Bus

If I told you that I learned to drive from my parents or my aunt, I’d be lying, and I hate liars. Driving came naturally to me. The twenty-five hours of supervised driving I had to go through in order to get my license at age sixteen was easy as pie, and since my mom was still alive at the time, she was in that vegetable phase and vouched for me when I applied to get my license so I could finally drive my shitty hand-me-down car. There are rules to follow, signs to learn, etiquette, safety, and all sorts of other expectations that you have to be familiar with in order to be a sane person behind the wheel.

Some people just don’t fucking know how to drive, though.

I like to think I’m not one of them. I drive a school bus, for Christ’s sake. I know a thing or two about cars.

Other people out there? God, I could swear it’s their first time ever being in a vehicle.

There’s a reason why school buses have big flashing red lights and huge stop signs that fold out when kids get off the bus. The stop sign doesn’t mean you can just California roll on through and speed past me like you’re so much more important, and it’s certainly not for show. You’re supposed to stop. It doesn’t matter what side of the fucking road you’re on, you’re meant to stop when a bus is picking up or dropping off kids. It is literally one of the things they test you on when you get a license.

The people who act like the shiny lights of my bus are superfluous piss me off to no end. It happens every so often. I’ll see some suburban mom or some dickwad businessman yakking away on their cell phones or just huffing in annoyance at the big yellow beast blocking the intersection, and they’ll slam the gas pedal and zoom right past before I even have the chance to open the door. I beep my horn at them as loud as I can, sometimes pairing it with a loud but mild swear that won’t scar the kids’ ears too badly.

That’s one thing. It’s a whole other ballpark when there are kids getting off the bus and the stop signs are alight and you’re just either too fucking stupid to obey traffic laws and know that pedestrians get the right-of-way, or you know what you’re doing and you’re too much of an asshole to understand what you’re doing. I’m a dick. I can admit that. But even I won’t go out of my way to run someone over if I don’t even know them.

I’m at the intersection of Burro Malo and Vida, and there are only two kids that get off at this stop – the kid who smells funny, Stan, and this tall girl with a roller backpack, April. They’re both fairly quiet and they don’t piss me off a lot, but the others don’t speak highly of them. Kids are assholes.

Well, they get off of the bus like normal, April’s wheeled bookbag thumping down the stairs after Stan jumps down and heads off to his house, and April turns the corner around the front of the bus, careful to dodge the guard arm that sticks out from the front of it whenever kids get on or off.

And she walks across the street and even does that little jog thing that people do when they’re self-conscious about not walking fast enough, but in a matter of seconds she’s a deer in the headlights.

I can’t blame her for freezing in the middle of the road when she does. When I was learning how to drive with my near-comatose mother in the front seat so I could legally drive with a learner’s permit, she always told me to assume that everybody else on the road is an enormous idiot. Always assume that they’re do something stupid. It’s something I carry with me to this day – I don’t trust anybody merging into a highway or anybody pulling out of a store expecting to stay in one lane.

April is in seventh grade. Somehow I doubt that she has that assumption locked away in her brain, and even if she does, it wouldn’t stop the fucking moron speeding towards her from slamming the brakes seconds too late.

I lay on the horn in a feeble attempt at either getting the driver’s attention or making April aware of the bright white sedan heading right towards her, but it’s no use – that car is still moving too fast, and so even with brakes squealing into the sunset, they still hit April right in her hip and send her sailing to the asphalt.

She hits the floor with a smack right along with her now-broken backpack, but she doesn’t cry. A little yelp escapes her throat when the impact happens, which gets the attention of the only four remaining kids on the bus – Mikey, Katie, Hector, and Curtis – and faster than you can say, “Some people should have been swallowed,” their heads are pressed up against the windows and they’re screaming in shock and anger at the dumb bitch behind the wheel of that car.

It all happens so fast. Right as I yank the bus into park and rip off my seatbelt, about to give that horrible driver a piece of my terribly angered mind, Mikey screams like his pathetic little life depends on it, Katie jumps over two seats and pushes open the door to fly off the bus, Hector yanks out his earbuds and follows her, and even Curtis mutters something about aliens and follows those two. I’m not in the mood to yell at them for breaking obvious rules. Bus rules are petty when it comes to traffic laws, and they’re even more puny when compared to official laws that are put in place to protect people.

They rush over to April’s side while Mikey’s still screaming out the window, and by the time I get there, the driver of the dinky sedan shows her face.

She can’t be older than seventeen or eighteen. She’s gripping a plastic cup with a green mermaid logo on it, and there’s coffee spilled all over the front of her stupid tanktop with an infinity symbol that has the words, “I refuse to sink,” printed within the line. Her stupid headband is crooked along with her eyebrows, scrunched up into an expression that rides the fine line of, “I can’t believe I just did that,” and, “What are you looking at?”

