This semester, I park my car in an area that is designated as "on-campus." I can only assume that this phrase is short for "on-campus, but only within walking distance if you have hiking boots, or in the winter, those shoes that look like tennis racquets." So I ride the bus to and from my car, because I don't have hiking boots and I only have one tennis racquet.
Riding the bus puts me in a position I haven't been in in many years. Of course, that position would be sitting upright with a heavy book bag in my lap, very close to someone loud or sweaty or both.
I rode the bus for years. In elementary school, I was a second loader, meaning I was in the group of kids that lived far out in the country. The buses took the city kids home, then came back and took the rest of us home.
Second load was cool. You got to hang out with the rest of the second load kids in your grade in a classroom. Sometimes the teacher would play Mad Libs or something like that. Sometimes we were just allowed to talk quietly. And then sometimes we abused the privilege to talk quietly, and then we were allowed to talk not at all, which is called being "put on silence" in the grade school vernacular. But we all sat around until we heard the magic words on the intercom "Bus two forty-four. Second load of bus two forty-four," or whatever your bus number was. There were several buses that had second loads. Seems like 244, my bus, was always one of the last ones to pick up second loaders.
And then, when our bus was called, we all rushed out of the room, down the halls, and out the door to the bus lot. If you were in the third or the fourth grade, you walked as fast as you possibly could without running (because then you'd get in trouble), because the third and fourth grade classrooms were the farthest away from the bus lot. We were all terrified of missing the bus, because then the school would have to call your parents to come and get you, and then you'd be in for it.
The teachers played on our fears of missing the bus, or being bus-left, as we called it. If we had been particularly rotten during second load, the supervising teacher would make us stay seated after our bus had been announced until we were deemed well-behaved enough to go. We would sit at the edges of our seats, clutching our bookbags to our chests, our eyes wide and watching the teacher, visions of having our parents come to the school and pick us up looming large in our heads. After what seemed like ages, the teacher would let us go, and we would do double-time to the bus lot, never relieved until we were standing safely in the line that formed in front of the bus door. And Lord help the third and fouth graders whose teachers played this cruel little game of delays.
Sometimes, if you were really good in school, your teacher kept you in the classroom to clap erasers or file papers or sew Nike clothing instead of sending you to the classroom where the other second loaders waited. This was a great privilege and the position was much envied, especially when the teacher supervising the second loaders that week was known to put the room on silence without provocation.
Second load kids were different. Nevermind the fact that we got home from school forty-five minutes later than the first loaders. You were defined by your bus load. In a time before we could judge and label each other based on economic background, athletic ability, or supposed promiscuity, we judged each other based on bus routes. It seems to me now that second load kids were a little rougher around the edges - maybe as a group we got into trouble a little more often than the cleaner cut first loaders. Maybe because we were rural kids, or maybe because we were stuck in school an extra half hour every day.
Once I got into middle school, I found myself suddenly a first loader. There was only one second load bus at my middle school, and buddy, those kids were weird. They had to wait all together in the gym, long after I boarded bus 187 and gone home. They never got to clap erasers or play Mad Libs. They were never true second loaders in my mind, because that term died at our fifth grade graduation. Besides, we were all old enough to call each other sluts and dorks and jocks now, and we no longer needed bus routes to tell us who are friends were. But we still remembered our second load days like we were veterans from some war.
Yeah, I was a second loader. Bus 244.
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