The Bus Wasn't Short, I Promise

Liz reminisces:

My favorite bus driver growing up was Roosevelt, but in third grade he moved to California and we inherited Ms. Odom.

Ms. Odom was a BITCH.

I was a GOOD kid in elementary school. Good as in when the teacher left the room, I would take names without being asked. I know. Dork.

My passion for ratting out my peers gave me a spot as a safety patrol on the bus. I got an orange belt and got to carry the flag out in front of the bus to make sure that cars would hit me instead of the heathen child trying to cross the street. I did this all free of charge too!

One day Ms. Odom wrote me up for getting off at the wrong bus stop without a note from my parents giving permission. It was one stop up from my house and I didn't even know you were supposed to have a freakin' note. So there was young Liz, brown eyes filled with tears in the principals office, feeling bewildered and betrayed. I may have even been suspended from the bus, I can't remember. I can only remember the hatred that moment gave me for Ms. Odom.

Once loyal to the Blue Bird, I was out for vengeance.

This bus driver was extraordinarily mean. She truly hated children and, I feel certain, life. I had been one of the few to "defend" her hard-ass ways because she was, after all, the supervising adult. She lost me on that day. Had I weighed more than 75 pounds at the time, this would have been her fatal mistake.

Allow me to explain:

Ms. Odom had one tricky piece to her route. The Hollomans lived at the end of a dead end street with no grace room for a large school bus to maneuver. Every morning and every afternoon, old bag Odom would struggle to turn the bus around. Gears grinding, eyes squinting, shouts of, "Shut up!" occasionally breaking her pursed lips... it was tense.

One rainy afternoon Bitch hole Odom was reversing the bus and we slid into a ditch. No one was injured, but the bus appeared stuck, tilted heavily to the right. Hag Odom flung open the bus door using the metal bar handle and started walking down the bus steps to assess the damage. She slipped on the steps and fell, on her back, into the ditch.

Someone yelled, "Odom's down!" Within 3 seconds, every kid on the bus had leaped to the right side, rocking as heartily as possible in an attempt to tip the bus over. We all wanted her to have the same fate as the witch that gets plowed by the house in the Wizard of Oz. We all wanted her annihilated. I wanted to see the life drain from her eyes as I lay on top of the glass window that squishing her deeper into the mud and closer to Hell where she belonged.

She got up, PISSED, returned to the bus, gave us a sever tongue lashing, and called for a tow truck. We were stuck for an hour on the bus with her. Silence the entire time.

I've told that story to friends before and they usually laugh and then say, "But wouldn't you have felt bad if Ms. Odom had actually gotten smothered by the bus YOU helped to push over?"

No. No I would not.

Ok. Maybe just a little.