CHAPTER 1 SWIMMER
There! Right there was a break in the thicket! She tried to fix the point in her mind but her very stride made it hard to keep a lock. As many times as she’d entered that thicket she still found it hard to make out a hole in the long bushy wall of brown branches that set it apart in the world. Beyond that seemingly solid bank of brush, inside that thicket, countless paths formed around the stems of giant thorn bushes, crisscrossing into a muddling maze, but few ran together in just the right way to make the thorn-canopied clearings where schoolmates and she held secret meetings during midday recess at the New World Academy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Central America.
Academia del Nuevo Mundo. She wrapped her lips around the words slowly. Amelia knew that generations of school kids had explored that thicket. It once had run from up there, at the summit of the mountain that hosted the school, far down into the valley below. Nowadays, the mountain was a well-developed neighborhood and the thicket was hardly so vast anymore, but, when you were in the thicket – in the maze – you couldn’t tell. Amelia swatted vaguely at the faint cloud of no-see-ums that had dogged her like bloodhounds since she’d left the school’s main building complex, but they were relentless. She suddenly chortled at the thought of carrying her own little black cloud around with her and then looked about, to see if anyone had
Rocket McGee: Avoiding Trouble! Description:
On present-day Earth, or nearly so, trouble brews and flares and sweeps four lonely kids about 12 years old into someone else’s gnarly mess. Now they must rally and forge an alliance, no matter how reluctant or rocky, in a perilous, high-tech adventure to save themselves and a parent. On the way, they discover friendship, a place in the world, and the super-human power to work together.
It started mundanely enough. As Amelia darted from the locker room after the swim meet, out onto the playing fields of the New World Academy and rushed to rendezvous with her schoolmate Diana in the thicket at the edge of the school grounds, she didn’t imagine for a moment falling down a rabbit hole into a roller-coaster ride for her life and the lives of family and friends, or being there at the birth of Rocket McGee. Who would?
Roan Reedling wrote Book One of the Rocket McGee Series, Avoiding Trouble! mainly with middle graders in mind, but it’s a sci-fi adventure that kids of any age can enjoy. You be the judge. Learn more at RocketMcGee.com.
