A school bus picked up my kid four days ago. After he was gone, I just went about my day like I always do. When school was over, I waited at the end of our driveway but a school bus never came. When I called the school, they said my son had never arrived. “He got on the bus,” I told them. There was silence. “We don’t doubt he got on a bus,” they told me, “but it wasn’t one of ours.” When I started freaking out, they told me I wasn’t alone. The same thing had happened to 18 other children this morning and the police were on top of it. When I asked what that meant they simply said, “They’re working on it. They know.”
I keep going back to that morning trying to remember something, anything, but the same things that I remember are the reason I wasn’t paying attention. The bus was yellow. It was long. It had wheels. What the fuck am I supposed to remember about a bus? The thing pulls up and you kiss your kid and that’s that. Five times a week and the routine gets so redundant a submarine might have pulled up and I’m not sure I would have noticed.
Three days ago, the parents of the missing kids got together at the Rec Center to put their heads together and support each other and grieve. Everyone was crying and rerunning the theories they have for days. Some of them are absolutely batshit. There wasn’t any complicated thread connecting the kids, really. They were all in elementary school and lived in the same neighborhood and that was about it. Some people think the school is covering something up. Or maybe the bus company. But all the drivers are accounted for and the school’s got nothing to gain. Everyone local knows about it already and some parents are keeping their kids home until this is figured out.
Two days ago, the parents received something in their mailbox. It must have come in the normal mail. In a little white envelope, there was a drawing from their child. All were of school buses exploring something different. The edge of a cliff. The bottom of the sea. A barn on fire. The thickest, blackest woods. On the back of the drawings written in cursive was the same black handwriting, neat as a crew cut: “It’s just a little trip.”
Yesterday, halfway to California the police are saying they found a field with eighteen scarecrows. Each was wearing our children’s clothes. At the edge of the field scratched in the mud in big letters were the lyrics:
THE WHEELS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROUND
ROUND AND ROUND
ROUND AND ROUND
THE WHEELS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROUND ALL THE WAY… ?
This morning I’m standing on the curb and I’ve picked up smoking again and I’m waiting for the bus to come back. I’ve done it every day, of course, in the morning and after school. Every day, I’m twice as terrified as the last.
I hear the diesel and a bus comes rolling around the corner. The bus is yellow. The bus is long. The bus has wheels. The bus has children.
But none of them are mine.