Wild Mandolin: Paradise Springs High, #1

By Natalie Rhodes

Samantha Clarke has been anticipating this weekend for a long time. She's a junior at Paradise Springs High School and she's about to spend two nights camping in the Owyhee Canyonlands with her biology class. She'll be sharing a tent with her best friend Shayna, and the best part is that Jayden Juarez (her longtime crush) will be there too. Jayden's not like other teenage boys. He's incredibly handsome and he's so good at playing the guitar that he performs at school assemblies. Of course, Samantha plays an instrument too, the mandolin. Or at least she used to. Will Shayna be able to convince Sam to bring her mandolin on the trip? Will Samantha be able to spend time alone with Jayden without his annoying friend Timothy tagging along? And how did a bunch of doggie treats end up on a school field trip? Read Wild Mandolin to find out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Natalie Rhodes Books
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393744627

Book preview

Chapter 1

Samantha Clarke had been planning for the Owyhee Canyonlands camping trip for weeks. In fact, truth be told, she'd actually been looking forward to it since she was in middle school. Back then, everything that would come with turning sixteen had all seemed so far away – the independence of a driver's license, the romance of the prom, and the adventure of the spring trip for juniors in Mr. Fullerton's honors biology class.

And now here she was, just a few weeks past her sixteenth birthday on April 1st. I got a wise baby for April Fool's, is what her mother liked to say. Sam had always been pretty grown-up for her age, and level-headed. Her mom had told her that when she was a toddler, Samantha wouldn't have tantrums or throw her food on the floor; instead, she'd just look at adults quizzically, as if she didn't understand why they weren't complying with her wishes. She'd never been particularly impatient and wasn't one to scare easily.

Sam rolled up her sleeping bag to see how to best fit it into her backpack, looking out the window and imagining the creatures that might come in the night to poke around the campsite: there could be elk or wolves, and now that it was warmer, maybe even rattlesnakes. The thought of them didn't bother her. But she remembered the last time she'd gone camping with her best friend Shayna, who'd apparently heard something moving around the campfire in the middle of the night. Frantic, Shayna had started banging on her lantern with her phone with all of her might in an attempt to scare off any potential predator. The next morning as they were eating oatmeal and bananas around the campfire with Shayna's family, there was some debate about whether there'd really been anything knocking around in the dark, or if it had just been Shayna's notoriously wild imagination. Everyone could agree on one thing, though: Shayna clanging against the lantern with her phone in the still of night, accompanied by the furious back-and-forth of the beam of light from the touchscreen, managed to wake everyone up and led to a lot of general confusion.

Sam laughed to herself, shaking her head and stuffing the sleeping bag further into her pack. It had down feathers in it, so she was able to compress it deep next to the thermal underwear and multiple rolls of thick wool socks. Though the days were mild, nights out in the Canyonlands would be chilly. She couldn't imagine this trip without Shayna. They'd been best friends for as long as she could remember, and they balanced each other out. On this trip, for example, Sam would be the one to calmly figure out how to get the fire going, while Shayna would be the one to wander off and get all the details about what was going on at the other campsites. Nicole, Carmen, and Katey were surely going to be all together and have something fun planned, like making s'mores or telling ghost stories or playing Mad Libs or who knows what. And then Timothy and Jayden of course would have their own campsite and maybe Jayden would bring his guitar. Samantha forgot about the sleeping bag as she thought about Jayden and it billowed back to its full bulk, filling up the backpack all the way to the top.

She laughed again and looked around the room for the other items she wanted to start packing. Her flashlight, her pajamas, mosquito repellent, sunscreen. Her gaze fell on the mandolin in the corner. It had been in that corner for a long time, collecting dust. She almost didn't want to disturb the fine layer that had accumulated on it, as if it would