There is nothing on earth that induces more unmitigated terror than spotting a bus full of those unholy sadistic creatures known as high school students.  It may be a bright, sunny day but dark clouds suddenly rain down acid 70’s memories where getting tortured by Idi Amin was more preferable option than catching the school bus home.

Whoever said schooldays are the best days of your life has either had a frontal lobotomy, years of regressive psychotherapy or was home-schooled by a clingy mother.  Or all three.  If you had red hair and freckles, was a nerd, a fatty or a four-eyes you always attracted unwanted attention from the kids who stalked and preyed upon those lower down the food chain.

My daughter was explaining in graphic detail to my just starting high school son about that mobile torture chamber known as the school bus and it would appear that the unwritten rules haven’t changed over the decades.  The real scary kids, the school shooters, the druggies and the cool dudes sit on the back seats, the plastic Barbies sit in front of them, the normal kids sit in the middle.  The weakest links either stand in the aisle or hang around the front somewhere between the Bermuda Triangle of the yellow line, the bus driver and the automatic door.  Bullies at the back and the bullied at the front.  When everyone knows their place harmony reigns and it’s a smooth ride.

Where you sit on the school bus is designated by your position in the school pecking order and the social and political ramifications are severe if you end up sitting in the wrong seat. 

Eggs, half-eaten apples and “water” balloons that contain fluid other than water get hurled at the back of your head and your back-pack, formerly known as the old grey school bag, gets tossed out the window along with the dying remnants of your low self-esteem.  My son, like myself, quickly learned that aside from the bus-drivers lap, the Bermuda triangle is by far the safest place to be.

I can clearly remember the sheer horror of accidentally ending up at the back of the bus once which housed the future psychopaths who, while everyone else was home doing homework or watching The Partridge Family, would be out mindlessly stomping on snails or plucking the wings off butterflies.  I got teased, taunted, slapped and spat upon simply for being the wrong person, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

Normally it’s impossible to get past the gate-keepers preventing entry to the inner sanctum of the back of the bus unless the human crush pushes you through and then, like a dingo caught in a steel trap, you can’t escape.  This is when you become the snail or the butterfly.

Even now as an adult there’s an invisible force-field which prevents me from passing a certain point on buses where my blood pressure rises ominously along with my anxiety levels and imaginary ants start to crawl along my back. 

It’s no wonder people don’t want to catch public transport anymore which is probably why there are so many one person cars clogging up the freeways.