“Dude, I still can’t get over what happened yesterday. You sure that wasn’t your guardian angel?” Travis said. We were at the bus stop the next morning after a new janitor the size of a tank rescued us from Jeff and his gang of douchebags who were about to tear us a new one.
“Did that look like an angel to you?” I replied, “Look, I already explained this to you. I accidentally ran into him in the hallway while going to meet you, ran away thinking he was going to either get me in trouble or beat me up, and I guess I must have dropped my guitar strings in the process. He probably came looking for me to give them back and happened to show up at the right time.”
“See, that’s the part I don’t understand,” Travis objected, “Why did you have a pack of guitar strings with you at school? You don’t bring your guitar to school, why would you bring a pack of strings?”
Travis had a point. I never bring any of my music gear with me to school. For one thing, there’s no reason to do so: I do all my rehearsal at my or Travis’s house. If I brought any music gear to school I’d just have to bring it back home without using it. There are also several reasons not to bring it. I’ve seen what some of the cretins who inhabit my school have done to some of the band geeks’ instruments. No one has escalated to property damage yet, but would you want to play a trumpet that had been dunked in the toilet? I wasn’t going to let these freaks near my axe.
The distinctive screech of the school bus brakes cut our conversation short. Travis and I would have to continue our discussion later. We had a much bigger problem at the moment: how to make it all the way to school without Jeff throwing us out of the bus window. We didn’t need to worry about him on the bus home yesterday because he has “lacrosse practice” (he’s a benchwarmer) after school, but we take the same bus as him in the mornings.
The school bus is an entirely different environment for bullying opportunities, with advantages and disadvantages compared to school itself. There is only one adult present whose priority is (hopefully) watching the road. Their ability to monitor students is limited to a wide-angle mirror and their sense of hearing, which is compromised if they’re listening to the radio. However, this is usually sufficient to spot a lowlife walking down the aisle to pick on someone, and the bus driver will usually shout at said lowlife to go back to his seat.
This means that in order to successfully harass someone on the bus, a bully must either sit near his intended victim or have a clear line of fire with his projectile of choice (i.e. spitballs, paper planes, food, loogies, etc). If the bully does not expect his intended victim to fight back, the former is the preferable option since it’s harder to miss at such a close range. However, if the bully in question wants to avoid retaliation, bullying from a distance is the way to go. If you’re into table top role-playing games, think melee weapons versus ranged weapons (as if I need to explain the different methods of bullying to kids who play role-playing games).
The advantage of the ranged attack is its protection from retaliation: if the victim tries to come over to the bully and confront him over the spitball he just shot, the bus driver will just yell at the victim to sit back down. If the victim tries to retaliate with a projectile as well, statistics indicate the bus driver will only see the victim’s retaliatory projectile and yell at him. If the victim tries to simply move to a different seat outside of the bully’s range of fire, the bus driver will yell at the victim to sit back down. If the victim does nothing, the bus driver may eventually see the bully flinging strawberry Jell-O with a plastic spoon and yell at him, but the victim will already be soaked in Jell-O at that point. If the victim asks someone else nearby to switch seats with him, the other party will usually decline because he doesn’t want to get pelted with ketchup packets, either. If the other party accepts, that’s because the other party is Travis, the victim is me, and the bully is Jeff, who doesn’t care which metalhead he plasters with condiments.
I’ll give Jeff credit where it’s due: he has been able to successfully master both bus bullying techniques without experiencing any serious reprisal. Most people who resort to either technique usually get caught, but not Jeff. We’ve tried avoiding all of his ranged attacks with the above results, his melee attacks aren’t enough for the bus driver to notice until we retaliate and get yelled at, and we even tried telling the bus driver on Jeff, but the bus driver just ignored us. Jeff had been relatively mellow with us on the bus at this point, preferring to drive us out of every spot where we hang out after class, but I had a feeling he would be back to his old routine considering what happened the day before.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The entire bus went silent as soon as they saw Travis and me. Jeff was there, but this time he was sitting in the back. Usually he would sit in the middle, since our stop was one of the last ones and the middle seats near him were usually the only ones available. At first I thought he was trying to play some kind of game with us, perhaps making a challenge for himself to hit us with a paper plane from halfway across the bus. He has had enough practice at this point that I wouldn’t be surprised if he succeeded.
We looked at him, but he refused to make eye contact with us. In fact, most of the kids on the bus did the same. Normally, Travis and I can’t even sit together since all the free seats are taken by the time we get on, but none of the other kids wanted to sit with us this time; they made sure Travis and I had a seat to ourselves.
Don’t get me wrong, as the only metalheads in the school Travis and I are used to being pariahs, but this was different. Usually the normal kids either ignored us or antagonized us, but never actively avoided us. The kids began whispering to each other as the bus started to move, but it wasn’t the usual madhouse. Travis and I sat in silence for a few minutes surveying our surroundings, trying to figure out what had gotten into everyone. Did we miss the memo about some kind of prank? Was my fly unzipped? Did someone die?
Travis, oblivious to our peers’ odd behavior, tried to continue our conversation, “So where did those guitar strings come from?” Everyone else on the bus stopped talking again.
I had had about enough of this. Sure, this was objectively the most peaceful school bus experience Travis and I ever had, but it was too peaceful for me to feel comfortable. I leaned over to this guy Tom Seiks, who wasn’t exactly a friend but wasn’t a jerk to us either, and said “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s going on here? Why is everyone acting so weird?” I could feel the rest of the bus staring at us, wondering if Tom was going to tell me whatever secret everyone else apparently knew. But Tom wouldn’t say a thing and simply looked away again. I tried a few other people who were normally cool, but none of them budged either.
Eventually, after what seemed like the longest bus ride of my life, we arrived at school and started heading inside. Travis apparently hadn’t noticed anything different, since he was still asking the same thing he had been asking the entire ride: “So where did those guitar strings come from?” I continued to ignore him.
As Travis and I were about to head inside, I heard someone whisper “psssht! Travis, Eric, over here!” It was Tom Seiks hiding in some of the evergreen trees that decorated the front lawn of the school. He gestured with one hand for us to come closer, while holding a finger to his lips with the other hand as he darted his head back and forth to make sure no one saw him.
Travis and I also looked around to make sure no one saw us before we met Tom in the trees. “Dude, that was the weirdest bus ride of my life. What’s going on?” I asked.
“You seriously don’t know?” Tom replied.
“No, man, that bus is usually an asylum on wheels. You know that. It’s almost like all the kids were afraid of us today. Even Jeff Hennessy.”
“Yeah, especially Jeff Hennessy. He has the most reason to be afraid of you guys after what you did yesterday. I heard you practiced some crazy metalhead black magic stuff and summoned a demon to kill him and his buddies yesterday. They were lucky to escape with their lives.”
“We summoned a what?!”