by Nate Ball
Amp sat up and grabbed his antennas with excitement. “And to sleep on the ground in that little cloth house held up by sticks.”
“You mean a tent,” Zack said flatly.
“Yes!” Amp said, snapping his fingers. “A tent! I want to sleep in a tent.”
“Forget it,” Zack said, sitting on the corner of his unmade bed and holding his head in his hands. “Quit bugging me about this, okay? You know my family can never know you’re here. They’d freak out if they ever saw you. Call the park ranger. Call the cops. Call the government. Not to mention you’ve still got a little alien invasion to stop. Remember the whole reason you came to this planet in the first place? You don’t want the Erdian Army to arrive only to find their lead scout napping in the woods.”
“Come on, a camping trip might be just the thing I need to get the creative juices flowing again.”
“It’s too risky. If anyone else sees you, they’ll take you away and dissect you like a frog.”
“But look at the size of me,” Amp said, standing up and doing a sort of jumping-jack motion. “I’m so little, they’d never see me. Plus, you know how good I am at staying out of sight.”
Zack looked over at Amp and shook his head at his friend’s energy.
His family had gone on an annual camping trip for the last three years, and each year had been a disaster. The McGee family just wasn’t the outdoorsy type. But every year Zack’s dad insisted they go. And every year, a perfectly good three-day weekend was ruined.
Amp fell onto his belly and pressed his face into the fluffy socks. “I promise if you take me with you to the Crooked Forest,” his muffled voice begged, “you’ll never know I was even there. I’ll be like a ninja.”
“It’s not called the Crooked Forest,” Zack said, rolling his eyes. “It’s called Twisted Grove State Park.”
“Yes! That’s it. I want to see the ghost, too,” Amp said, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. “I’ve never seen a ghost.”
“There’s no ghost,” Zack sighed. “That’s just a story people made up.”
“You told me the outlaw Nasty Ned hid his stolen gold in that forest over a hundred years ago, but could never find the spot where he buried it. Now his ghost wanders through the trees at night trying to find it.”
“I was just reading you that stuff from the back of the park’s map,” Zack explained.
Amp sat up. “The anger from Nasty Ned’s ghost made all those trees crooked. That’s just so exciting.”
“But it’s not true! It’s just something they wrote to make the campgrounds sound mysterious to tourists. It’s just a bunch of trees that got bent out of shape. It’s no big deal.”
“Watch this,” Amp said, and he disappeared from sight. “See, nobody will see me,” his voice explained. “I’ll be invisible. Now let’s go hug some trees and see ghosts in the Crooked Forest!”
Zack pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.
He knew all too well about the Erdian mind trick that enabled Amp to stop your brain from seeing him. The way Amp explained it, he could make your brain forget you were seeing him at the same instant you were seeing him. Zack had trained himself to block the mind trick when he wanted to, but now he just stared at the empty space above the sock.
“Forget it,” Zack said, yanking the sock off the desk and stuffing it in his bag. He heard Amp give an invisible cry and then appear just as he crashed onto the desk.
“Ouch!” Amp yelled. “That was incredibly rude.”
“See, you can’t always be invisible,” Zack said with a chuckle, zipping up his bag and heading toward the door. “Under the bed are enough Ritz Crackers and SweeTarts to last you a month. I’ll be back late on Monday night, okay? Are we good?”
“But I’ll be so bored,” Amp whined, rubbing the back of his head.
“Just stay in here and out of trouble,” Zack said and closed his door.
Alone in the hallway, Zack pressed on the door to make sure it was securely shut, sighed, shook his head, and headed downstairs.
There was one more thing he had to do before leaving.
The Ol’ Switcheroo
“Jimmy has pinkeye,” Zack’s little brother, Taylor, reported when Zack dropped his bag at the front door. “He can’t go camping with us.”
“No biggie,” Zack said. “More room in the kids’ tent.”
“But Jimmy always comes with us,” Taylor moaned. “He just called. Both his eyes are glued shut with pus.”
