Long thought to be the case from anecdotal playground gossip and your elder brother’s teasing at the dinner table, research has found that teenagers at the back of the bus are at least 250% tougher than you, and could lay you out with a single punch, no problem, and what are you staring at anyway?
Researchers considered a range of other factors thought to be associated with schoolkid hardness, including the age of the first appearance of ‘bumfluff’ facial hair, the amount of implausible stories of sexual activity and the number of classroom confrontations with a supply teacher.
‘What we still don’t know is the direction of causation between hardness and seat selection,’ noted a nervous teacher on bus duty at your school today. ‘Do the hard kids opt for the back seat out of some feeling of entitlement? Or does the act of sitting at the back embolden otherwise wimpy kids to swear more and constantly adjust their crotches?
‘It would be good to run an experiment seating the hard kids on seats nearer the front to test this theory,’ noted the teacher timidly. ‘I suggested it to Brookdale gang, but they suggested that I f*ck off back to the hole I came from.’
