The first chapter (after the prologue) is called “Terminal.” Because it involves death, and also a bus. Ah, wordplay.

I wrote that introductory bit a couple of days after the big event. Back then, I suspected it would all get blown out of proportion and lead to disaster, but now I don’t suspect that. I know that that’s what happened, and I also know that more people need to know about it so everyone can finally find out what happened. Also so I can make some money. As you’ll see at the end, I’m going through some financial troubles at the moment.

SPOILERS- There is absolutely no reason for “everyone (to) finally find out what happened” after the story’s end, any more than there was any reason to keep it secret in the first place. There’s not much reason for anything in this story.

Also, nothing gets blown out of proportion. If anything, I think most of the characters could show a little more emotion over the attempted murder of four people.

I didn’t know how we all ended up on the same bus, but I was sure it was going to become clearer after a while (I was right, as usual. Well done Anja).

Great- she’s not just a drunk sociopath, but a smug drunk sociopath. Nice going, past-me.

The way I ended up on it was pretty weird, though, and even then I didn’t think for a minute it was a coincidence. I was in a German lesson, with my eyes on the clock, willing it to be three-thirty so I could go home, when one of the office staff came in, saying that Mrs Eastoe, the head, wanted to see me in her office. This was a massive surprise for me and everyone else in the class, because the article somehow managed to get one thing right about me. I am hardworking, and a right little goody-two-shoes as well. I think I should point out, though, that this is more out of fear than respect for the rules. If I thought I had half a chance of getting away with it, I’d run amok.

I’ve no doubt you would, Miss Smug Drunk Sociopath.

But as it is I’m a wimp, so it was anyone’s guess why Mrs Eastoe wanted to see me. All the way to her office my mind kept coming up with horrible possibilities. Maybe one of my family had died. Maybe someone had committed some evil crime and blamed it on me. Maybe there were extraterrestrials in Mrs Eastoe’s office, demanding to eat whoever’s names she picked out of a hat…

This is the first instance in a pattern of past-me not having any idea where to put the comic relief.

Anja is kept waiting for an hour and a half, then told that Mrs Eastoe doesn’t want to see her after all:

She apologised for keeping me waiting this long, told me that the office must have made a mistake and checked that I’d be able to get home alright, which I could. I take the bus home and my parents don’t usually get back until about six. My little brother would probably be round his friend’s house, so he wouldn’t be worried either. If I’d disappeared completely that evening (which I did) nobody would have missed me until six-thirty.

Anja’s parents and brother will not be appearing in this story, because they spend the entire length of it thinking she’s dead! And they still haven’t been told she’s alive by the end, even though by then the villain is dead and she has no excuse for keeping the secret anymore! This renders the whole story unbelievably creepy, in case you couldn’t tell!

So anyway, at five o’clock I was waiting at the bus stop on my own. If the bus hadn’t come along only five minutes late (not the usual ten or fifteen) the dark and the silence would probably have severely creeped me out. It didn’t help that there were only four other people on the bus, all men. Well, technically Gary and Joe were boys, I guess, being as they were only a couple of years older than me, but my point was that I was the only female of the species on the bus. At least they didn’t seem to be in a gang or anything. That would probably be the dictionary definition of “creepy”, especially since it was October and already quite dark outside.

Alright, this paragraph can stay- it’s a fairly realistic reaction for a fifteen-year-old girl to have. It could do with being a bit longer, to build up the atmosphere a bit, but I didn’t care about that at the time.  I wanted to get on with making fun of the other characters.

Anyway, let me give you a mental image of this bus. At the front is whoever it was doing the driving, who would eventually turn out to be “the only survivor of the tragic accident” (or rather, the only one the papers knew about), because s/he was at the front. The seats near the front are pretty much unsittable on, due to some disgusting stains which I’m really hoping were food. Actually, I’m guessing that whoever wanted us dead got on the bus before us and made sure the seats were in this condition, forcing us all to sit near the back, so it probably was food. Anyway, that’s not important.

The whole plot hinges on the fact that none of them thought to stand. And I have no idea how the villain managed to ruin all those seats without anybody noticing.

Sitting on the first non-disgusting seat is Keith Daly, described in the papers as “a real character with many stories to tell, but underneath it all quite a lonely man.” This, as you may know, is obituary speak for “an insufferable old git who winges all the time, and can’t see why no woman in her right mind would be seen dead within a million miles of him.” Spending a few days in the same house as him was hell on earth. I think he must have had a real thing against anything modern, especially (as I later found out to my cost) women exercising their rights. Judging by the glowering gazes Estelle kept throwing him, I’d say she agreed with me.

This chapter was originally written in present-tense, which is one of the reasons it’s worded so strangely. And go ahead, fifteen-year-old-me, tell the readers which characters they should hate. They’ll never figure it out of their own.

