Light the Fire (Jackson's Hollow #1)

Chapter 6

Eventually she would need to go to the bookstore (which she guessed was going to be appropriately tiny), but first she wanted to figure out where her classes were around the campus. There was a small quad closed in by the math, science, humanities, and communication buildings. Most of her courses would be in those buildings.

Out of a spurt of randomness based on some of the college's more eclectic courses, she had signed up for one of the park service classes about wildlife identification. It seemed like a good idea at the time seeing how she was going to be living in the woods, but now she was considering changing it since it would just give Ryker more hiker-related fuel.

The National Park Service had a training center at the little community college, the newest one to be added to the original three centers. It was smaller and lesser known, but it was supposed to be pretty good. Maybe Ryker was in that section of the college. Even more reason for her to drop that class. Still, she wasn't one for quitting after she had made up her mind to do something.

Wandering through the quad and the buildings surrounding it, she found each of the rooms her classes would be in. So many introductory classes, but she was planning on eventually transferring and that's what her advisor here had suggested. She was toying with eventually moving back east and going to UNC-Wilmington, which was almost as far from the mountains as you could go and still attend college. A lot of her friends had gone there, and she had planned on applying too, after her gap year. But yeah...

After finding most of the places on her schedule, Jo went over to the training center on the far side of the campus. It was closer to the woods, and as she rounded the building, she could see trailhead signs and a few students heading off into the forest. Someone had carved a bear statue and put it in front of the building, and the bear was holding a 'Welcome Future Rangers!" sign. She wondered if they usually dressed it up or anything quirky.

The center only had a handful of people roaming around it at the moment, and most of them seemed like official rangers. Made sense considering classes hadn't started yet. A receptionist asked if she needed help, and Jo smiled politely before telling her she was making sure she knew where her class was.

Apparently her class was in a small auditorium, the only one in the center, but the receptionist confided she likely wouldn't be spending a whole lot of time in the auditorium. The rangers were big believers in hands-on learning. Well, it might be nice to have some built-in walking time in her day.

Ryker really was going to have fuel to accuse her of being a hiker.

But that was fine. Jo wasn't going to let Rkyer influence her decisions. She had signed up for this class for a practical reason, and some grumpy, overzealous local wasn't going to sway her choices.

It was a good thing she'd just made up her mind on that, because as she stepped back out of the auditorium, it was of course inevitable that at the same time, Ryker and his posse walked up one of the hallways. Charlie was waving goodbye to a ranger as if they were old friends, so either that was just Charlie's personality (she was really starting to think so), or Ryker and his group really were gung-ho future rangers.

She was hoping to escape unnoticed, but no such luck. "Jo! You're taking classes here too?" Curse Charlie and his extrovert tendencies.

Jo turned around with a smile pasted on her face, trying to ignore the glint of humor and 'I-told-you-so' in Ryker's eyes.

"Just one," Jo said, crossing her arms. "Thought it'd be a good idea since I'm moving here from the city." She didn't know why she was explaining herself to them. Anyone could take this course. And really, anyone could hike. What was the big deal anyway?