JediTalentAgent posted:

"I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it..."
"You can't have it!"

The lyrics of an old song from The Who played on the bus's radio..

Valerie didn't weep as she avoided any further contact with the infant, while school bus merely continued to fume in park. It said nothing, but Valerie knew what it was thinking.

"I know. Your magic. You're magic..." she said, bitterly. "I kept my word. I gave birth to it, but I said nothing about keeping it around after!"

Valerie took a small basket to a porch with a sign on the door that read, "Perlstein", knocked on the door and ran back to the bus. She didn't even care to wait to see if anyone would even answer the door, she and the bus just left.

She felt the bus start to tend towards the interstate offramp, and put her hands on the steering wheel.

"No..." she muttered. "I'm at the wheel from now on. From now on, I'm driving you."

There was silence.

"I'm. Driving. You." she intoned more seriously, gripping the wheel with force strong enough to melt her fingerprints into it. "Say it."

The bus broke and gave into her.

Valerie giggled, then laughed. She started singing along with The Who song from the tape deck, her voice becoming more and more absurd, almost mocking.

"No, no more of that. I think maybe you should go 'unleaded' for a while. I don't think you can be trusted after all this." she said to seemingly no one. "In fact, I think maybe I should just keep my name. MS. Frizzle sounds so much better than Mrs. Bus, doesn't it?"

---

The Perlsteins never told their son of how he was adopted. They family decided to keep it a secret for their own reasons. Still, despite being healthy, smart, and social to varying degrees, there was something very off about him in ways that always made his parents uneasy.

Where had the eyeglasses come from? Why did he have so many yellow shirts? No one ever recalled getting those for him.

The two most absurd thing was perhaps the extremes of the most normal and abnormal for a kid his age.

He had a fear of a teacher. It was normal for a kid his age to find a controlling adult figure with massive amounts of power to be scary, but she wasn't that. This Frizzle lady wasn't some strict headmaster type, but some goofy aging hippie. He'd never had such an anxiety-filled relationship with any teacher until Ms. Frizzle.

The second thing was a fear of field trips. What kid was afraid of field trips? Every kid loves missing out on a day of school to go to a farm or a zoo or something like that.

"Maybe Arnold just has a fear of her because being one of the few redheads in school made him sort of unique for a long time," his mother suggested, seeking out any possible reason. "Maybe he thinks she's stealing his defining trait or something like that. Maybe, maybe he's figured out he's adopted and he sees her as another redhead old enough to be his mom, or maybe he sees her as some kind of threat to us being his parents. They spend a lot of time together outside of the school, with her taking that class on all those field trips all the time. Maybe that's something he's thinking that's the same as when we take him on vacation in the Summer, in a way, right?"

"I don't know," Arnold's dad stared out the window, wanting to finish the conversation before Arnold got home. He'd recalled a moment where he...

No, that wasn't right. It couldn't be.

Arnold's father was about to tell his wife about something strange he thought he'd imagined to himself and never thought to mention. The night that they'd found Arnold on their porch, he swore he heard a bus driving off. That was impossible though, wasn't it?

They were in the suburbs. The only buses that...

Arnold's father blood ran cold.

The only buses that come out to the suburbs are the school buses.