Alpaca My Bags Read online

  For the family and friends who keep me rooted.

  And for my adventurous crew,

  Matt, Ethan, Logan, and Lucas—

  I’ll pack my bags for you anytime!

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  With feet dangling and a vast amount of open air beneath me, a thought carved its way through my panic: Is this really living your best life, Amelia Jean?

  “Stay calm, sweetie, and don’t wiggle around too much.” Mom’s voice sounded deliberately steady as it bounced off the canyon walls. I carefully tipped forward and peered down at the base of the cliff, where she and my two older brothers were waiting for me to descend.

  Big mistake.

  The height, the nothingness surrounding me—my head started spinning like I’d just stepped off an amusement ride rather than being strapped into some sort of carabiner pulley system. On second thought, the two had a lot in common. Both made my heart pound uncontrollably. And both were activities favored by the rest of my family.

  I’d been assigning fear ratings (on a scale of one to ten) for years. My ranking system started when I’d nearly been swept away by an undercurrent in the Pacific Ocean on the day the Amundsen family decided to learn how to surf. Since then, among other things, we’d gone glacier climbing in Alaska (fear rating seven); paragliding on the Oregon coast (fear rating six—which would’ve been a nine, but I’d ridden tandem with a pilot); backcountry camping in Yellowstone (fear rating four—which would’ve been lower, except bears); and white-water rafting in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Wisconsin (varying fear ratings from three to eight, depending on the classification of the rapids).

  My family bounced around. A lot. The common thread was always adventure. And don’t get me wrong, adventure could be fun, but it also presented ample opportunity for me and my stupid fears to mess things up. Like when my family bought tickets for the Skywalk in Arizona but had to skip it because I was too scared to go out on the glass bridge extending over the rim of the Grand Canyon. Or, worse, a year ago when a team of mountain rescuers was called in because I’d frozen halfway up a via ferrata. They had to use ropes to pull me out from above because I was too terrified to continue climbing the iron rungs bolted into the side of the mountain.

  Even then, I’d only given the via ferrata a fear rating of nine. This latest expedition warranted a solid nine and a half. And, as hard as I was fighting to keep it together, I was losing the battle. The air whooshed out of my lungs. I inhaled rapidly, but everything I brought in was pushed out twice as fast by the alarm coursing through my body.

  “Your mom is right,” Dad’s voice rang out from up above. “Just stay calm. You’re perfectly safe as long as you don’t somehow manage to slip upside down and out of the harness.”

  Terrific. Now I had images in my head of me, I don’t know, sneeze-rolling myself into a hundred-foot tumble and splatting on the already-red rocks below. Calm was no longer an option—if it ever had been.

  I’d somehow mustered enough courage to complete two shorter rappels earlier today. But on those, all I had to do was slowly feed rope through the rappel device hooked to my harness as I walked down a rock wall, backward and in a seated position.

  This was my first free rappel, where the cliff wall curved inward, and I was left hanging midair to complete the descent. Nothing to brace my feet against. Nothing but air.

  “C’mon, Amelia,” yelled Neil, my oldest brother. “YOLO, right? You’ve got this.” The words were encouraging, but the huff of annoyance that followed was not.

  “I was scared, too,” David chimed in. It was nice of him to say so, but I knew it wasn’t true. “Keep threading the rope through the belay device,” he continued, “and try not to look down.”

  But I already had—looked down, that is. And because of it, I couldn’t control my breathing and my heart wouldn’t stop drumming in my ears.

  After the embarrassing evac on the via ferrata, my parents gradually reexposed me to hair-raising situations. They took me on amusement park rides with increasingly larger drops. Next, a trip to the top of the Empire State Building. Then the glass Skydeck Ledge of the Willis Tower in Chicago. Somehow, they managed to shuffle these experiences in between other Amundsen Family Adventure Challenges. Like I wouldn’t notice what they were up to.

  Then this adventure challenge was picked—completing a free rappel—and, well, I’d seen the looks exchanged behind my back. They weren’t sure I could do it, and I hated ruining everyone else’s fun. I hated being a disappointment.

  So, I’d acted excited, even though I wasn’t. I pretended it was no big deal, even though the thought of being back in a harness ran ice through my veins. And now, here I was, scared out of my mind again, and with nothing remotely close to an iron rung to cling to this time.

  My hands were clammy. I felt cold all over despite the scorching Utah sun.

  “Amelia?” Mom called again.

  I couldn’t answer, not with the tremor that started in my lower jaw and extended to my toes.

  “Honey, it’s all right,” Mom shouted. “Take all the time you need.”

  Not meaning to, I glanced down again, and that’s when my sweaty hands slipped off the rope. For a terrifying second, the rope ran freely through the rappel device and I fell. I thought I was going to die. Seriously, I did. My heart skipped a beat and a scream exploded from my lungs. Then the safety cord tightened abruptly, and I jerked to a stop.

  “Whoa!” David called up from below. “Always keep at least one hand on the rope.”

  I knew that. But when something scared me, all bets were off. And, just like when I’d frozen up on the via ferrata, I was petrified.

