Joanne looked up irritably. “The food is great and the warden promised me a conjugal.”
Pamela Parsons couldn’t help but chuckle. “You can’t stall forever. All the kids are on the bus already and the clock is ticking closer to ten, babe. Let's go! Come! Get some fresh air.”
“Fresh air? Arctic acne, you mean?” Joanne moaned with a heavy sigh. “Here. Take my bag and make yourself useful. I can’t count on you to fill in for me, lie for me, or feed me, so you can be my porter.”
She flung the large sports bag at Miss Parsons, nearly knocking the hyperactive anorexic off her feet in the process. Reluctantly she left the sanctuary of her throne room, glancing back with every other stride to make sure it had been left in order. She imagined how quiet and lifeless it was going to be for the next few days and she longed to be right there, immersed in that quiet peace instead of sitting on a bus full of noisy children on her way to some godforsaken patch in north-eastern Canada.
“Jo! Pronto!” Pam urged, virtually pulling the door against Joanne to shut her out of the classroom. “Now lock it and let's go. Please don't be one of those people everyone always has to wait for. There is no such thing as fashionably late, you know, just fucking tardy and that’s it.”
“Okay, alright, I'm coming!” Joanne pouted, shoving Miss Parsons away to lock the orange door in the short hallway that led out onto the south side lawn. The sun was bland above them, hardly warming anything. Here in Newfoundland it had been reduced to an impotent ornament in the sky, a mere bulb of light shining bleakly until the long darkness would eat it up again. As the two teachers hurried over the green mound of the lawn towards the gate, Joanne Earle glanced up at the sky with a wince and sighed, “A whole long weekend wasted in the middle of nowhere. Oh joy.”
“Oh shut up,” Pam said. “You're going to love the woodlands. The natural beauty is breathtaking up there and at night…”
“I don't even want to hear about the night,” Joanne pouted. “Good God, couldn't Harold arrange this little trip over the summer, at least? We’re going to freeze up there!”
“Freeze?” Pam said incredulously as she motioned to the bus driver to start the engine. “Jo, we’re staying at a camp with cabins, fireplaces, and a mess hall. Nobody is going to freeze to death. They even have a communications tower with access to,” she sucked in a heavy breath with over-dramatic pause, “…the outside world! Can you believe that?”
“Your sarcasm sucks,” Joanne replied wryly. “So we won't be sleeping outside, but hey, at least we’ll be snugly accommodated at Camp Crystal Lake.”
“Oh, for fuck's sake,” Pam groaned. “Just get on the goddamn bus.”
When Joanne boarded the already occupied bus she received a jovial applause from the handful of tenth graders, forcing her to smile, something she dreaded for Pam to see and shoot that I-told-you-so-face.
“Come on, Miss Earle! We have a lot of ground to cover!” shouted the burly Nathan Hughes, one of her more robust students who could have been a prize quarterback had he not been so disinterested in sports altogether.
“You already cover a lot of ground, fat ass!” one of his classmates exclaimed, bearing the reprimand of Miss Parsons almost immediately.
“Sit right here,” Pam told Joanne, pointing to the two front seats that had been reserved for the two of them. “I'll take the other seat.”
“Listen, are we the only two chaperons? What if something happens up there? You know, what if something happens that we need a more… male… person for?” Joanne asked Pam in a loud whisper to manage speaking over the rowdy lot on the bus.
“Oh, don't worry. We have Mr. Spence coming with us,” Pam replied as the bus pulled away, evoking a roaring cheer from the high school students.
“The new guy?” Joanne asked. Pam nodded cheerfully with the cacophony of the group drowning out any possible discussion about the new teacher and ex-Olympic swimmer, Jacques Spence.
The din did not bother the two women much. They knew from experience that, as soon as the excitement had dwindled and the road side scenery became monotonous, all the kids would be on their phones anyway. Soon they would become quiet, wasted young zombies in the thrall of boredom thanks to the over-stimulation of media they’d been raised in.
Pam found it sad, really, that potentially brilliant minds were going to waste on selfies, duck-faces, and ignorance most of the time. However, there were a few among them who gave her some hope. Those who bothered to evolve, those who bothered to punctuate and indulge in the more thoughtful subjects of the education system; they were strangely somewhat immune to the snares of modern intellectual regression and entertainment enslavement.
“So where is The Rock?” Joanne asked, taking a hearty chunk of oatmeal cookie into her mouth. Since she’d first laid eyes on the male Physical Education teacher she’d nicknamed him thus because of his dark resemblance to the celebrity. Of course, he was not half as big, but his face was almost a dead ringer.
“He’s driving behind the bus in his Land Rover. Says if something happens to the bus there will be another vehicle to go and look for help,” Pam explained. Her response seemed to please Joanne, surprisingly, because usually she would have a thousand counter questions.
Joanne was a history teacher, but after school each Wednesday she accepted the duties of tennis coach. This was why she’d been asked by the principal to accompany Miss Parsons, the gym teacher and Mr. Spence, the swimming coach on the trip. Although it was not a sports camp in name, the principal wanted the young people to experience the fresh air fitness of mountain hiking without feeling like they needed to excel in sports. In fact, it was just a reason to use Education Board funding in a proactive and beneficial manner.
As the journey progressed, Joanne had to admit to herself that it was not altogether nightmarish. As a matter of fact, the kids were behaving most of the time and the scenery that paced by her window was quite beautiful. She would never admit this to Pam and make her right again, but Joanne was enjoying being out of the confinement of the cube she taught history in all day. It felt good to see other places for a change. Her hands clutched her cookie tin as she watched the road gradually abduct them from the comforts of civilization and farther into the unknown.
Heading in the direction of Churchill Falls, the bus hummed incessantly for hours; before long practically everyone was asleep. It would be another three hours of driving before they would reach their first destination, close to Goose Bay. There they would spend the night before going on to the camp. Joanne couldn’t join the others in a good bus nap for reasons she could not explain. After all, she wasn’t agoraphobic or anything. Yet for some reason the wide expanse of alien terrain kept her vigilant. She’d always been that way — intuitive — but always about the wrong things. Tapping the back of her pen against her lips rhythmically had a hypnotic effect on her and she slowly sank into another world of thought, abandoning the trappings of reality even while wide awake.
The passing shrubs, hills, and power lines pulsed along with her pen, but she didn’t feel at all sleepy. All she felt was a veil of emotion that came from nowhere in particular, a sense of warning about their destination. Joanne had often learned that these feelings led to nothing prevalent to her own circumstances, but it always manifested in the fate of others — strangers. That was a small consolation. Still, she hated this sense of apprehension she harbored which grew stronger and more urgent with every mile they traveled.
“Hey, Miss Earle, would you like some apple crumble?” Lisa, one of her students, asked from the seat behind her in a considerate whisper. The girl's offer gently alleviated Joanne's growing concerns for the outcome of the trip by distracting her from her lonely vigil.