The Great Flying Bus Prank War

This story happens on a flying school bus! Our field trip driver, Mrs. Okoye, found the big yellow bus with wings in the back lot and said, “Eh, let’s try it.” We were flying over mountains and clouds shaped like breakfast foods on the way to the Grand Canyon. My comedy partner Maya, my friend Theo, his cat Duchess, and I got the back seats. They were the best seats, obviously, because that is where the bumps are.

The prank war started. Theo opened his juice box, and it sprayed him right in the glasses, because Maya had poked a tiny hole in it. She went, “Oops!” in a perfect impression of Theo’s own voice. Theo wiped his glasses, pulled out his clipboard, and wrote PRANK WAR: MAYA 1, THEO 0. He said, super calm, “This means war.” I had never been so excited in my entire life.

Theo waited until Maya fell asleep against the window. Then he very carefully swapped her mismatched socks so they matched. When she woke up, she looked down and screamed like she saw a ghost, “WHO DID THIS?!” The whole bus turned around. Theo just wrote MAYA 1, THEO 1 on his clipboard and went back to reading his Grand Canyon fact book like nothing happened.

Maya went BIG. She snuck up front, grabbed the bus microphone, and did a perfect Mrs. Okoye voice: “Attention passengers, Theo has volunteered to sing the national anthem!” The whole bus started chanting, “THE-O, THE-O!” But the real Mrs. Okoye turned around to see who took her mic and let go of the wheel for one second. The flying bus did a full loop-the-loop! Popcorn went everywhere, Theo’s clipboard was flying, and Duchess was stuck to the ceiling like a fluffy white starfish.

The bus leveled out and Mrs. Okoye yelled, “NO MORE PRANKS!” Everybody froze, except me, because I was laughing so hard I got the hiccups. Then Theo went pale and said, “The clipboard. The clipboard went out the window.” That clipboard had the whole field trip plan on it: the map, the snack schedule, and Mrs. Okoye’s directions to the Grand Canyon. So now we were a flying bus, in the clouds, with zero idea where we were going.

Maya and Theo looked at each other and for the first time all day, they were on the same team. Theo said, “I memorized the map, mostly,” and Maya said, “I can do an impression of a GPS.” They got to work, with Theo pointing and Maya going, “In two hundred feet, turn left at the cloud shaped like a waffle.” But then Duchess climbed onto the dashboard, stared out the windshield, and started meowing at one exact spot in the clouds. We followed the cat.

We landed right at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and stuck to the windshield was Theo’s clipboard! It had flown out the window and come back around during the loop-the-loop. Maya and Theo both reached for it at the same time. Theo said, “Truce?” and Maya said, “Truce,” in her own voice for once. Then Theo wrote on the clipboard: MAYA 1, THEO 1, DUCHESS 1000. We all agreed the cat won the prank war by not doing a single prank.