  “It’s okay,” Dad called down with forced cheerfulness. “You’re not in any danger, but you’re going to need to release friction on the autoblock before you can start moving again.”

  I heard what Dad was saying, but my head was buzzing. He might as well have been speaking a foreign language, considering the way my mind refused to make sense of anything. The concentration required to adjust my equipment was 100 percent out of the question.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Neil groaned. He wasn’t talking to me, but his voice wafted up. “How long is she going to be stuck this time?”

  Air escaped my mouth and lungs in rapid little spurts.

  Mom’s voice broke through the noise inside my head. “Amelia Jean, take deep breaths and listen to your father. He’ll talk you through this.”

  “Right.” Dad’s voice came from above. “You’ll need to slide the safety cord down the rope to loosen the autoblock, and then you’ll be able to feed rope through your rappel device again.”

  I’d practiced this with him countless times before ever swinging over the side of a ledge, but it all seemed like gibberish now. Instead of sliding the safety cord, I relocked both hands in a death grip around the rope. There was no way I was removing either of them to release tension on the autoblock. Right then, the autoblock was my best friend. Why on earth would I want to mess with it?

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nbsp; I held myself perfectly still, doing everything I could to reduce the sway in the rope and harness. For a moment that dragged on forever, no one said anything. And then my family started to have a conversation, an argument really, about me. Their voices spanned the height of a canyon wall as they ignored the fact that I was stuck halfway between them.

  “I told you it was too soon,” Mom grumbled at Dad. “Now what?”

  “This is ridiculous,” Neil said. “It’s not like she’s rappelling off Mount Thor.”

  “I could go for help,” David offered.

  “You’re not going anywhere.” Mom’s voice was scathing. But I knew her irritation was with me, not my brother.

  “Yeah, if anyone’s going for help, it should be me,” Neil said. “I’m older.”

  “Both of you stay where you’re at,” Dad called down. “Just give me a minute while I rig up another anchor.”

  I tuned out their voices and passed the time with my eyes firmly closed. I wasn’t going to take any chances. When I opened them again, Dad was dangling in the air beside me. “Hey there, kiddo,” he said.

  He sounded happy, but there was regret in his eyes. I knew he was worried he’d pushed me into this, even though I’d said it would be fine. A part of him must’ve known all along that when the rest of the family had been pumped for this adventure, I’d been pretending.

  “I’m going to help you finish the descent, okay?”

  I breathed in sharply through my nose, then shook my head.

  “It’s our best option, Amelia Jean. Unless you want to release the autoblock and continue on by yourself?” he asked hopefully.

  I clamped my eyes shut again. The air I’d sucked in drained through my quivering lips.

  Dad sighed. “I didn’t think so. We’ll do it the hard way, then.” He finagled the ropes and carabiners, unlocking and locking, tying and untying … I couldn’t watch. Next thing I knew, he had me off my rappel system and hooked onto his. I buried my head in his shoulder while he lowered us both to the canyon floor.

  Mom folded me into her arms as Dad unclipped us both.

  Half-hearted cheers rang out among my family members. “Congratulations, Amundsens. Free rappel challenge unlocked,” Dad said, like I hadn’t just wimped out and failed them all. He held out his hands. “Give me some!” He high-fived with my brothers, and then my mom. When he came to me, I barely lifted my head.

  “Gonna keep me hanging, are you?”

  When I shrugged and kept my arms planted at my sides, he drummed his fingers playfully on my helmet. “You’ll finish on your own next time,” he whispered in my ear.

  I smiled weakly and nodded my head. “Yeah, next time,” I said. Then I choked down a small amount of bile rising in my throat.

  Dad spent the first forty-five years of his life not really living, or so he says. He and Mom were both corporate lawyers in their “previous lives.” One day, he had this grand idea—every time he and Mom had a bad day at work, they would scribble something they’d rather be doing on a piece of paper and toss it in a giant mason jar. Then, when they had enough money saved, they’d sell everything, hit the road, and start living their “best lives.” Nothing as conventional as a road map even. They’d simply draw a slip from the jar and see which way it took them.

  That day, the day they packed their bags for adventure and loaded the family into the yellow travel trailer, was five years ago. I was seven. David was nine, and Neil was ten. A lot had changed since then.

  For one thing, when my parents bought the trailer, they called it “Winne” (short for Winnebago). It had started out shiny and new. It was dented now, had national park stickers slapped all over it, and had been renamed the Gnarly Banana by my two older brothers.

  For another, our lifestyle had started out as the coolest vacation ever. Lately, however, I’d been feeling like an outsider in my own family. While everyone else was pushing the limits, I was doing all I could to keep from falling on my face. And sometimes, I couldn’t even manage that.

  I was ashamed of how freaked out I’d been by the free rappel. My family had to notice the way I’d moped around since we’d returned to the trailer. But, as usual, they pretended not to notice. They probably thought talking about my fears would only give rise to bigger ones.

  “Time for a new slip!” Mom announced after the dinner dishes were cleared from the table. Dad passed her the Adventure Jar, and then ceremoniously beat a drumroll on the trailer wall.

  My knees knocked with David’s beneath the flimsy table that doubled as my bed. The Formica top popped right off at night, and the cushions came down. My brothers’ bunks were at the back of the trailer. My parents slept on the full-sized bed up front.

