Volcano Expedition

Your science teacher picks you for a once-in-a-lifetime expedition to explore a newly discovered cave system inside a dormant volcano on a remote island.

You are the kind of kid who always has dirt under your fingernails and a rock collection on your desk. You are ten years old, in Ms. Ramos's fifth-grade science class, and you keep a beat-up expedition journal where you sketch every bug, leaf, and fossil you find. While other kids trade baseball cards, you trade facts about volcanoes and tectonic plates.

'Did you know,' you whispered to your friend Marcus last week, 'that if you dropped a watermelon into lava, it would not even sizzle? It would just vaporize.' Marcus had stared at you. 'Why do you know that?' Ms. Ramos is your favorite teacher because she actually takes your questions seriously, even the weird ones.

Your life is about to change, because today Ms. Ramos is standing at the front of the classroom holding two plane tickets, and she is looking straight at you. 'Wait,' you whisper to yourself, sitting up so fast your pencil rolls off the desk. 'Wait wait wait. Is she looking at... me?'