Free I Grew My Boobs in China by Savannah Grace

light blue and black, sixty-litre backpack. I hate you already, I thought with the fiercest passion I’d yet experienced . And then I laughed with a touch of hysteria.
    “Hey, you better enjoy it. This’ll be one of the best rooms you’ll get,” Ammon said, peeking around the doorway beside where I was still transfixed by our accommodations.
    “What’s your guys’ room like?” I asked.
    “The same.” With no space to walk, I crawled from the door onto the bed next to Mom.
    “Can you believe this place?” In disbelief, I looked around at the room which held all of one door, one bed, and a crooked mirror on one wall.
    “Ammon booked the best he could find for a reasonable price. Even this costs fifty dollars a night. Hong Kong is a big city; nothing is cheap here.”
    “How can they charge that much for this?” I asked, baffled. “You can hardly even fit a bag in here!” I tilted my head towards our two packs which consumed the entire floor space.
    For us, fifty bucks was a lot. Whenever we went on a family road trip, we’d either camp or all stay in a single, forty-dollar-a-night room in a Motel 6. That was another deep, dark secret that not even Terri knew. I always felt ashamed that I could only imagine the five-star hotels my friends stayed in on holidays.
    “Yes, I know, Savannah. But it’s clean, and you don’t actually NEED any more than this,” she emphasized. Yah, and you don’t actually NEED underwear either, but it’s still nice to have them, I thought bitterly.
    “Doesn’t it make you wonder how they ever got the bed in here in the first place?” I asked, too tired to argue. I was too tired for anything but the simplest complaints. I had no strength left to stage one of my usual, more dramatic performances. So this is their plan, is it? Tire me out so much I can’t complain. Keep me quiet. How could I let them take over like this? Those sneaky devils! A frightening realization hit me. No wonder my – they must’ve – I’ll bet they planted weights in my bag!!! I sprang to check my pack.
    “What are you doing?” Mom jumped at my sudden movements.
    “What the heck on earth,” I rambled, completely ignoring her as I flipped back the top of my big backpack and loosened the string to get into the main section, “could possi---BOOKS!?!?!” I exclaimed as I felt the hard flat surface and the bundled pages.
    “Yes, books. Lots of them,” Mom said without flinching. “What about it?”
    “That’s horrible. How could you do this to me?” I asked, too flabbergasted to be angry.
    “I told you before we left that everyone is going to keep a journal, too,” she added.
    “Yah, yah.A journal. Okay, I can see that. But you didn’t mention the rest of the library that comes with it!” I said, feeling deceived as I continued to pull them out one-by-one like a magician might pull rabbits from a hat.
    I had only found a notebook and pen at the very last minute for a journal because of Mom’s insistence, but I never thought she’d actually try to enforce reading, particularly if we had to lug the books around with us! It was a family tradition, I guess. When Bree and I visited our relatives at their summer house on Lake Chelan, Washington, Aunt Pam expected us to read for an hour each day. But we’d spent our entire summer vacation time boating, wakeboarding, and Seadooing with our cousins. I couldn’t recall ever seeing, let alone opening, a single book, so it didn’t really follow that reading and writing would actually happen on this trip of our own volition.
    “You’re cruel,” I said, pulling the last of five books out and placing it on the bed.
    “It’s good for you,” she said.
    “I’m already carrying all my school work!” I reminded her.
    “That was your choice, not mine.” When they asked if I packed my own bag at the airport I should have said “Certainly NOT!”
    “Yah, so?” Before the trip, I had been enrolled in self-taught correspondence courses, an