Chapter Text
The wind was cold on the back of Arnold’s neck as he sat on the curb with his trunk, but he couldn’t tell whether he was shivering from the breeze or from nerves. His parents had kissed him and tearfully wished him goodbye no more than ten minutes ago, but the ache in his back made it feel that he had been crouched on the cold, hard concrete for much longer than that.
He was already starting to have his doubts. What if nobody ever showed up — how long would he have to sit here by himself until someone found him? He hadn’t thought to bring any money for a pay phone. What if some stranger saw him sitting here all alone? What if he was kidnapped?
Maybe he should have stayed home today.
With one hand, he absentmindedly stroked the thick, ivory parchment of a half-opened letter; he had anxiously picked the burgundy wax of the seal off earlier and rolled it into a little ball that he had stuck to the side of his trunk, since there was no rubbish bin nearby. He had briefly considered simply tossing it out into the street, but that would have been littering, which was both illegal and very morally wrong.
The letter itself was the reason he was sitting out at this abandoned bus stop to begin with. It hadn’t exactly been a surprise — his cousin Janet had received a similar letter two years ago — but he had never really expected to get one himself. He honestly wasn’t sure he was pleased that he had.
He had just started to consider the possibility that he could walk home and it would be like none of this had ever happened, when he was interrupted by a sudden blur of yellow barreling around the corner and straight at him. He yelled and threw himself backward from the curb just in time for his brain to process the shape as a squat yellow school bus of the kind he had occasionally seen on American cartoons.
It screeched to a stop in front of him, the crumbling black asphalt crunching under its wheels. There was a fwoosh of air as it came to a standstill. Arnold stared up at it, chest heaving and grit pressed into the palms of his hands from the sidewalk. Large, good-natured eyes blinked down at him in place of headlamps, and the front fender curved into a welcoming smile.
The doors opened.
“Hell-oooo!” trilled the driver pleasantly. She looked down and gave Arnold a cheery wave. He scrambled to his feet, yanking his heavy trunk with him.
His first thought was that there was no way this lady wasn’t related to him somehow. She had the same wildly curly red hair, a rarity he’d only stumbled across once or twice in his short lifetime, pulled into a bun. She wore a colorful dress emblazoned with a repeating pattern of eight tiny figures like paper dolls; curiously, one of them appeared to have his hair, glasses, and striped shirt.
“You must be Arnold,” said the woman, bus-shaped earrings dangling and glinting merrily as she stood. Arnold nodded mutely. “I’m Ms Frizzle. That is, Professor Frizzle! Ah, that part always slips — ” she slid down the safety rail and landed in front of him with a flourish — “my mind.”
In one mighty motion, she heaved his trunk into the bus. Then, with a grand gesture that looked very odd directed toward the otherwise-deserted street, she called out, “All aboard!”
Arnold clambered into the bus after her and slipped into an empty first-row seat as the doors slammed shut behind him. There was a loud BANG accompanied by the slightly worrying sounds of springs popping, and suddenly they were bouncing along an entirely different road at a much faster pace than he had been expecting. He yelped and scrambled to grab the back of the metal divider in front of him as the bus skidded around the corner, tilting dangerously on two wheels.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” moaned a boy’s voice behind him, and Arnold turned around for the first time. There were six other students in the bus, each occupying a seat that was designed to fit two or maybe even three people. The voice belonged to a stocky boy in a backwards red cap, who was hanging his head out the window and looking thoroughly miserable. Sitting across from him was a black girl in a magenta jumper that looked to be at least two sizes too big for her, her voluminous brown curls tied back in a ponytail, eyeing him with an expression of intense wariness.
“He better keep aiming outside,” she muttered. The tiny black-haired girl sitting behind her, wearing an unbuttoned red waistcoat that clashed horribly with the pink shirt she wore underneath, snorted in amusement.
“Hey!” she called, and it took him a second to realize that she was talking to him. “Arnold, right?”
He nervously adjusted his glasses. “Uh-huh.”
She grinned and stuck out her hand, which Arnold shook gingerly. “I’m Wanda Li. This is … Kelsey? Kira?”
The girl in the oversized jumper raised an eyebrow in amusement. “Keesha.”
“Right! Keesha. And that sorry green-faced lump over there is Ralphie.”
Ralphie waved weakly from over by the window.
“Hello,” said Arnold. There was no question in his mind that he would forget at least one of those names in the next five minutes.
Wanda leaned forward and rested her chin on the back of the seat in front of her. Her eyes sparkled with mischief.
“I haven’t been introduced to the lot back there yet,” she said innocently, indicating the remaining three students in the back of the Bus. “Why don’t you do the honours?”
“Oh,” Arnold said faintly, “Er — ”
He was saved by a lurch as the bus came screeching to a halt, sending Wanda barreling headfirst over the seat in front of her and into Keesha’s lap.
“Oh, Carrrr-los!” trilled Professor Frizzle in the same sing-song tone she had greeted Arnold with as the doors folded open. The others were getting to their feet, grumbling; Arnold winced as he gingerly felt his newly-bruised forehead. “We’re heeee-re!”
