Transportation Safety
The Wheels on the Bus Go Off the Road
written by Bill on January 31, 2026

"Hi. My name's Kevin. I'm the new kid in school. My parents just moved here from Oregon. It sure is tough being the new kid. I'm in a strange new place, I don't know my way around, I'm at an unfamiliar school, and I don't have any friends! It sure is lonely being the new kid. Did I mention I was the new kid? That might be important later. Or not. I dunno. I'm too new to know that."

Meet Kevin. He's new. You may have gathered that.

Today is Kevin's first day at his new school. More accurately, it's now the end of his first day, a day he spent primarily staring out the window, lost in the mixed emotions of leaving one's old home and contemplating why his class has only 15 people crammed into one half of the room. But the bell has rung, and now Kevin walks out to the bus corral to make his way home. If he can only figure out how to do that...

He approaches a random schoolmate. "Excuse me, can you tell me where to meet bus 77?"

"I dunno. What are her hobbies?"

"What?"

"Nothing. Look, this is a long shot, but maybe you should head to where all those giant, yellow, elongated vehicles marked 'school bus' are parked and look for the one with a 77 on it."

"Ah! You see, I'm new here."

"Uh-huh."

"You know, I never had to ride a bus before."

"Oh, I get it. One of those fancy pants money kids, eh? No need for buses when you got stay-at-home mommy to drive you to Lil' Yuppie private school since daddy stockbroker pays all the bills, huh? Never taught you the words for 'lower income public transportation' while you were sitting cross-legged on the floor flipping through your Learn Latin Like Lightning flash cards in between play breaks building working ethanol combustion engines with Erector Set pieces, eh? Don't see many buses go by when your gated community is surrounded by eight foot stone walls and watch towers posted every 50 feet to keep the Mexicans out, is that it? But then daddy pushed his luck a little too far on 4000 shares of Compuglobochem Inc. and had to sell the house to keep the loan sharks mommy didn't know he was dealing with from driving nails into his teeth and then got busted on embezzlement and insider trading charges and now daddy's drinking sparkling spring water and playing tennis in white collar prison so mommy has to relocate to Shithole, USA because it's all she can afford and you're forced to slum it with us proles on our rickety antediluvian autocarriages while mommy gets her ass slapped by fat, sweaty bags of flannel at a truckstop diner, is that how it is??"

"No, I mean my old school was within walking distance."

"Oh. It's over there."

Kevin does indeed find the bus, and our first exciting chapter comes to a close. As the ride rolls on, the bus gradually empties until finally, Kevin is the only child left. He is, again, staring out the window, pondering to himself.

"That kid seemed nice. I wonder if he'd be my friend. *sigh* Probably not. I've gone a whole day and no one wanted to be my friend. I might as well see if I can get mom's keys and lock up the garage with the car running--"

"Why are you crying?"

"Wha.. huh? I.. I wasn't crying!"

"I know what it's like to be a stranger in a new place. It just takes time to get to know people, Kevin."

"Hey, how do you know my name?"

The mysterious girl's pep talk collapses at an early stage, and she nonchalantly flicks her pencil off the books sitting next to her into the aisle. Kevin, naturally, falls for this.

"I'll get it!!!"

When he stands back up, the girl is gone. Given the situation, the most likely assumption is that the girl leapt out of the window of the speeding vehicle in order to avoid being exposed any further to Kevin's haircut. But the boy holds onto hope that she may have simply turned into a puddle or teleported away while he was on the floor.

"Hey, what happened to that girl?" he asks the bus driver.

"ABC cancelled it in 1971."

"No, I mean the girl who was here. The one with the curly hair and white slacks?"

The driver pauses, his mind momentarily addled by the both the boy's question and his own, the latter being what kind of boy identifies people primarily by the color of their slacks. Who says slacks, anyway?

"Well?"

The driver assures the boy with the measured tones used when dealing with the mentally unstable that no little curly haired girls with white slacks got off this bus. The bowl-haired boy with blue jeans decides to leave the conversation there, and exits the bus. But as he walks to his home, he examines the pencil and finds a name: Tracy Donnelly. Mystery.

