Into the Out

Letter 2

Letter 2

Hi Bianca,

I think there’s a special hell designed specifically for kids: the school bus field trip. Claustrophobic, overheated (winter or summer), noisy, smelly, filled with people you either don’t know or don’t like—and worst of all, boring. You’re trapped in a rattling, bumpy contraption with no hope of escape. Little wonder we all love it so much.

So anyway, I showed up in front of the school promptly at 7:30, as requested. So did the other ten ExClub members. I guess, despite the general bitching about how boring Stanyan Hill is, nobody wanted to pass up a chance at all that fresh air and sunshine. Well, personally, I don’t give a s**t about fresh air and sunshine. I just want the club credit. Silly me.

I’m wearing my blue and white blouse, the short-sleeved one with the open neck, plus casual-fit blue jeans, sturdy half boots, and Dad’s knapsack. I’ve got one of Dad’s old fishing caps on, too, to protect my scalp from sunburn. I packed myself a pair of PBJs for lunch, along with a fruit juice pack. Mom tossed in a bag of apple chips. Have to have something healthy, after all.

Dad’s a very efficient packer. I guess he learned it while hiking in Europe. Everything Mom was able to find from that list got packed into the knapsack, along with this recorder. Just my luck, huh?

Mr. North showed up shortly after the rest of us, looking even sicker than he did yesterday. I was torn. My motherly instincts, such as they are, felt so sorry for the poor man I wanted him to cancel this excursion and go home to bed. But on the other hand, I need the credit for this club, and the outing’s necessary to save my academic rating.

The school bus arrived a few minutes after Mr. North, and the whole club boarded. Mr. North stood at the front and took roll. He was coughing so bad I’m sure we’ll all end up with the plague. When everyone was aboard, he signaled the driver and off we excursed to Stanyan Hill.

We distributed ourselves throughout the bus more or less evenly. Linda Wu and her boyfriend sat together, along with another girl in the seat behind them who looked to be one of Wu’s cronies. I sat alone at first, but then Warren Jefferson came over and sat beside me. He’s wearing a pair of black jeans and a gray tee-shirt with red lettering that reads:

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON

AND USUALLY THAT REASON IS PHYSICS

How could I diss anyone with a shirt like that, so I accepted his presence with a friendly grin. He nattered about the weather and his previous field trips. Harmless stuff, so I just let him talk and didn’t bother to interrupt.

I noticed The Gray Girl seated by herself two rows behind us at the very back of the bus. She had her notebook out and was jotting something down in it. That seemed to be taking Mr. North’s dictum about writing a contemporary report very seriously.

I asked Warren about her, and he said she’s always like that, absorbed in her notepads and little else. He said her name is Jennifer Penney, and the snottier kids call her “Jenny Penney.” That made me wince. I wondered who was crueler—the kids who gave her that nickname, or the parents who gave her a name so susceptible to perversion.

Warren wondered whether she might be autistic, but I told him no. I’d been around some autistic kids when I assisted in a Special Ed class at one school a couple years ago, and Jennifer Penney wasn’t at all like them. They couldn’t break out of their special world. I can see Jennifer’s aware of her surroundings, and just doesn’t care. She has her own personal universe in her notebooks, and she’s perfectly content. The rest of the world just isn’t important.

I wondered to myself why she chose to join ExClub. But that’s none of my business, so I let it go. I did ask Warren about the girl sitting with Wu and her boyfriend. He said that was Julia Layton, and she’s indeed one of Wu’s lackeys. Her father’s a retired naval commander, and she has impossibly snooty standards. Well, so do I, when it comes to that.

Warren’s kind of a gossip-girl, ’cause he gave me the rundown on our fellow explorers even though he admitted he didn’t know them all that well. One of the boys with a serious, brooding look, is Donny Nakamura. Kind of cute, I guess, if you’re not put off by clinical depression. He had ear buds and was listening to something on his phone.

The other two boys were sitting and talking together. Jim diCamillo is skinny with wire-frame glasses and light brown hair that falls down over his forehead. Warren thinks his dad’s some kind of salesman. The boy with him is Mike Vasconsuellos, with black hair and, well, not exactly fat but boxy-looking. His face is more pocked than most kids our age, but I’d rank him as both earnest and honest. I trusted him at first glance. His family runs a food truck, Warren tells me.

The other two girls on the bus were busy on their phones, either texting or talking to friends. Serena Swann is impossibly tall and lanky, a black supermodel in the making. She didn’t so much walk as flow from place to place, like a silky ghost. She’s so physically perfect I could hate her instantly, except I don’t hate people without provocation.

Warren’s voice took on a different tone when he talked about her. Methinks he has a crush on her. Hopeless, of course—but isn’t that what crushes are?

Compared to Serena, Kim Trudlow looks positively stocky, though taken on her own she had a perfectly normal figure and a lovely face. Spiky black hair, bushy eyebrows, and at first I thought she looked entirely too serious for her own good. Then her friend on the phone said something to make her laugh, and she was transformed. I decided I liked her, after all.

The bus ride was nearly two hours. Warren told me that the Indian name for Stanyan Hill translated as something like “Mountain of the Lesser Gods,” and after that we ran out of trivial things to say, so he suggested a game of chess. Before I could decline, he whipped out his phone and had a game set up.

I was trapped. Truth is, Bianca, I’m lousy at chess. I know how all the pieces move, of course, but plotting moves and strategies way in advance is just not one of my talents. I know, I know, all famous people are supposed to be, like, smokin’ chess geniuses, so this is a handicap I’ll just have to overcome. Sometime. But that’s something for the future.

After just a couple of moves it was obvious I’m a blithering i***t at the game, and I’m sure it was almost painful for Warren to watch. And yet, I could see he was dumbing down his game so he wouldn’t embarrass me too badly. As we played, it slipped out that he was a finalist in the Chess Club tournament, which didn’t surprise me in the least. He did manage to string things out so it took him almost half an hour to beat me—mostly because I took so long between moves, trying to figure what to do next. Then, before I could back out of it, he tricked me into a second game.

I contrived to lose that one even faster, then begged off any more by saying I needed to dictate some notes. He accepted that—a little disappointed, I think—and went off to give me some privacy.

So here I am, telling you about a stupid school bus trip. I’ll write more when I actually have something to say. We’re almost there, so I’ll put this dumb machine away.

Your sister,

Tamara the Explorer