“Gross! Thanks for sharing, Taylor,” Zack said.
Taylor sighed. “This will be our worst camping trip ever.”
Zack shrugged. “I’m not so sure. The bar is set pretty low.”
“Oh, stop it, you two,” Zack’s mom said, rolling out a plastic cooler stuffed with ice and food. “C’mon, Zack, bring this and your bag out to Dad. Olivia is helping him put everything on top of the car.”
“Olivia? Why?” Zack asked.
Helping Dad tie down the tents and bags was usually his job. And while Olivia was his best friend and next-door neighbor, sometimes she helped out around his house a little too often, which tended to make him look lazy by comparison.
Mom brushed Zack’s hair from his face with her fingers. “Since Jimmy couldn’t go with us, I asked Olivia to come instead. It’ll be so fun.”
Zack pulled away from his mom. “What?!”
Zack had planned on having Olivia keep an eye on Amp while he was gone. She was the only other person on the planet who knew about Amp, so her going on this trip threw a major wrench into his plans.
Plus, when Zack thought about the close quarters of a tent, camping with Olivia might be a little . . . embarrassing. He flapped his arms, trying to think of something to say. “Mom, I can’t sleep in a tent with Olivia. She’s a girl. It’s just weird!”
“Yeah, Zack likes to fart when he camps,” Taylor said. “Nobody should be subjected to his weaponized toots.”
“Don’t be crude, honey,” Mom said to Taylor with a tsk-tsk. “Zack can’t help it if he has a sensitive system.”
“I don’t have a sensitive system,” Zack said. “It’s just that . . . I don’t know. It’s just weird, Mom.”
What Zack couldn’t say was that, while he knew Olivia would make this camping trip a lot more fun, the thought of leaving Amp unsupervised for a whole three-day weekend made him nervous. Amp was like a disaster magnet.
“Zack also likes to sleep in his underwear,” Taylor said. “Now he can’t.”
“That’s not true,” Zack said.
Mom continued to try to fix up Zack’s hair. “Olivia and I can sleep in the small tent, and you, Taylor, and your father can sleep in the big tent.”
“Dad! He snores like a volcano,” Zack protested.
“Volcanoes don’t snore,” Taylor said, shaking his head at his brother’s lack of basic science knowledge. “But they do sort of burp. Mostly water vapor and carbon dioxide. But also lots of different sulfur compounds. It’s a long list and varies by volcano.”
Zack stared at his brother like he was the alien in the house, and then began flapping his arms again. “It’s bad enough that Taylor laughs in his sleep, now I get snoring on top of it?”
“I don’t laugh in my sleep!” Taylor shouted, apparently insulted at being accused of sleep-laughing.
“She’s already coming,” Mom said with a firm nod. “Now let’s have fun, you two.”
Zack looked out the window and could see Olivia on top of the car, helping Zack’s dad thread twine through the handles of various suitcases and tent bags.
Olivia was also going to feed Mr. Jinxy and walk Smokey while they were gone. Now somebody else would have to come into the house to take care of the cat and the dog, further risking the accidental discovery of Amp.
Zack closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. Camping had always seemed inconvenient, but this year there was so much more at stake.
Zack had a bad feeling about this trip.
/> He wished he were the one who had come down with pinkeye.
But he was not the lucky type.
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About the Author
NATE BALL is the host of the Emmy and Peabody award–winning PBS reality shows Design Squad and Design Squad Nation. An MIT graduate with a Master’s Degree in mechanical engineering, Nate is also the cofounder of Atlas Devices, a two-time All-American pole-vaulter, and a competitive beatboxer. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Credits
Cover art by Macky Pamintuan
Design by Jeff Shake
Copyright
ALIEN IN MY POCKET: OHM VS. AMP. Text by Nate Ball, copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers. Illustrations by Macky Pamintuan, copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress catalog card number: 2014034089
ISBN 978-0-06-231489-5 (trade bdg.)—ISBN 978-0-06-221631-1 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © April 2015 ISBN 9780062216328
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