Later, as Kevin toils away with his homework, his mother walks into the kitchen. Or, judging by her frame, is perhaps blown in by a slight draft. She's searching through moving boxes for cooking ingredients (and her sword), and adds what she can't find to her shopping list. She borrows Kevin's pencil, notes the name, and mentions that the Donnelly's pencils are all over the house. They must have left in a hurry, not to take their precious writing instruments, but it's understandable after the accident.

"Whuh?" says Kevin's brain, desperately trying to keep up.

Yes, it turns out that the Donnelly family had a girl named Tracy, who died last year in a school bus accident. I'd like to take this time to request that anyone who did not see that coming, please leave the room.

Dun dun dun DUN

Not you, Kevin.

On the bus home the next day, Kevin anxiously anticipates the reapparance of his new transubstantial friend. He jerks his head back and forth, checking all the seats, looking like a dog taken on its first car ride that's trying to see out every window at once. While he's looking away, Tracy makes her appearance with a traditional "Boo!"

Kevin acknowledges her entrance with a traditional defecation in his pants.

"AAauuugh!"

"Quiet down. The bus driver's going to think you're crazy, yelling like that."

"He already thinks I'm crazy, thanks to you."

"What do you want me to do, go up to him and say 'Hi Mr. Caldwell, haven't seen you for a while'?"

"Not while the bus is moving. He might lose control and send us flying into one of those--"

"..Oh, right." I have not made this part up. Kevin is defined in the KWRS Animal Phylum And Genus Index as a class A schmoov operator.

"..."

"..So anyway, he might send us careening off the road and the bus would explode into a huge fireball and I'd be all mangled and burn to death with no one to hear my tortured screams and my parents would be all sad and they'd have to move away and leave all their pencils and for the rest of their lives any time they ever saw a child going down the street they'd burst into tears--"

"Do you know why it happened? I couldn't get out in time. There was a fire."

"So why are you visiting me, anyway? Why don't you go talk to someone you used to know?"

"Are you kidding me? It'd scare them out of their wits! I mean, I've probably screwed you up too, but who's gonna notice. Besides, you and I have something in common. New kids gotta stick together."

"Well, you're not really new anymore, but.."

As a testament to their new bond, Tracy summons her all phantasmic energies to bridge the void and hand Kevin..

..a guide to bus safety rules.

"I'll, uh.. treasure it always."

With that, Tracy is gone, and the bus comes to Kevin's stop. Kevin leaps to his feet, again frantically searching the bus for, I don't know, Tracy's ectoplasm trail, and shouts "No! Tracy! When will I see you again?!"

The haggard driver perceives with new clarity that he is, by all practical metrics, Too Old For This Shit.

Later that night, Kevin is embarking on what we can only hope is the first day of his bulk up routine when stranges happenings begin to occur. The radio goes fuzzy. His pliers slide across the weight bench. The barbell rattles. Tracy seems to be unaware that once you've appeared to a person twice and held casual conversations with them, the subtler approaches to haunting no longer work. True to this, Kevin isn't spooked but, instead, raises his voice in a sly "Trrraaaaccyyyy..." as if he expects her to coyly step out from the bedroom in a slinky nightie. Suddenly feeling dirty and a little naseous, Tracy forgoes the rest of the act and just throws the safety guide on the table. Kevin gives up the "weightlifting" farce and gives it a read.

"To avoid hitting your head when exiting the rear emergency door, lean forward before you jump. Ah, I see. As you jump, flex your knees to cushion your landing. Hmm, that makes sense. If the bus has been rear-ended, exit through the front door. Yeah, that's it. If this bus is on fire, try to get out of it. Man, thank God I read this. It all makes sense now."

The next morning, the bus is about as full as it ever gets, and naturally Kevin is still seated by himself. Tracy appears, and Kevin admonishes the empty air next to him in front of a number of his schoolmates for ruining his workout.

"I was prepared to finally lift one of the weights! I was in the zone!"

