say?”
“Care for a tortilla chip?”
“Well, I didn't think you were planning to eat all them by yourself.”
“No sense letting it go to waste,” replied Amelia, laughing.
“I agree. No sense letting it go to your waist,” added Jillian.
They shrieked with laughter.
Chapter Two
Going home for the last summer before starting university, lost in a thin sleep and wrapped in a small blanket, she was sitting on a reclining seat towards the back of the coach in Via Rail train No. 63 as it sped along its 2-hour run from Kingston to Toronto. In the background she heard the continuous din of the metal wheels grinding on the tracks, the voices of passengers speaking French and English and attendants announcing in tinny hollow voices the approaching stops. She was looking through large coach windows and imagining the puffy white clouds overhead as a troop of giants being blown across the vast sky by a small cherub with golden wings and chubby rosy cheeks. Beneath them lay miles of farmland, rows upon rows of hay ricks, dandelion flowers just beginning to bloom in bold golden yellows and orange daylilies growing like weeds by the side of the road.
She was returning from Kingston, where she had arranged her lodgings for the fall and then spent several hours strolling through the main campus of the university and staring up at its imposing gothic buildings. She was to share a house within walking-distance of the campus with three other girls, all first-year students. Someone had told her that undergraduate life and all the people she would meet would be a foretaste of the greater world she would be thrown into one day— a time of transition, unsettling, for sure, and a big change from her life a mere four years ago, when she was just beginning high school.
“I'm on my way back home to Toronto,” she said cheerfully to fellow passengers seated across the aisle from her. “I'll be attending Queen's in the fall.”
“Oh, it's such a beautiful countryside isn't it? We've had so much rain; everything is so green.”
“One day I would love to take the train across Canada and see the Rocky Mountains up close. I hear its God's country out there.”
The landscape whirled by as the train rocked with speed, heading west through rural Ontario. As she peered out the window, catching glimpses of green fields, swaying pines, quaint towns and picturesque white churches with solitary black crosses perched high on top, their windows ablaze with the morning sun, she wondered if she would make it home in time for her job interview at 1:00 p.m. She looked up to see a friendly male attendant who had just approached with the food trolley, regarding her with curiosity. He inquired in his broken English, “Anyt'ing to eat, mademoiselle?” A Quebecker, she thought; his accent was thick, and his words rolled off his tongue with difficulty. She glanced indecisively at the selection, not feeling very hungry, while the smiling attendant waited patiently as she tried to decide between a ham and a turkey sandwich, then finally settled on the peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich washed down with hot tea in a large styrofoam cup.
At the next stop, which was Belleville, a male passenger boarded the train. He was middle-aged with small apprehensive eyes and a rather large high forehead. The hair on his scalp was thin and sparse; it reminded her of the tufts of grass growing unruly in her mother's flowerbed.
Jillian, the best way to control weeds is to pull them up as soon as you see the pesky things. Never put off to tomorrow what can be done today.
He sat in the vacant seat directly next to her.
“ Excusez-moi, ” he announced, his eyes gleaming brightly like shiny black pebbles. “You don't mind if I sit 'ere, do you?”
Her sensitive nostrils pinched. A strong smell of either aftershave lotion or cologne tainted the air. At once she disliked the man, but she looked up from her newspaper, greeted him with a vacant smile, nodded her head to
“Care for a tortilla chip?”
“Well, I didn't think you were planning to eat all them by yourself.”
“No sense letting it go to waste,” replied Amelia, laughing.
“I agree. No sense letting it go to your waist,” added Jillian.
They shrieked with laughter.
Chapter Two
Going home for the last summer before starting university, lost in a thin sleep and wrapped in a small blanket, she was sitting on a reclining seat towards the back of the coach in Via Rail train No. 63 as it sped along its 2-hour run from Kingston to Toronto. In the background she heard the continuous din of the metal wheels grinding on the tracks, the voices of passengers speaking French and English and attendants announcing in tinny hollow voices the approaching stops. She was looking through large coach windows and imagining the puffy white clouds overhead as a troop of giants being blown across the vast sky by a small cherub with golden wings and chubby rosy cheeks. Beneath them lay miles of farmland, rows upon rows of hay ricks, dandelion flowers just beginning to bloom in bold golden yellows and orange daylilies growing like weeds by the side of the road.
She was returning from Kingston, where she had arranged her lodgings for the fall and then spent several hours strolling through the main campus of the university and staring up at its imposing gothic buildings. She was to share a house within walking-distance of the campus with three other girls, all first-year students. Someone had told her that undergraduate life and all the people she would meet would be a foretaste of the greater world she would be thrown into one day— a time of transition, unsettling, for sure, and a big change from her life a mere four years ago, when she was just beginning high school.
“I'm on my way back home to Toronto,” she said cheerfully to fellow passengers seated across the aisle from her. “I'll be attending Queen's in the fall.”
“Oh, it's such a beautiful countryside isn't it? We've had so much rain; everything is so green.”
“One day I would love to take the train across Canada and see the Rocky Mountains up close. I hear its God's country out there.”
The landscape whirled by as the train rocked with speed, heading west through rural Ontario. As she peered out the window, catching glimpses of green fields, swaying pines, quaint towns and picturesque white churches with solitary black crosses perched high on top, their windows ablaze with the morning sun, she wondered if she would make it home in time for her job interview at 1:00 p.m. She looked up to see a friendly male attendant who had just approached with the food trolley, regarding her with curiosity. He inquired in his broken English, “Anyt'ing to eat, mademoiselle?” A Quebecker, she thought; his accent was thick, and his words rolled off his tongue with difficulty. She glanced indecisively at the selection, not feeling very hungry, while the smiling attendant waited patiently as she tried to decide between a ham and a turkey sandwich, then finally settled on the peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich washed down with hot tea in a large styrofoam cup.
At the next stop, which was Belleville, a male passenger boarded the train. He was middle-aged with small apprehensive eyes and a rather large high forehead. The hair on his scalp was thin and sparse; it reminded her of the tufts of grass growing unruly in her mother's flowerbed.
Jillian, the best way to control weeds is to pull them up as soon as you see the pesky things. Never put off to tomorrow what can be done today.
He sat in the vacant seat directly next to her.
“ Excusez-moi, ” he announced, his eyes gleaming brightly like shiny black pebbles. “You don't mind if I sit 'ere, do you?”
Her sensitive nostrils pinched. A strong smell of either aftershave lotion or cologne tainted the air. At once she disliked the man, but she looked up from her newspaper, greeted him with a vacant smile, nodded her head to
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