Many years ago I was a young scofflaw.

Me and the boys in 1997. Colorized.

When I was a boy there was a particular substitute teacher that most of us hated. Lets call her Mrs. Johnson. She was one of those rare assholes who are overly strict but at the same time unable to keep order in a classroom. She hated kids, but enjoyed tormenting them. Substitute teaching was the perfect job for her with a captive batch of victims but no responsibility to teach anything. This particular substitute hated the smart kids and the creative kids most of all, which put me on her bad side immediately. Mrs. J was also a school bus driver, which is the important part of the story.

In 1997 halloween was on a friday. No big deal, right? Wrong. In the 1990s halloween was not the watered down trunk or treat nonsense parents do to keep their kids safe in the 2020s. Any kid too old to trick or treat but too young to face criminal charges was planning mischef. So on holidays in which toilet papering was tradition the school bus drivers would take the buses home and park them where there wouldn’t be a big group of unattended buses as a tempting target in the school lot. Mrs. J lived on the street behind my house and left the bus parked in an empty lot across from her house. The thing was less than 200 yards from my house with plenty of overgrown privet bushes and such to creep through to access the target.

We left the bus alone on halloween. Mrs. J had eyes like a harpy and loved pecking children’s livers out of their squirming bodies as they screamed their last. We knew she would be watching. We waited until saturday evening. She was confident that whomever(us) had toilet papered the usual targets on halloween was out of paper and satisfied. Fool. No goblin is ever without paper and is never satisfied with the current level of mischef. She was out on some errands so we crept into the bus via the rear door and toilet papered everything below window level. It was a masterpice, with bits wrapped around the legs of the seats, some in the pedals, plenty crammed into the seat cracks. It was all artfully decorated to cause the most time to pick up. Plenty of short bits were scattered around. If she looked in she wouldn’t see anything until she actually got onto the bus. My friends finished their papering and got out silently. I added the finishing touches by urinating down the entire length of the center aisle.

She retired from substitute teaching not long after that.