vacation (1)

6 SABINE HILDING
They were on an educational field trip—an end of summer vacation—with a group
from the science museum. His mother had signed them up for, “Paleontology of
the High Desert.”
It had been a rather traumatic last twenty minutes.
One minute, he was riding along in the backseat of their expedition leader’s Jeep
Cherokee, playing computer games with this older kid also on the field trip. The
next minute, he heard his name screamed at him by his mother—she was driving a
VW Beetle, the last in the line of four vehicles—that he was supposed to get back
in their car.
“Seems like your mother wants you back with her,” said Chris, the lanky class leader
and tireless paleontologist. “You got all your stuff?”