A dark-haired boy in a blue hoodie appeared in the doorway, straining to lug a large trunk behind him. It was difficult to tell in the dim light of the streetlamps, but the entire thing appeared to be plastered with stickers.
Professor Frizzle disappeared to help with the luggage. Arnold did a double take — left on the vacated driver’s seat was what seemed to be a large, spiny, silver-green lizard, lazily watching the class with one of its swivelling yellow eyes. Arnold thought about getting up to take a closer look, then decided it was too unsettling. He wondered with an uneasy lurch in his stomach if it had been there, watching him, the whole time.
There was a loud “thump” as the sticker-covered trunk was tossed into the undercarriage of the bus, and the boy in the blue hoodie — Carlos? — came scrambling in after Professor Frizzle. He plopped down in the seat behind Ralphie just as there was another loud BANG and they were suddenly barreling down a busy street in the middle of London.
“Excellent! Everyone’s present and accounted for,” the teacher said, clapping her hands together with delight. “Now, as you all should know from your letters, my name is Valerie Frizzle, Professor of Muggle Studies at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.”
She punctuated this with the flourish of a wand that Arnold hadn’t noticed her pull out, and everyone jumped in alarm as suddenly the bus was full of silent fireworks, bursting and fizzling above their heads. Someone screamed, and Arnold threw his arms up to shield his face; then there was a sort of sucking noise as the glittering bits of light abruptly coalesced to form the word WELCOME!
Professor Frizzle waved her wand again cheerily and the fireworks vanished. “Think of me as a sort of guide to your first years in the wizarding world. I’m here to make the transition to magical life as easy as possible for all Muggleborn students, and offer help and support to you whenever you may need it!”
“Don’t you mean witching and wizarding world?” muttered a blonde girl quietly from the back of the bus, at the same time as Wanda asked loudly, “What on earth is a Muggle?”
“Ah! An insightful inquiry, Wanda!” replied Frizzle brightly, not having seemed to have heard the blonde girl. “A ‘Muggle’ is a wizarding term for the non-magical population. Your parents are Muggles, and you are all Muggleborns; that is to say, you have no known magical ancestry, and yet you are witches and wizards!” Without warning, she spun around and added, “Liz, could you turn the air down a bit? It’s getting just a tad nippy in here.”
She was talking to the lizard, Arnold realized with sudden horror. He hadn’t noticed until now that Frizzle was standing in the aisle at the front of the bus, meaning that someone else was driving the bus. The lizard.
Yes, the lizard was driving the bus. He really should have stayed home today.
“What is that thing?!” yelped Ralphie from behind him, and Frizzle clapped a hand to her forehead.
“Ah, where are my manners? Class, this is Liz. She’s a Moke. Liz, this is … ” — she frowned for a second — “Ralphie, Wanda, Keesha, Arnold, Phoebe, Carlos, Tim, and Dorothy Ann.”
“She’s so cute!” sighed a girl in the back wearing a pretty red dress, and Liz actually seemed to look bashful. She waved a clawed foot as if to say “oh, you!” and then scampered over to fiddle with the knobs. A boy in the back took out a sketchbook and began drawing, glancing up every few seconds at Liz.
“Is it just me, or is this completely mental?” muttered Ralphie, and Arnold nodded fervently in agreement.
“That’s better, thanks,” Frizzle said, as the vent next to Arnold’s seat began to blow warmer. He shivered as the goose pimples he hadn’t realized he’d had faded away.
“And here we are!” Frizzle cheerily peered out the window into the night. Arnold strained to see what she was indicating, but the glare on the windows blocked his view of anything but darkness and flickering street lamps; Keesha and Wanda, who had attempted the same thing, exchanged dubious looks.
The bus slowed once more to a halt. They were outside what appeared to be a run-down, poorly-lit little pub. The sign looked like a witch’s pot. He squinted through his glasses, and was able to make out the lettering, which read The Leaky Cauldron.
“Single file, please!” Frizzle said, and the students trudged off the bus (which yawned widely, causing its chassis to shudder) and into the shabby little pub.
They were immediately hit with the warm smell of shepherd’s pie and the babble of conversation from several strangely-dressed characters drinking at the counter. One of them looked to be some sort of goblin.
Professor Frizzle spoke quickly to the barman — an old, bald, toothless fellow with a head like overripe fruit — and the class was led up the stairs to the rooms above the establishment. Frizzle directed the boys to one room and the girls to the other.
It was now after ten o’clock, and Arnold was suddenly cognizant of just how exhausted he was. He had only been sitting on that curb for about twenty minutes — the letter hadn’t specified a time, merely “sometime after nine in the evening on Tuesday, August the 31st, 1999” — but he was used to going to bed at nine-thirty at the latest. He was so tired that he barely batted an eye when Frizzle came into the boys’ room and conjured a pair of bunk beds for the four of them to sleep in, then changed them into pyjamas and brushed their teeth with a single wave of her wand. Letting his book bag slide to the floor beside him, he collapsed into one of the lower bunks and immediately fell asleep.