The School Bus Symbol Analysis

School buses appear in some form or another in almost all the stories in the collection, and their various forms represent the collection’s focus on the importance of looking at things in multiple ways. In some stories, like in “How to Look (Both) Both Ways” and “How a Boy Can Become a Grease Fire,” the school bus appears as an actual school bus, a large, yellow vehicle that ferries kids to and from school. But in “How a Boy Can Become a Grease Fire,” Gregory Pitts also sees a pattern on Sandra’s shirt that looks like school buses falling from the sky—it’s a pattern of yellow rectangles on a blue background, but through Gregory’s watery and painful eyes, the pattern blurs and becomes falling school buses. This illustrates how a person’s perspective and experiences—such as Gregory’s watery eyes, and the fact that he’s crying because he put mentholated VapoRub on his lips—changes how people see things. In other stories, like “The Low Cuts Strike Again,” Bit tells Trista that he’ll write his assignment to imagine himself as an object about being a flying school bus, while Cinder and Cynthia laugh about a school bus falling from the sky in “Ookabooka Land.” In these instances, the bus exists in a person’s imagination as something more than it actually is—Trista even observes that if Bit writes about being a flying school bus, he’ll actually be a spaceship. The school bus becomes a jumping-off point to inspire characters to think outside the box and use their imaginations—another form of looking at something “both ways.”

This symbolism becomes especially clear in the final story, “The Broom Dog.” The first several pages of the story lists all the things a bus can be to kids, from a courtroom to a stage, a nurse’s cot to a science lab. Every kid who rides the bus sees it differently—and what the bus is changes depending on the day and what’s going on in its passengers’ lives. The story goes on to detail Canton’s process of healing from trauma after his mom, the crossing guard Ms. Post, was hit by a bus a year ago. The bus suddenly becomes something terrifying to Canton after this, but the custodian, Mr. Munch, makes Canton a pretend emotional support dog out of a broom head. At the end of the story, Ms. Post observes that the well-loved broom dog looks more like a school bus—and as Canton tosses the broom/dog/school bus into the sky and catches it again, he imagines that a bus is actually falling from the sky. Canton learns to look at the broom head—and school buses—in many different ways.