The students of Parker Elementary school, or specifically the ones who rode Bus 7 home in the afternoon, huddled around the windows of the long yellow vehicle, confused and baffled by what had just transpired. Bus 7 was one of three buses that picked up students on the east side of the schoolyard, and being that Bus 7 also happened to service an advanced learning program not far from Parker Elementary, it was very common for Bus 7 to arrive a few minutes after the other buses on the school’s east end had already departed, fully loaded. Such had been the case today, when Bus 7 pulled up several minutes after Bus 11 and Bus 13 had driven away, and the children, ranging between the ages of 5 to 12, about 20 students in all, boarded.
               
                Or that is to say, all but one of the students had begun to board. One child, a young girl of the age of 9 with auburn hair and soft grey eyes, remained at the end of the line as her friends stepped onto the bus. She had bent down to tie the laces on her black and green converse shoes. To say that her sense of fashion was unique or perhaps misaligned would be an understatement. A pair of thick red and grey argyle socks rose from the ankles of her old and dingy footwear, disappearing into the black capris pants at her calves. These, like the socks and sneakers, were either hand me downs of a third or even fourth generation, or simply saw so much use by the little girl as to have nearly worn out before their time, and like the rest of her clothing she seemed to have nearly outgrown it all.

                A just slightly pudgy belly peeked out from the waist of the jeans and bottom of her green tee, a white cartoonish rabbit smiling a faded smile emblazoned on the stomach of the shirt, and as the girl, Mandy, knelt down to tie her shoes her pants slid and exposed a plump plumber’s crack, barely contained by a pair of old soft pink panties with ‘Frosted Buns’ printed across the cheeks. Her friends barely noticed however, if they could be called her friends. She liked them well enough, and though one or two of them might have been rather nice and considered to be real friends to Mandy, most of the other kids just found the girl to be entirely weird. The kind of kid who would eat a mayo packet from the cafeteria without putting it on anything, or who might blurt out something entirely inappropriate in conversation as if they completely lacked that all-important social buffer most people began to develop at this age that told them what to say and what to keep to yourself. Mostly Mandy was weird because she went through each day in some strange, absent-minded daze, thinking odd Mandy thoughts lost in her own little world.

                So it was that today, like many other days, Mandy was preoccupied with her shoelaces and a dozen peculiar thoughts that delayed the simple task, and made her the last person to board Bus 7. Had Bus 7 been there when she finished. Standing upright and shifting her backpack into a more comfortable spot on her shoulders, Mandy took a step towards the bus only to find that it, and the other children, were gone. She looked up and down the street, somewhat distraught. It had just left like that? It couldn’t wait a couple of minutes for her to fasten her laces? Furrowing her brow, her temper boiling up inside of her, she swung a foot out onto the street and began angrily walking home, the sun beating down on her. It was a good dozen blocks to her house, at least, and she had been waiting outside for the bus for nearly fifteen minutes already. She didn’t especially relish the thought of getting home soaked in sweat, particularly on a day she’d forgotten to wear deodorant.

                As for the children ON the bus, they were fretting over a much larger matter. That being Mandy, ironically, who stood off in the distance from the bus, towering incomprehensibly huge, casting the now miniscule vehicle in her titanic shadow. Somehow, as the last student before Mandy boarded, Bus 7 had dwindled almost instantaneously in size, until the bus full of children around Mandy’s own age was only about the size of a breath mint. As the students frantically moved about the bus, looking outside of the windows in shock and awe, the bus driver reluctantly rose from his seat and stepped onto the small stairs at the bus’s door, looking out, perplexed. Unfortunately for him, this proved to be a very bad idea. As Mandy rose, and took that first step towards the bus she had not yet realized was gone, her foot thundered down and hit the ground with such force as to send the bus several feet (to the shrunken driver and children) into the air, causing the middle aged man to tumble out the door and onto the pavement.

                Before he had a chance to collect himself, or even think to try and rush back into the bus and relative safety, a gigantic, worn down black rubber sole filled the sky, unfathomably massive, flecks of dirt and grass and who knows what debris dotting the old ruddy bottom of the child’s converse. Some of the children were able to watch as the darkness fell over them all, and the converse sneaker, the sidestrip of which alone was several times taller than the bus, came slamming down, the bus narrowly escaping complete obliteration. The bus driver was not as lucky, disappearing with hardly a squeak as the rubber overtook him not even three yards from the vehicle he had fallen out of.

                At this second earth-shattering step from the gargantuan classmate, the students began to panic, screaming in fear, not knowing what to do. It hardly would have mattered had any of them decided to try any course of action at that moment, because one sliding step later, the recently tied shoelace of the titanic Mandy’s sneaker brushed against the bus, dragging it forward. The huge, powerful loose threads of the very old shoelace entangled the bus, strong enough at the bus’s current size to lift it without any strain, the weight of the vehicle and children on board negligible compared to the sturdiness of hand me down lacing.

                Mandy, completely oblivious to the plight of her friends and classmates at her feet, continued on the long, hot walk home, her temper rising as she muttered and grumbled under her breath angrily at the unfairness of being left behind. The wailing and screaming of her peers far below her completely escaped her notice, the bus hardly even perceptible to the ‘little’ girl, no more worthy of her attention than any ant or aphid she squashed or smeared on a daily basis without ever even knowing.