A Story By Rachel Gosling

After a lovely day of shopping (wandering around in the rain, visiting the same three shops over and over again), me and Gina (this is Gina from Year 9, by the way, not psycho Gina) went to the bus stop. I was pretty hyper, due to the fact I’d just bought Escaflowne-my favourite Japanese cartoon- on DVD, so I agreed to get the bus home with Gina even though she gets a different bus to me (Hell, I only have to walk down one more road and I’m home). So, we waited outside Browns Café for the bus and after ages and ages, who should come to the bus stop but Tom (hi Tom!). Me and Tom were pissing about, burning Sam’s Womble teddy and so on and while I was distracted, I didn’t notice our bus sail by. Gina, however, watched it go by but didn’t bother telling me until about five minutes afterwards.

“Oh, our bus just went past by the way.”
I stopped burning the womble’s face and turned to her. “What?”
“The 27 bus just went by.”
I groaned, sighed, rolled my eyes and made every sign of impatience you can think of… But then I shrugged it off and we started burning the womble again.

After a while, even this got pretty boring so we started throwing the womble under cars and stuff. Then, Tom’s bus came and before he left he threw 5p at me. And then he threw 10p at me. Don’t ask why he did this, Tom’s a very “special” boy… Anyway so Gina couldn’t believe Tom would waste 15 whole pence and we both just looked at each other and then at the coins on the floor, wondering which one would be low enough to pick them up first.

Eventually, we got over that and held a very interesting conversation about blind people, which then progressed to toilets.

“So, me, Sam and Jason were in the elevator at the library the other day and as we went in, this voice went ‘Doors now closing’ and I was all like ‘Duh, we know!’ and Sam said ‘Maybe that’s for the blind people.’ And I said ‘WHY WOULD BLIND PEOPLE GO TO A LIBRARY?????!!!!!’”
Gina laughed her head off and said, “There’s this service station with these really high tech toilets and they have instructions of what to do and they have them in Braille too for the blind people but I mean, blind people wouldn’t expect them to be there, would they? They wouldn’t just walk in and start feeling around for the instructions, would they?”
“Why did they have instructions anyway? Everyone knows how to use a toilet.”
“These were really high tech toilets that clean themselves and the doors open after twenty minutes all by themselves!”
“Oh my god!”
How she knew they opened after twenty minutes remains a mystery.

Anyway, so after about half an hour of waiting, my mother called.
“Where are you?”
“I’m just waiting for the bus now. Why?”
“I want to go shopping! Hurry up!”

Oh that’s nice. Never mind the ‘You’ve been gone for hours, we were so worried about you!’ so long as somebody can look after Charlie while they run around Tesco for 7 hours.

“Who was that?” Gina asked as I hung up.
“My mum. She wants me to come home right away.”
“We’d better go to the church then.”

I looked up at her, confused. How was going to church going to help me get home? What was going to happen? Was Jesus going to teleport me home? Would I step into the confession booth and be magically whisked away in a Mr Benn fashion?
“W-Why?”
“Because that’s where the 27 stops.”
I froze. Actually, what am I saying? I didn’t freeze: my jaw dropped, my eyes bulged, my fists trembled as I resisted the temptation of smacking a nearby tourist…
“Well then… well then, wha-? Whuuu- Huh? Why the hell have we been waiting here for an hour, then?!”
“I don’t know!”

We both ran towards the church with about one minute to get there before the bus beat us to it.
“Which way do we go now?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I thought you knew.”
“I thought you knew!”
“No, I was following you!”
“But I was following you!”
We both stopped in mid-argument as the 27 bus roared by. There was a split second where we both simply stared at each other…

Then we ran like hell.

We spun around the corner and slowed down to a stop as we watched the 27 bus pull out of the bus stop outside Browns and drive away…

“If we- if we-“ I stammered.
“If we’d just waited two more minutes outside Browns, we’d be on the bus right now?”
I shook my head and pointed at the sign above the bus stop. “If we’d just looked up there and spotted the number 27 in big, black letters we’d have been home hours ago…”

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!” I laughed. “I can’t believe we’re still here!”
We both laughed our heads off. We had reached the point where it didn’t really matter that we’d been sitting at a bus stop for over two hours. It was so amazingly dumb of us that if was bloody hilarious.
“I ca- I ca- I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING!!!!!!!”
And we were off again.

Suddenly, I saw a bus driving towards us. A bus with a big 27 on it.
Not daring to miss another bus, we both jumped to our feet and practically ran out in front of the bus to stop it Then we climbed aboard, laughing like loons, and finally went home.