A wide, cinematic digital painting of a lonely rural school bus grinding down a winding backroad at dawn. The landscape is bleak: mist rolling off cold hills, cracked pavement, and leafless trees closing in over the road. The bus’s harsh yellow headlights cut through the fog, illuminating exhausted kids slumped in their seats, some staring blankly out the windows with that “Help me” expression. The sky is a washed-out steel gray with a faint orange glow on the horizon, hinting at another long, miserable school day. In the foreground, the viewer stands on the shoulder of the road, slightly below eye level, creating an imposing, almost oppressive angle as the bus approaches. Mood: nostalgic, claustrophobic, and bureaucratic bleakness. Muted color palette with desaturated yellows, cold blues, and rural Midwest browns. Painterly realism. No text overlay. Wide cinematic composition.

Reliving the “privilege” of riding a not-so-magic school bus

ByTC Marti

The worst part of my childhood was riding that damn school bus. It wasn’t boring-ass lectures, useless homework assignments, or even studying.

Honestly, it’s not an understatement when I tell you that I fucking hated riding the bus. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the routes were better planned, but I’m sure the bureaucracy that was the local school board couldn’t have given less of a damn.

As long as we made it to school so they could lock us inside those godforsaken prisons for six to eight hours, that’s all they cared about.

How long, exhausting, and bad did it get?

Let’s harken to the days before Gyubin was born when people actually wore the hem of their shorts below the knee, and it might give you a hint about my age.

Second through fourth grade was a breeze

I first attended the school district I graduated from in the second grade, and the bus ride was simple. It picked us up, drove us a mile to school, and let us off. Going home, it was the same concept. Man, were we spoiled during those last three years of grade school.

Yeah, the place sucked (for the most part), but at least we weren’t on the bus any longer than five minutes. And that was a round trip.

Enter the “in-between years” as they called them

Here’s where shit started to hit the fan. Between grades five through seven, we still rode to the grade school, but transferred buses there. And man, we wished that bus coming to take us to the middle school wasn’t gonna show up. But alas, it did. Every damn day.

We’d hop on at around 7:30 a.m., then take a winding-ass set of roads to the northern tip of Jefferson County. It was so in the middle of nowhere that it made the Ottawa Senators’ original arena in Kanata look tame, by comparison.

That drive usually took a good 30 minutes, and that was if the roads were clear. I’d also guess about once a month, someone was getting sick on the ride over, given how crazy those backroads are.

The ride home sucked even more

In middle school, our day was kind of lax, starting at 8:15 a.m. and lasting until 2:20 p.m. Not bad at all, right? Until you factor in that I didn’t get home until somewhere between 3:30 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. Yeah, so that’s a good eight to eight-and-a-half-hour day under the State’s thumb.

We’d leave the school, sift through those winding-ass roads again, then arrive at the high school. There, we’d transfer back to the bus that took us to the grade school that morning, and they’d take us home.

Problem was, we were on that bus for a fucking hour. And that was assuming nothing slowed us down. What a fucking nightmare.

No AC, either. It was hot as hell in the warmer months and cold as hell in the cooler months. Not to mention, there were times when we were packed in there like sardines since the middle and high schoolers rode together. So there we were, zigzagging through country roads until, finally, they reached our neighborhood, where we were the last ones dropped off.

Eighth grade

If you thought that was hell on Earth, don’t worry, we’re going down another level. Remember how I said we boarded that damn school bus at 7:30 a.m.? Yeah, in eighth grade, try 6:15 a.m. No more transferring buses at the grade school either.

We went the same exact route that would’ve taken us home in the previous section, but in reverse. That meant we were the first ones on every morning. Then, we’d go pick up the kids who, in the afternoon, got off the bus before us.

They also added to the route taking us to school, meaning we were on that damn bus for a good hour and a half in the morning. Once we picked everybody up, we then went to the high school, transferred buses, and then went to the middle school.

As for going home, it was the same route that we took in my fifth, sixth, and seventh-grade years. If you’re doing the math, that meant we left at 6:15 a.m., and didn’t get home until between 3:30 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. One hell of a waste of a nine-to-nine-and-a-half-hour day.

High school was the same nightmare

The only good thing that happened here, if you could call it that, was that we never had to transfer buses again. So, we got into school a good 15 minutes earlier, sat in the gym, checked out what our favorite girls were wearing so we knew who to think about when we were whacking it that night, and then went to homeroom.

As for going home? You can probably guess what the route looked like at this point. The same damn one we’d taken since the 2001-02 school year. It goes without saying that when my older friends started driving, I hitched a ride with them. Saved a lot of time.

Seeing a school bus still makes me sick

The Arcane Prophecy by TC MartiWell, it either makes me sick or makes me swear. Especially when I get behind the damn things and see a few of the kids staring back at with a “Help me” look on their faces.

Trust me, kiddos, I feel your pain. Unfortunately, though, there will still be plenty of mismanagement like the one I shared with you earlier, and I’m sure it’s not confined to my old school district. As for those buses driving “all through the town?” Oh, they’re notorious for causing traffic jams.

Anyway, the best way to get rid of the need for the school bus is to seek out more effective education methods like homeschooling, microschooling, unschooling, learning pods, and anything else someone comes up with.

Or, like in my YA fantasy, one gigantic magic academy featuring 32 competing schools. That’s what my protagonist Yote Diamondback is about to experience, and for the better.

Luckily for Yote, she never had to deal with a school bus when she attended traditional school, since she and her sister Jett had a private driver. And when she’s at Arcane, she’s living on that kick-ass campus and experiencing school in an entirely different way.

Get to know her by reading the first three chapters of Book I, The Arcane Prophecy. Find out how she ends up at Arcane and why, and what’s possibly in store for her.

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