I sat at the very front of a bus - the seat next to the driver, just by the front door - on the way to school when a kid got hit. Straight on by the thirty-ton bus coming around the corner - trees blocked the line of sight so there wasn't a moment for the driver to see the kid trying to run across the road.
I just saw a brown blur, then the impact on the windshield - I thought "Woah, who the fuck put a garbage can in the middle of the road?" because it looked like a brown plastic garbage can, and the hollow, thumping sound he made when he hit the side of the bus over and over again as it passed him made me absolutely sure that it was a plastic garbage can.
We stopped, there was a massive crack on the windshield right in front of the driver - I wondered, what the fuck now? Did we hit a THING? Some guy came in the back door covered in blood, and I realized that yeah, we hit a "thing" that was a boy, about 2 or 3 years older than me. Guy who came on probably asked someone to call an ambulance or something, but at the time I wasn't listening, I was just... Startled, confused and irritated.
I'd been in a really good mood that morning 'cause we were going to go ice-skating with my class and I love that shit. I was irritated that I would be missing out on it because this stupid kid went and got himself killed by the bus.
Did take a day or two for it to sink in, really. It didn't help that we still went past that spot every day to and from school, and indeed some days I rode the same bus, cracked windshield and all. I don't know if they replaced the windshield before they replaced all of the local busses with newer ones.
Driver was gone for a while, but damned if, not a year later, I saw him in that driver's seat again, doing the same run in the mornings. I've immense respect for that driver, because I don't know many people who'd go back to work after such an accident, even with a break.