The Finger

 This morning as I was taking my morning walk, a big yellow school bus came buzzing by me. I love seeing school buses - especially in the fall. It brings up all of these memories for me. I remember the feel of the cheap brown plastic seat fabric. I remember the thrill of getting that single seat in the very back row of the bus. I remember the sounds of kids laughing and screaming and sometimes the sound of silence. 

While most of my memories are great, I do have one memory that brings about a wave of nausea.

When I was in the third grade, I had a bus incident. The incident is something that I still think of and it still gives me a little bit of anxiety to think on.

I loved sitting in the very back of the bus. After school, the kids would file out of school and line up on the sidewalk by your bus sign. Once an orderly line was created, the driver would open the doors and let all the kids onto the bus. If you were the very first in line then you would have your pick of seats. Most kids ran to the back but some preferred the front. No one wanted to sit in the middle.

I would often try to sit in one of the back rows. If I was able to get one of those coveted seats, I was usually surrounded by a bunch of older kids. 

One day, the older kids started up a naughty game in the back of the bus. The game was simple. See a car behind the bus and give it the middle finger salute.

Look, society these days is desensitized to the middle finger. It is just not that big a deal. But back in the late 80's/early 90's the middle finger was a shocking thing - especially from children. My 8-year-old self knew the middle finger was really, really, really, really, extremely bad. It was the ultimate in naughty behavior. But here were these Catholic school kids flipping randos the bird from the back seat of our bus.

When I was sitting in the back seat one afternoon, there was an altercation between me and some older kids. The older kids wanted the back seats. They thought I should move just because I was younger. I did not want to move. A deal was made. If I were to show my middle finger to every car behind the bus, then I could sit in the back. 

I would like to give my 8-year-old self credit and say I thought about this deal a bit before accepting. But, I'm pretty sure I just said okay and got to my business.

And my business was flipping cars off. I don't know how many cars I flipped off but it was a lot. Sometimes a short bird and sometimes I held that finger up for a long time. At one point the bus stopped to drop a kid off and a small car rolled up behind the bus. I believe it was a Toyota Tercel. I proudly sat up and gave the woman in the Tercel my middle finger. The bus was stopped for awhile - longer than I would have preferred. The woman looked angry. I mean - obvi - but she looked angrier than the other people had been about the finger.

The bus started moving again, and the car followed us. I kept sneaking peeks of the woman out the back window and she was following the bus closely with an angry look on her face. I started to get nervous. As we rolled up to the next stop, one of the older kids looked out the back window and alerted the rest of us that the woman was stopped behind us and getting out of her car. 

The back of the bus was thrown into panic. This woman was not letting the middle finger roll off her back. I hit the floor. Literally. I got down flat on my stomach and army crawled under the seats toward the middle. The older kids started sneaking up towards the middle of the bus as well. The back of the bus was now completely empty.

The bus was stopped for a long time while the driver and the narc chatted. Finally, the bus driver turned around with a red, angry face. I remember her exact words. She said, "I don't believe what I just heard. And to think all of you are Catholics! WHO DID IT?! WHO DID IT?!" There was silence. Everyone on the bus knew who did it, but no one said anything. The bus driver said she would continue with the route but we had not heard the end of this.

I was freaked out. But then the night came, I went to sleep, and then the next morning I woke up. I got up and went to school. I thought it was over. That afternoon we were sitting on the bus waiting to leave school and the very scary Vice Principal stepped onto the bus. The VP was a woman who meant business. She did not fuck around. Everyone was afraid of her. Her getting on the bus was not good. She screamed at us. I don't remember what was said exactly. The gist was that the investigation would continue. They would find the finger and the person owning that finger would be punished severely.

I think about this today and am shocked at the harsh reaction to a middle finger. I should not have done it but it was also just a middle finger given to a stranger as a jape. I did not even know what the middle finger meant. At the time, though, this was the scariest thing I had gone through. I truly felt like I had committed a horrible crime.

I was so stressed about getting caught that I faked being sick for 2 days. The first day I said I was going to barf and I got to stay home with my grandma watching TV on the couch. I did not barf (although my anxiety was so bad I did feel like I could barf). The second day I again told my mom I felt like barfing. My mom was confused and was going to send me to school but I threw a fit so I got to stay home. I remember my mom whispering to my grandma to try and figure out what was going on. I think they knew I was faking but did not know why. I went back to school on the third day.

I never heard another word about the middle finger. The other kids told me the VP did visit the bus while I had been out but no one confessed. I think the point was to scare the bejesus out of us so we never did it again - which worked! But it also gave me lifelong anxiety so the joke is on me.

So, now anytime I see a yellow school bus, I think about kids flipping the bird. I think about the time that woman took to follow the bus just to tattle on a little girl giving her the finger. What a loser.