asked. Since we were off the bus and in school, the conversation felt suspiciously less educational.

He clicked his tongue. “He ain’t like us, you don’t want him sitting next to you.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “He’s a human being.”

“Kinda, but nah. They got green blood.”

An assertion just as wrongheaded and strange as Sean’s, although unlike Sean’s definition of sex, I couldn’t tell you where Toby got this notion about people like Latrell.

The next time Latrell sat next to me, I asked him if it was true, if he had green blood. His eyes bulged from his chunky little head.

“Hell nah, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he said. “Would be kinda cool though. Maybe it’d be like, I got a superpower or something.”

“Yeah! Like a science experiment gone wrong!”

“That’s pretty good! We should make a comic about that!”

Despite Rebecca’s cruel but accurate judgments, I still had my sketchbook in my backpack. I took it out and handed it to Latrell with a pencil. I took out a notebook and pen for myself.

“You do the drawings, and I’ll write it!” I suggested. I watched him draw the shape of a kid like himself falling into a vat of liquid. Latrell was a good artist.

But soon after that, the school year ended, and the next year, Latrell stopped taking the bus and started riding his bike to school. I’d see him around, he lost all his weight, we’d give each other a little head nod, but we never had any classes together, didn’t have the same friends, and never got each other’s numbers. Eventually, he moved away to live with his dad.

We never got to finish that comic.

Sean the Earwax Kid stopped taking the bus when we got to middle school; since it was on the same campus as the high school, his older brother could take him in his beat-up Camry, which he then passed on to Sean when he went into the military.

Rebecca the Art Critic’s parents were too busy with work to take her to and from school, but when we got to high school, they bought her a brand-new Mazda for her sixteenth birthday. I had very rapidly fallen out of love with her after reaching puberty.

By the time I was a senior, there were only a handful of kids every trip, and I sat alone in the middle rows with my headphones on and an iPod full of songs, free to choose any I wanted (especially not “Sex” by Ginuwine) and to write comics without illustrations.

One day when I was getting off the bus in third grade, I saw that Brent kid again, the proper little boy who asked me about Jesus. He got out of his mom’s Escalade; she kissed him on the head and sent him on his way toward school.

“Hey Brent,” I said. “Why don’t you ride the bus anymore?”

“My parents say the Devil’s on the bus,” he told me.

I looked back at the line of buses rumbling in the bus lane, unloading their slices of humanity. The Devil was on the bus, sure. But so was everything else.

---

After the OBGYN confirmed for us that we had indeed done sex right (the swapping of bodily fluids and all) and that Rachel was healthily pregnant, our route home took us past the high school campus of our local public school, where our future child would attend.

I was amazed that there was still a traffic backup from the school parking lot and from the bus lane exit, at the number of cars, SUVs, and trucks idling in the pickup zone some twenty minutes or so after school was out.

A blind and sacrilegious inefficiency, all for the sake of a population committed to remaining insulated from their own neighbors.

“This is ridiculous,” I said to Rachel, my pregnant wife. “No one wants to be a bus kid anymore, I guess.”

“Do you think our child will be a bus kid?” she asked, hand on stomach again.

“I hope so,” I said. “I sure do hope so.”

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thanks for reading this story about school buses. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

Do you think less kids are taking the bus? Why?

What was something you learned from someone as a kid that was wildly incorrect?

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thanks for reading PNP, where we do not pee into each others mouths.