The Ghosts of Rancho Espanto

SOMETIMES PARENTS ARE creative when they punish you. Maybe making you squeeze into the same shirt as the little brother you’re fighting with.
Other times they’re tired and just go for the usual no phone, no video games, no internet.
Dad didn’t bother with a traditional punishment. He skipped right over creative, too, since I’m an only child. He blasted all the way to completely unhinged and bonkers.
That’s the only way I can explain why I woke up to the smell of poop. I’m not in Miami anymore. I’m in Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico.
Do you know how far away New Mexico is from Miami? This must be Dad’s version of shooting me to the moon to punish me.
When Principal Khouri told him what Yesi, Beto, and I did with the slushie machine, the vein in Dad’s forehead started to pulse and twitch like the boa constrictors people let loose in the Everglades. He pinched the bridge of his nose and hung up his cell phone. Mom just shuffled to the bedroom and went to lie down, ignoring his incoming tirade as she wrapped her bata de casa around her thin frame. Dad’s lips formed a tight line as he tried to keep his voice down, hissing at me as he closed the bed- room door where Mom was about to sleep. His thick black eyebrows pressed together like jousting caterpillars. Between “How could you?” and “¿Qué demonios estabas pensando?” he quickly arranged my punishment—an entire month at a ranch in New Mexico, working with a friend of his from college.
I was surprised how fast Dad worked everything out. It was al- most as if he’d been planning to ship me off across the country ever since we got the news about Mom. Like he just couldn’t wait to get rid of me so he’d have one less thing to fix.
“It’s for the best,” he told me. “You know, with everything that’s going on.”
Dad’s been using that phrase a lot lately. It was “for the best” when he made me stop hanging out with Beto and Yesi in the library so I could do more chores at home. It was “for the best” when he said I had to quit the school anime club because my grades were slipping. It was “for the best” when he grounded me from playing video games after I called my PE teacher a wart-covered warlock.
Dad and I clearly have different definitions of best.
Stealing the slushie machine was apparently Dad’s breaking point, after months of my grades slipping, calls from teachers, and whispered arguments so we wouldn’t wake up Mom. Yesi swore in multiple languages that Dad was overreacting, since it was just one little prank. She promised to hide me under her bed for the month. Beto told me he’d come up with a cloaking spell to make me invisible all summer.
But I was on a plane to New Mexico before he could figure it out.