“Oh my God,” she gasps, turning to face April, who’s sitting on the ground with bloodied palms and a red face. “What just happened?!”

“What the fuck does it look like? You just hit her with your car!” I fire back, not even going easy on the f-bombs.

The girl whips her head back over to me. Her hair, brunette at the roots and blonde at the tips, flails as she does it, and she just shoots me this look as if I’m the one in the wrong here. “It was an accident.”

“That doesn’t take away from the fact that you literally just violated traffic laws and ended up hitting this girl!” My voice is cracking at this point, but I don’t care.

“But I didn’t mean to!” She stammers for a few seconds and grips the coffee cup in her manicured hands. “That counts for something!”

Katie takes over for me, which is nice, because I didn’t have a lot of patience with this girl to begin with. “Hell no, it doesn’t count! You could’a killed her!”

She’s got one of April’s arms around her shoulder, and it’s actually kinda funny watching her try to help the injured girl stand up, considering the fact that April is so much taller than her. April winces and looks at her scraped hands, and when she walks, she limps.

“Dude, I am so sorry,” the driver says to April, trying to look sincere but coming across a little contrived. “I, uh…I’ll drive you home, how about that?”

April doesn’t say anything, and she even looks a little scared. Being mean to people can be intimidating at first, even if they did almost just kill you. Curtis takes a stand on the other side of her, taking her other arm and putting it over his shoulder. Hector doesn’t look like he knows what to do, so he just kind of stands there. Together, they send the girl a death glare, though, even without uttering a word. Even April breaks out a scowl, even if her lower lip is quivering.

“Listen, how about you explain this shit to her parents and I report you to the police? How’s that?” I speak up once and for all, my main goal being to scare the shit out of the chick.

She stares at me like she doesn’t even know what the hell a “law” even is. I would laugh if things weren’t so serious right now, and the way she caresses her coffee cup in fear is enough to make me want to pet a kitten, it’s so delicious.

“Why do we have to take this to the police?” she asks, her voice shaking. “She…she’s standing. She can walk around, right?”

The scrunched-up look of pain written across April’s otherwise blank face says the opposite. She had to have gotten at least a bruised hip from that, if not worse.

It’s been a weird day.

That dumb embarrassment to humankind gives me her license plate number, and sure enough, when I get back on the bus to drive Katie, Mikey, Curtis, and Hector home after dropping off April directly at her house, I phone the cops and report her ass. I make sure April tells her parents about it too, and I even give her the bitch’s information. People like that don’t deserve anonymity.

And I guess it was sort of heartening in a way, seeing people team up to defend someone who got hurt. Normally I wouldn’t think much of it. Happens all the time, or at least that’s what I’ve been raised to believe or whatever. It’s something totally different when it happens in people I never would have expected from.

Like I said before, I was expecting scary things to come that fall, what with that tornado knocking out the glass windows of the school. I mean, Halloween is literally next week – skeletons and zombies and werewolves and shit. Ooga booga. I’ve been used to hating my surroundings for as long as I can remember, even when I lived back in Duluth, especially since I’ve moved to Yuma.

So in a way, it’s kind of scary to feel a weird sort of respect for those kids and how they may not have totally stood up for April, but they still stuck by her side and didn’t call her names or make fun of her for not crying but wanting to. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about anything under the age of eighteen in such a way, save for Carrie sometimes when she was a kid. And even if Mikey only kept screaming out of one of the windows, he still did his part – a few people looked out their doors and made that pathetic excuse of a licensed driver even more embarrassed.

At this point, I’m not really sure of what’s going on. After that little incident, I can’t say for sure I know what’s gonna happen next, because it was something I didn’t think I’d ever see in a million years – a weird case of teamwork. Especially since it was between a bunch of little brats who could hardly solve math equations.

I hate knowing that something shitty is locked in place and I have no control over it, but even more, I hate not knowing if something shitty is going to happen. As I write this, I have no clue what the next big thing is going to be. I lost jurisdiction over my life long ago when I applied to become a bus driver, and over time I’ve accepted the fact that things go downhill. It’s something I’ve grown to expect, in a way – I never know how things are gonna get worse, I just know they will.

And I don’t want to be lulled into a sense of security when I’ve never had one and never will. I’m not going to let today guide me into thinking that things are going to get better for me, when I know they won’t. Tomorrow, those kids will go back to arguing over their stupid shit, and I’ll be the one piloting the bus that takes them to school and back. Everything will continue like it always has.

I don’t want to feel like I have a little bit of faith in them, because if I do, I’ll get my hopes up, and I know what it’s like to have them crash back down and send shards of glass into my skin from the impact.

I just won’t think about it anymore.