Bus

The sky’s so dark it feels like it’s nighttime. Normally, the sun is out, casting its blazing fires upon the rocky terrain of Arizona, but today is a day unlike the normal ones – rainclouds are sitting in the atmosphere, ominously floating over Yuma.

Hell, I was a bit worried when I was driving to the school this afternoon. Not a single drop has hit my windshield yet, but I know that in a matter of minutes, the rain’s gonna come pouring down. I’m standing under the canopied sidewalks of Yuma Middle School right now, staring at the blue-gray sky up above alongside Mercedes, who just sent her sixth-period gym class to the locker rooms to change.

“There were tornado watches all over the news this morning,” she says, worriedly twisting her hair around her finger. “I don’t know if they’re gonna release the kids at the normal time today.”

“I figure if it starts pouring, I’ll pull over,” I say. Nah, nevermind. That’s a dumb idea.

She strokes the nonexistent beard on her chin. “They might evacuate the kids from the buses to the school building if the weather gets any worse. I can’t remember the last time they had to do that, though.”

“Probably long before I was here.”

“Yeah, I think so. Newb.”

“Hey, I’m not complaining,” I kinda smile.

“Mmmhmmm,” Mercedes says, rolling her eyes and nudging me with her elbow. “Which is why you’re still here.”

“This place sucks as far as jobs go,” I shrug.

“Nah, you just love seeing my beautiful face every day,” she winks.

“Right,” I snicker, winking back at her in such an exaggerated way that it makes my stomach churn.

She laughs and tells me, “Don’t do that, it’s creepy.”

I’m used to being called tons of worse adjectives, so I smile a little and then the bell rings, which cues me and Mercedes to say our goodbyes for the day and head to our respective stations. Mine’s in my bus, and hers is at the fork of the bus loop directing traffic.

I get to my seat and kids start shuffling on, almost all of them talking about the insane sky and how pissed they are about it not raining so that gym class would get cancelled. When most of them are on, I turn on the bus and the radio starts blaring through the awful speakers, and just as I’m basically certain that we’re about to get out of this place, a voice comes up on my radio – it’s the principal talking to all of the bus drivers. I turn down the radio and listen.

“We’re evacuating the buses right now; I repeat, we’re evacuating all buses right now. Students are to follow their bus drivers to the buildings to where they are directed by staff, and they are to stay in one group. This is not a test, there is a tornado warning for Yuma County, and this is no condition to drive students home. Remain calm. Thank you.”

Everybody listens, even the assholes in the back of the bus who never shut up. And when the message is over, Craig stands up and says, “Hurry up! Drive us home!”

“No, no, no,” I groan, unbuckling myself and turning around. “You heard the dude. All of you, get off through the front, bring your shi – uh, crap, and wait for all of us to get off…”

Damn it, Mercedes. Damn you for being right and foreshadowing this crap. The last thing I wanted today was to be stuck at this school longer than I wanted to be, and now this happens. It’s never tornadoes here, as far as I know – it’s mostly sandstorms or droughts. Now is not the time for all the clay to turn to mud.

I get off the bus first, followed by all eighteen of the kids, some of whom saunter off like it’s just some stroll in the park and not an actual emergency like it kind of is. I mean, the sky’s getting tons darker by the minute and the shadows cast by the buses are blocking out nearly all of the light that gets under the canopies, and the second they’re all off and I close the door and lock it, I round ‘em up and lead the way.

I run into Mercedes and she shouts at us, “Go to building eight! Building eight!” and I nod.

Building eight is the main classroom building of the school, housing all sorts of random classrooms, and when we make it in, I do a quick headcount before approaching the crowded corner where another teacher is directing traffic. All eighteen are here. Good.

This teacher guy tells us to go down the first hallway to the right and line up against the wall and sit down, and I usher them all there. They cooperate, and when they finally get their asses on the floor, I do a final headcount, thankful that they’re all still there. Good, good. My ass is not getting fired today.

Beyond the hollow roar of chatter circulating throughout what I’m pretty sure is the entire seventh and eighth grade classes, the wind is getting louder. I can hear it pounding against the brick walls of the building, trying to pulverize what was supposed to double as a storm shelter and is failing so far.

A short, old guy who I think is the vice principal tries to make his way down the hallway, looking over all of the kids who would much rather just be home. He waves his hands as if to pretend to squish them all into the ground, shouting, “Everybody sit down and stay calm, this shouldn’t take very long.”

Nobody listens. Instead, they keep talking like kids do.

“Piece of shit school,” he mutters under his breath. With a walkie-talkie in his hand, he trots away, trying to quell the mini-uprisings happening in all other parts of the building.

