The Haunted School Bus

The last bus home leaves Ridgeline High at six-forty - and on foggy October nights, the bus that comes sighing out of the murk is not the bus in the system. It is District Bus 9, retired in 1987 after a field-trip return that was never signed off: a bus whose route never closed, because its paperwork never did. It still runs the old stops - the closed elementary school, the drained quarry, the fairgrounds that moved. It still collects its riders. Maya Okafor, fourteen, has spent the whole school year making sure she is on every list there is. After a mid-year move left her administratively invisible for two weeks - no roster, no locker card, a yearbook photo captioned 'Student, 9th Grade' - she knows exactly what it costs not to be counted. So when the old bus arrives with a silent driver and her boarding scan fails with a flat gray line, Maya does the one thing she trusts: she counts. Five riders get on. The driver’s mirror shows six. Her name is missing from the manifest. And the seat she has taken - seat 13 - is the seat that belonged to Wren Halloway, who rode this bus in 1987 and never arrived anywhere. As the fog thickens and the windows fill with 1987, the bus starts counting Maya back - twice. To get everyone home, she will have to finish what no one has finished in thirty-nine years: close the route on paper, with a roll call of all twenty-one names, a driver’s signature, and a witness the list cannot file. A scary novel for readers ages 10-14.