(SPOILERS- Mr Daly’s dislike of Anja actually has very little to do with “women exercising their rights.)

That pale, enigmatic-looking person staring out of the window and drawing in a sketchpad a few seats back is Gary Wolf, although Gary Bushbaby would be more appropriate. The first thing I noticed about him was that his eyes were big, but none of the rest of him was. Gary was described in the papers as “a bright and talented child who triumphed in the face of adversity,” which, judging by what he told me later, probably means “someone who had no friends because everyone was jealous of him, was called a nerd and a geek by pretty much all the kids in school and a few of the teachers, and all in all had a fairly hellish time.” This isn’t to say that I thought Gary was a nerd and a geek. Even at the start he seemed quite nice, even if he was annoyingly shy. I could see he wasn’t one of those smart people who shove their knowledge in your face and act all superior (I think I can be one of those occasionally).

At least she’s self-aware.

And let’s just get this out of the way now- Gary is essentially Elijah Wood’s character from The Faculty, alright? In fact, every male love interest I came up with around this time was Elijah Wood’s character from The Faculty. It was a film that had a big impact on me.

(A few years before that, most of my male love interests were essentially Adam Rickitt. So it could have been worse.)

Anyway, on to the other two, sitting together at the back, talking loudly and getting damning looks from Mr Daly. Joe Foster, as I’ve said, was about Gary’s age, and the newspapers didn’t mention him a lot. All they called him was “a promising young man” and “a Jack-the-lad type who always had time for his friends.” Mostly because he never had to do a real job. Joe lived with his great aunt, who was loaded with a capital L.

Yeah, I can see where you’re going with this. Someone else who wanted the great-aunt’s money must have been involved in the “accident.” To be honest, you’re right. Well done. But there was still a big mystery over why that person would want to wipe out a whole bus just to get rid of Joe. They could have just shoved him off a cliff and made it look like an accident. Or made a heavy statue collapse on him.

Foreshadowing! Clumsy, clumsy foreshadowing!

Anyway, we’ll get to what happened in a second, so be patient. There’s still two more people to get through, although the papers really couldn’t think of anything to say about Mark, a friend who Joe was staying with. This is mainly because shouty, enthusiastic, boisterous and slightly superficial people don’t look good in obituaries. The papers couldn’t just translate Mark’s personality into obituary speak.

…We’ve just had the papers describe Joe as “a Jack-the-lad type who always had time for his friends.” Right there. In the previous paragraph.

In order to make him sound like A Tragic Loss To the World, they would have had to lie. This is kind of weird, because I think that the world would be a poorer place if there wasn’t anyone like Mark hanging around making stupid comments and never taking anything seriously. But all they could say about Mark was that he was the son-in-law of Victoria Jewel. You might not have heard of her (I hadn’t), but apparently she was in quite a few films in the 70s. Estelle’s her daughter, and I’m not sure how much she told her mum about what happened. Victoria lived in America, anyway, so she hadn’t got much chance of hearing about it from someone else.

Because e-mail doesn’t exist. Despite the fact that this story was written in 2002.

You know about the last person on the bus. Anja Cleary (i.e.- me) has been described as a lot of things since she supposedly died, but one of the most ridiculous is “beautiful.” No way am I beautiful. I’d say I was pretty, but that would be it. Well, sort of pretty. On a good day. In the right light. If you ignore my nose.

The naive young heroine never sees herself as beautiful, of course. To improve her self-esteem, she has to learn to see herself through the adoring love interest’s eyes.

Look, the point is that Joe suddenly stopped talking to Mark when we reached the first stop. A car stopped a few metres behind the bus, and someone got out. No one would have noticed him crouching conspicuously behind the bus if Joe hadn’t been looking right at him. He proceeded to save everyone’s life by screaming at us to get out now, and sliding through an open window (kind of dangerous since the bus had started to move again).

Just how big are the windows on this bus?

Mark and Joe pull the others out with them, and…

The light fixtures, which had been right above us, all exploded in unison. Then there was another explosion, from the engine or something, probably, and the back half of the bus collapsed in flames.

And at no point, in the two years after this horrific accident, did anybody bother to check for bodies. They just assumed that everybody dissolved into atoms, and held the funerals anyway. Oh, and apparently the bus driver didn’t hear Joe shouting for everybody to escape through the window, even though it seems to have happened quite a few seconds before the explosion. At the very least, wouldn’t be have looked around after the lights burst and seen that none of his passengers were there?

I can’t tell you for sure what was going through the minds of Joe, Gary, Mr Daly and Mark. But I can tell you what was going through mine.

Just before the terror and relief kicked in, I thought, This is so cool!

She’s just kidding about the terror and relief.

Also, note that, at this point, Anja doesn’t know that the bus driver survived. Classy girl, that Anja.