  “Amelia Jean, will you do the honors?” Mom asked, then held the jar out to me. It was obvious she wanted me to still feel included after I’d flubbed today’s challenge. Not that she’d say so. What else was there to do but play along? I obligingly dipped my fingers in.

  We’d gone through quite a few slips the past five years. Not all adventures were scary—like visiting the Alamo in San Antonio, searching for precious gemstones at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas (we didn’t find any), or even riding a fan boat through a swamp in New Orleans (although no one told me about the gators until after the tour was over).

  I had to stretch my fingers way down to the bottom of the jar to retrieve a folded piece of paper. When I opened it up, Mom’s neat handwriting popped out at me, proclaiming the next challenge. “Ski a Black Diamond,” I read aloud.

  I scrunched up my nose. That one would never do. It was the end of July. We hadn’t seen snow for months and wouldn’t for at least a few more. Relieved (because I knew enough about skiing to know that I’d be a disaster waiting to happen on the steepest, most hazardous type of ski slope), I refolded the slip and prepared to swap it out for a new one. But Dad stopped me. “Whoa, let’s talk about it before you toss that fish back in the pond.”

  That was strange. It’s not like this was the first time anyone had drawn a challenge that wasn’t a good match for the time of year. We’d always returned the slip to the jar and then drawn a different one. Then there was the weird eye contact Mom and Dad were making. But, parents—who understood them?

  Mom broke the silence by letting out a breath I hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She said, “Well, that’s fortunate.”

  “Serendipitous, I’d say,” added Dad.

  I glanced at Neil and David, wondering if they were any more clued in than I was. Something was definitely up. But my brothers’ smiling faces revealed nothing. Either they were too stoked about the upcoming Amundsen Adventure to notice our parents’ odd behavior, or they were keeping secrets from me, too. I felt a familiar stab of jealousy. The two of them were a team—my fearless brothers, ready to conquer the world. And then there was me. It was fine. I got it. They had the same interests and all. But occasionally, I wished we could be a trio instead.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Neil asked.

  “Oh yeah,” David responded. “Best skiing in the US is in—”

  “Colorado!” they hooted in unison, drawing out the syllables of the state’s name like Col-lor-RAD-oh.

  I narrowed my eyes. Even though I was very different from my brothers, there was no denying that we all looked alike. Everyone said so. The three of us were tall for our ages. We’d all inherited Mom’s pale skin and plum-round cheeks, and Dad’s dark hair and eyebrows. That’s really what people meant when they commented on the family resemblance. We three Amundsen offspring had the same distinctly dark, thick, and expressive eyebrows. And right now, my brothers had theirs elevated in exclamatory arches. Nah, they weren’t in on any secrets, they were just excited.

  “Kids …” Mom started, and then paused.

  Here we go, I thought. The pause. Mom always paused when she had something important to say. I kicked straight across at David’s shin, and then at Neil’s where he sat catty-corner from me.

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bsp; David shot up in his cushioned seat, and Neil a second after. “Ouch, not cool, Amelia Jean. What was that for?”

  “Pay attention,” I hissed, and tipped my head in Mom’s direction. They could celebrate our next challenge later. I wanted to know what was up with our parents.

  “Okay,” Mom continued. “So, when we calculated funds for our travels, we didn’t quite take into account how much our grocery bills would increase over the years.”

  I glared at my brothers with their bottomless stomachs. Mom would never come right out and say it, but I knew what she meant. They ate more, a lot more, than they did five years ago.

  “Plus,” she said, “we haven’t been economical in reaching our various travel destinations.”

  Dad cut in, “Your mom’s right. We’ve been zigzagging across the country instead of condensing the miles spent on the road. The extra gas money adds up.”

  “Are you saying we’re broke?” Neil asked.

  “No, not broke, exactly,” Dad said. “We just need to be smarter about how we spend money. And—”

  “And what?” I asked. An uneasy feeling caused my stomach muscles to tighten.

  “And your mom and I will need to find jobs, so the three of you will have to go back to a brick-and-mortar school for a little while.”

  Our way of life hadn’t allowed for public schooling. We’d taken some online classes over the years, but not everywhere we traveled had the best Wi-Fi. Most of our education had been given on the road—we stopped at bookstores and purchased books on Dad’s assigned reading lists. Mom covered math and science.

  My stomach relaxed, and I sat up straighter in my seat. My memories of school were of circle time and playing freeze tag on the blacktop at recess, and of Ms. Laskey, the school librarian, who always smelled like fresh cotton and called everyone “honey” in a thick Southern accent. My memories of school were nice and were tied to memories of a home that wasn’t on wheels and had wild rosebushes lining the path to a front door. Our old front door had been painted yellow, like the Gnarly Banana, but was far more welcoming.

  “Not public school, nuh-uh,” Neil said. “No way are we going back to spending Six Crappy Hours of Our Lives bored to death inside a brick building. How are we supposed to live life to the fullest when we’re imprisoned by the system? Eh?” My oldest brother knew exactly how to play our father—by throwing some of Dad’s favorite verbiage right back at him.