She tells him that it was much more important that he read the handout, as he's going to need it. Now, a smarter child might have tread more carefully around such a purposefully ominous statement, especially when it is received while in communication with the dead. But Kevin has weightlifting and crying to think about, so he blindly barrels on ahead to the inevitable response.

"How do you know?"

As the last of the words leaves his lips, the final cosmic tumbler clicks into place, and star quarterback Hamhead in the back of the bus makes an astute observation. "Hey, look what that pick-up's doing."

What the pick-up is, in fact, doing is attempting to overtake a bus by cutting into the oncoming lane. Unfortunately, there is also a van attemping to continue being a functioning automobile in that lane. The pick-up swerves back into the right lane, wherein the bus is still engrossed in its attempt to be a vehicle staying on the road. So really it is plain to see that there were multiple failures on all parts here.

Given that pick-up trucks are naturally intimidating vehicles and that Obi Wan was driving this particular evening on his way to the Farmer's Market, the truck manages to avoid simply crunching into the side of a bus four times its size by Force Pushing it off the road. The bus rolls through a field of grass and brush, with the driver still hammering the gas apparently, and heads for an upright toothpick someone left out.

Surely that won't be a problem, but--

Oh.

The bus continues on its path to Hell and finally comes to a stop with its front end hanging over a cliff which drops into a local rock quarry. The kids all freak out and start moshing in the middle of the bus, with some of them seemingly trying to push their way to the front of the bus. Sounds like somebody didn't read their bus safety rules. #36: Do not exit the front door if there is more than a ten foot drop to the floor below. Tracy instructs Kevin to quiet the kids down.

"..H-Hey everybody.."

"Louder!"

"..Hey every--wait, why did you do all this in the first place? You knew this was going to happen?"

"I thought if you guys didn't make it, I could have some friends. It's lonely haunting a bus all by yourself."

"That's.. weird.. *ahem* Hey everyb--Wait, you said you knew this driver. This is the same guy who was driving when you got killed? What the hell's wrong with him? Why didn't you use your ghostly influence to get him retired or something instead of nagging me with instructional pamphlets?"

*shrug* "Iunno."

"I am beginning to have serious misgivings about this relationship. *ahem* Hey everybody!"

"Clear the aisle so we can get out the emergency door!"

"Psst! Better see if everyone's okay!"

"Goddammit, do you want to do this? Look, is anyone hurt?"

A voice from near the front. "Andrea's bleeding and the driver--"

"Good! Get the first aid kit and drag her out of here. Would you like to spell out in my Alphabits what we're going to do with the driver, Ghostwriter?"

"First aid kits sometimes have ammonia capsules. Asshole."

"Lucky I happen to be one of the 5% of kids my age who know what ammonia capsules are."

The last of the kids heads out the back, but not before dispensing some helpful advice. "Everytime someone jumps out there's less weight to balance the front. This bus is going to nosedive any second." He hops out the back, and the bus lurches forward in agreement.

"..You never told me about that!"

"What do you want from me? I wasn't killed in a physics accident."

Kevin snaps the capsule and wafts it under the driver's nose (or maybe he's offering him a toke), and the two race as fast as an old injured bus driver can race out the emergency door. As soon as they're out (and they convince one of the students not to try to go back for her clarinet), the bus takes a dive off the cliff and.. well, they actually pushed a bus off a cliff.

Kevin doesn't have time to notice something so awesome, nor does he even notice the love and acclaim of the group who praise him for saving their lives. He passes up his one attempt to be popular with the crowd he's longed to be a part of for so long, and why is that? Because he's looking for the ghost.

His calls of "Tracy!" echo across the quarry walls, while something not far removed from the Lonely Man Theme from the Incredible Hulk plays in the background. In the end, he catches only a brief glimpse of her, waving goodbye, and then is left to wallow in his renewed loneliness. He has the attention, for now, of those who could become his friends, but he no longer cares; all that matters to him is the first girl to show him kindness, the first one to care. The one who's gone now, never to return. The one who has left him, like they all do, alone. But at least he got a pamphlet.