Only about half of my kids are sitting down right now, so I try to meet the dude halfway (even though he’s long gone) and do the same thing he tried to do. “Alright, everybody, sit down and shut up. The sooner you chill out, the less people die and the faster you get to go home.”

Some of them look at me, like Keke and Sara, sitting on the floor and sharing a SkyPod, while others don’t even glance.

Andre pipes up and tells me, “Ain’t nobody dying. We never get tornadoes.”

I’m about to retort when somebody does it for me – somebody I don’t even realize is standing behind me, Mercedes.

“Just sit down and shut up, Andre. I don’t want nobody suing the school, hear me?” she warns, sassy as hell with a walkie-talkie hanging in the hand that’s on her hip.

Craig makes some kind of noise that sounds like a toddler farting through a paper towel tube and whoops, “Oooh! Andre’s gettin’ whipped by his favorite teacher!”

Mercedes and I just kind of glance at each other with looks of mutual pity.

She pats my back. “Well,” she sighs, “I’ll be back in a few. I gotta help the other teachers try to control the monsters. Good luck.”

“Thanks. You too.” And with that, I nod to bid her adieu and go back to standing awkwardly in the middle of the hallway with my arms crossed over my chest as if I’m attempting to assert pathetic authority I know won’t be taken seriously. “Hey, c’mon. Sit against the wall. You can play on your stupid phones sitting down.”

The delinquents grunt and roll their eyes, heading to the splatter-painted walls of their alma mater and slide down to rest their butts on the dirty-ass floor. Soon enough everyone who rides my bus is sitting like perfect little angels, cussing each other out like filthy sailors and laughing about dumb shit that has nothing to do with the panic that any normal human being would be subject to at a time like this.

I hear the wind howling outside again. I wouldn’t be surprised at this point if all of the buses in the loop are blown over and are falling down like a bunch of big yellow dominoes while the canopies get ripped off and thrown across the desert. I’ve been through snowstorms as a Minnesota native, and I’ve been through sandstorms as an Arizona patron. But I’m not one of those folks down in, say, Florida, who’ve been through rain and wind and hurricane-force winds that have the power to lift me into the air.

So that’s why I’m completely taken off-guard when a huge fucking gust of wind knocks one of the stop signs in the parking lot completely over, bending it so far back that it snaps and flies off into the swirling action. I stand there with my eyes completely fixed on the sign, watching it flitter into the sky, twirling, and before I know what’s going on, the window I was seeing it all from gets smacked with that very same stop sign right smack-dab in the center, the glass turning into a spiderweb with cracks forming all along the impact.

Ricardo and Jack, these two losers who argue over video games, were sitting right in front of that window. (In retrospect, that was a dumb idea and I probably should’ve said so.) And I say “were sitting,” because as soon as that mother hit the glass, both of their inactive asses are so high in the air that I could swear they ran down half the hallway before anybody else even saw the window crack.

The bus, grouped together at the end of this hallway, now feels the need to migrate further away from the window, but I can’t say I blame them. Hell, I’m doing the same, slowly inching away from the shattered hazard.

“Ya’ll stay calm!” Andre takes it upon himself to say. “Don’t touch it, either. And get your booties back against the wall and siddown!”

Even if it’s my job to say that, I let him harass them all into submission, sitting against the lockers that blocked them off from sitting any closer to the shattered window, which is now shaking as the wind picks up. Hardly any extra room is available in this building, seeing as how every kid in the school is being kept in here – even those who walked home or were picked up by parents. Everybody’s crammed. Even I’m stuck near Sharon’s bus with her herself, trying to make sure her kids aren’t tossing around a severed head or murdering each other.

So I’m kind of an oddball right now, standing up in the middle while everyone else is sitting in a mob that could suffocate a scuba diver. I can’t even take my own orders. But I guess it’s better I’m dead than somebody who can get their parents to sue the school.

I try to daze out and keep my mind off the fact that it’s well past four in the afternoon and thus I should be at home watching TV, but the mindless chatter of teenagers doesn’t let me do that. What also doesn’t help is the fact that the glass is slowly being chipped off of that broken window, flaking into the hallway in front of it but nowhere near anybody yet. For some reason I can’t help but to imagine the whole thing coming loose and stabbing everybody in their vital organs. That’d be interesting.

That image is broken when Mercedes comes up behind me, pushing me over slightly as she runs to the window with a wooden board in hand. Saying what sounds like random words into her walkie-talkie, she kneels over, avoiding the glass, and presses the board against it. The device gets tossed to the side as she pulls a nail gun out of the back pocket of her gym shorts and points it at each corner of the board, arbitrarily shooting it every few inches along the perimeter. Soon after, the window is covered and we’re all safe from flying glass impaling us right where we don’t want or need it.

