The magic (I-almost-crashed-it) school bus

Gather ‘round, fair children, to hear the story of the time your Uncle DK nearly wrecked a school bus.

Long ago, in the year of (I believe) 1999, my family and I moved from a suburban house to a spot out in the country. And with that move came the necessity that I ride the bus to school. This is not a tough ask, really. Go out in the morning, stand at the end of your driveway for a bit, get on the bus, ride. Easy enough.

This particular bus performed an extra maneuver, though. Instead of picking me up and driving me to school, it made a stop at the area elementary school, dumping out the youngun’s, and picked up some other high schoolers who were on other buses. Each day, we’d sit at the elementary school for 10-15 minutes during the transition. Some kids would get off the bus, whether to chat, eat, smoke (sigh), or any number of other things. I never did, because it was early and I just wanted to sit. So that was how it always worked.

At least, that was how I thought it always worked. I rode the bus every day but Wednesdays at first (honestly, I can’t even remember why I didn’t have to on Wednesdays, but for at least the first three weeks I was not on the bus on Wednesday). About a month into the new schedule, though, I climbed on the bus like normal on a Wednesday. We rode to the elementary school. We stopped. The elementary schoolers got off, and so did the other bus riders.

Only … every single one of them got off. That was weird. Usually at least some kids were as lazy as me. But oh well, I was comfy, I sat there. And then … my bus left.

With me the only person on board but the driver (Mary), the bus immediately pulled out of the elementary school parking lot. It still went along the normal route that would take it to the high school for a couple of turns, so I just sat there, confused. Eventually, though, I had to say something. I got up, walked toward the front, and said, “So, uh…”

And that was as far as I got, because Mary jumped, jerked the wheel to the left, and nearly hit an SUV coming the opposite way. I fell over into the front-row seat. Yelling happened.

Luckily, she got it under control, straightened the bus out, and kept driving, and the SUV merely got out a honk and kept driving. We were okay. I was still confused, but we were okay.

Mary kept driving, but she yelled. “What are you doing here?” she cried.

Okay, still confused. “I’m … going to school,” I said. “Why didn’t we pick anybody up?”

So as it turns out, on Wednesdays Mary had a doctor’s appointment (turned out she had cancer, and turned out she died less than a year later, so this story got sad, my bad), so she traded off the Wednesday “to the high school” part so she could get to her appointments. Everyone else knew that, so they got off the bus and got on a different one. If I had been on the bus for any of the preceding Wednesdays, I would have as well, but fate deemed that not to work out.

Well, now there was a problem. Mary had an appointment to get to. I needed to get to school. I was the only one on the bus. She couldn’t miss her appointment, but she also couldn’t really kidnap me. She turned the bus around at the first chance she got, muttering under her breath the whole way, and sped back to the elementary, where as luck would have it the bus to the high school hadn’t quite left, so I got to jump off Mary’s bus, jump on my new bus, get seven million weird looks and mockery, and see Mary off to her appointment.

But for just a split-second there on Mary’s bus by myself, I almost made a lady with cancer crash the school bus she had to drive to keep her health insurance. Man that would have been a crazy story.