Excerpt from Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And now she's helping him start up this camp. It's not a regular camp, though, like a place where kids go for a few weeks. It's something called a "family camp," and the idea is that whole families come and stay for a week, to learn how to get along better or something. But that's not what we're doing, the week-?long thing. We're actually moving here to help run the place, us and Scott Bean and two other families. And we're not going home after the summer's over, either, though my mom and dad haven't talked as much about that part.

"I need to pee," Tilly says suddenly. "It's an emergency."   Should've gone at the stupid rock place, I think.

My mom sighs. "We've only got maybe ten or fifteen more minutes until we get there. Can you wait?"

"No," Tilly says. "I told you, it's an emergency."

My dad looks at my mom. "Want me to pull over?" he asks.

"I guess," she says. "I think I have some tissues in my purse."

My dad pulls to the side of the road and stops the car. I don't have to go, but even if I did, I'd hold it. I wouldn't want to squat down and pee on the pine needles, in the middle of the woods.

"Okay," my mom says, opening her door. "Come with me."

"Come with you?" says Tilly. "Sorry, Mom, I'm not a lesbian."

I don't even really get that one, but I know it's something inappropriate.

"That's enough," says Dad, but Tilly's already closed the door.

I watch them walk away into the trees. Tilly's gotten really tall lately, like even just in the month since she turned thirteen. She's taller than my mom now, though even from the back, you can tell that my mom is the grown-up and Tilly is the kid, because Tilly walks in this kind of all-over-the-place way, weaving around in all different directions, and she keeps her head down, not really looking where she's going. I'm prettier than Tilly, I think, but it's partly just because she never brushes her hair, and the medicines she takes have made her a little bit fat.

The car is quiet for a minute. Then my dad asks, "So, how you doing, kiddo?"

I shrug. "Okay, I guess."

"Nervous?"

"A little."

"Me, too," he says.

"You're nervous?" I say. I don't know why that surprises me, but it does. "So why are we going?" He turns around and gives me a look like We've already talked about this, which we have a million times. All he says is, "Nervousness isn't a bad thing. It just means we're trying something new."

I don't really want to talk about it anymore, so I say, "I miss the motel," in this gloomy voice, because I know it'll make him laugh. It works, and I smile, too.

My parents hated the motel we stayed at last night, because they found a hair in the shower, and breakfast was just muffins wrapped in plastic. But Tilly and I liked it. Last night, we were going crazy, jumping from bed to bed and playing TV Bingo, which is where you click through the channels as fast as you can, and only stop when you see something that fits in a certain category, like animals or a commercial that shows a kitchen. Mom and Dad let us order pizza for dinner from a place that left ads in all the rooms, and no one even said anything about how this was the last pizza we were going to be eating for a long time.

This morning, though, neither of us talked very much. When we knew it was almost time to go— Mom was in the shower, and Dad was packing up, looking around the room to make sure we weren't forgetting anything—we flopped down next to each other on one of the beds and turned on the TV. We didn't fight about what to watch; we just picked the first kids' show we found. It was Blue's Clues, which is way too young for either of us, but it made me feel kind of sentimental. Back when we used to watch Blue's Clues, we lived in our same house in Washington, the one my parents are trying to sell now, and life just seemed kind of… solid, I guess. Like you didn't even have to wonder whether anything was going to change. I remember that for a while I thought that paw prints were some kind of universal symbol for "clue," and I liked to imagine what it would be like if there were tons of them out there in the world, just waiting for you to find them when you needed them.

Excerpted from Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.