She stands and kicks the glass to the sides of the hallway, speaking a few more things into her walkie-talkie, and then she looks at me and smiles.

Walking towards me, she nods toward the door and says, “Of course they make me do it.”

“Well, it seems to be holding up fine so far,” I say just to fill the gap as filler.

Before she could come up with something way smarter to say, Craig intervenes by poking her leg and asking probably the whiniest question he could have at that moment. “Coach Peña, does this mean we don’t gotta run the mile tomorrow?”

She rolls her eyes without so much as a little grin. “Not tomorrow, but eventually, yes.”

So Craig just writhes around on the dirty floor for a few seconds in his own self-pity, just generally being a little brat trying to get attention.

Meanwhile, she turns a blind eye to her least favorite students.

“I am so sorry,” she apologizes.

It takes me a second to figure out what for, but then I snort and say, “I’m used to it.”

“Always the optimist.”

“Of course. It’s what I do.”

She turns around to face the gaggle of kids in the hallway, taking a stance at the butt of the commotion and just monitoring like I’m sure she was told to do. I try to veer off to the side so as to not look like somebody who’s in authority, but that pushes me to the end of the group, closest to the shattered window.

Some jock kid who rides my bus takes notice of Mercedes and poses the question, “Hey Coach, when’s our last football game?”

“December 9th, and spring conditioning starts the first week we get back from winter break,” she informs him, but not grudgingly like she spoke to Craig and Andre earlier.

I turn to her. “You’re the football coach?”

She just laughs like I asked the dumbest shit ever and says, “Oh, no. I do softball. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know nothing else.”

Okay, that makes sense. So I nod and let sleeping dogs lie, too awkward to try to continue the conversation.

While she goes off speaking into her walkie-talkie again, saying stuff about the condition of the door or the wind outside and rain, Amy, sitting near my feet, turns up to me. “You know Coach?”

I don’t really know how to answer that question so I just shrug. “A little.”

Cadence, next to her, takes the earbuds out of his ears. (I don’t know if or when they ever made up. They’ve at least started sitting next to each other again.) “Uh oh, that’s some dangerous water.”

Why the hell am I even talking to them? We should all be on the bus and they should be talking to each other about the shit playing on the radio. “Uh huh,” I mumble.

“Cadence, shut up. Her divorce was five years ago,” Amy rolls her eyes. “She’s a free bitch, baby.”

My first instinct is to ask for clarification and know everything about that statement, but I keep my mouth shut, realizing it’s better not to intrude on something when the information pertains to somebody who’s not even listening.

“That don’t mean it’s not foolproof,” Cadence counters.

“What are you guys even talking about?” I give in.

Amy winks. “I think you know exactly what we’re talking about.”

I put a stop to it before it can go any further – er, at least, I attempt to. “Nope. Shut up now, please.”

I will shit my pants and wear diapers before I let a couple of kids tell me what to do and what’s good for me and what will make me happy. I never let it happen before and I will not in the future. And it sure as hell isn’t happening now.

Why do kids do that, anyway? They see a boy look at a girl and think, “OMG, he loves her, I must play matchmaker and shit to get rid of the emptiness in my own life!” The world is not some dumb teenage movie, though often times I mistake it for one, what with the shitty plotline and awful character development. I guess since Amy hasn’t been insulting me relentlessly since I had that talk with her, she feels the need to be that girl and do the shit I hated witnessing in high school.

Or maybe it’s just a one-time thing. Maybe she’s only doing it because we’re all stuck in the main building of the school, waiting for a tornado to blow past us, which I’m pretty sure it has at this point, or else I’ve just got a bad case of wishful thinking.

Amy and Cadence do drop it, much to my pleasant surprise, and they go back to listening to the same SkyPod and tuning each other out. Everybody’s still restless, and Craig and Michelle are arguing in a different language about stupid sibling stuff I guess, while I spy Hector and that jock James conversing over what I’m guessing is baseball, seeing as how it started off when James pointed at the logo on Hector’s shirt, a Braves logo. Ricardo and Jack are laughing when they talk to this kid who smells funny, Stan, but he doesn’t say a word.

God, it’s like I’ve got a bird’s eye view of what goes on when my eyes are on the road.

I can’t believe it - it’s mid-October right now and the air is still dry and hot, but soon enough it’ll be cold enough to freeze us all into fall weather and long pants and sweaters. Halloween is coming up. If this is just the beginning of all the scary shit that’s bound to happen this school year, I sure can wait for the rest of it.

I’m stuck here trying to find symbolism in the tornado while everybody’s waiting for the okay to go back to the buses. I can’t come up with anything and soon enough, the wind has stopped and it’s only a light rain brushing against Yuma – we’re good to go. I wave goodbye to Mercedes as we file out of the building, trying not to think any further.