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  To Heather and Rob

  and the magic of Ghost Ranch

  CHAPTER 1

  “YOU MEANDER DOWN an empty corridor, late afternoon light streaming through the large, smudged windows,” Beto whispers behind me and Yesi as we walk down the hall. “You slowly make your way to the large banquet hall, empty of revelers.”

  Beto, Yesi, and I stop at the doorway of our school cafeteria at Heron Glade Middle School. Beto gives me a confident smile, his braces glinting in the light.

  He puts one hand on my shoulder and one hand on Yesi’s shoulder. “Your clan has been granted one item from the banquet hall to aid them in their travels. What do you decide to take?”

  Yesi looks at Beto and winks. I swallow hard. “Are we really doing this?” I ask. My ears hurt from straining to listen for approaching teachers or custodians catching us in the act.

  Beto squeezes my shoulder as Yesi nods. “Oh yeah. Our clan elects to take the slushie machine,” she says.

  Beto smirks. “Excuse me, brave traveler. The what?”

  Yesi squints, thinking. “The … magic fountain of icy sweetness.”

  “Ah, the magic fountain.” Beto nods. “Excellent choice. Roll, please.”

  Yesi pulls a green twenty-sided die from her jeans pocket. We crouch on the ground, and she flips the die on the gray concrete floor. It tumbles with a clatter that echoes through the hall. Our game is based on Beto describing a situation, Yesi and I deciding what we want to do, and then someone rolling a die to see if we’ll be successful. The number that pops up will tell us whether our attempt to steal the slushie machine will work. The higher the number, the better.

  “Sixteen,” Yesi says.

  Beto winks at us. “I see success in your endeavor.”

  We creep into the cafeteria, our eyes on the gleaming metal prize in the corner of the room.

  Beto, Yesi, and I have been obsessed with the role-playing game The Forgotten Age since the beginning of third grade. Other players have come in and out of our game, since it doesn’t really work with only three people, but they always lose interest. We’re the only ones who’ve stuck with it for nearly four years.

  Last week, my dining room table was covered with our character charts, a Land of Eldervorn map, multicolored twenty-sided dice, and a thick players’ book for The Forgotten Age, brimming with sticky notes. That was when Beto came up with the Great Big Idea to take our characters on a real adventure, one that would make our regular tabletop journeys seem like two-dimensional snooze fests. Beto insisted it was the perfect opportunity to showcase our characters and skills. Yesi agreed immediately. She’s the rogue in our group and always pushes our team into dark dungeons and crumbling castles during our adventures. I immediately thought it was a bad idea and wished I could distract Beto’s grand plan with the quesitos Mom always baked for us while we played.

  But then I remembered Mom hadn’t made her famous cream cheese puff pastry treats for weeks. She hadn’t done much at all the past few months, actually. And taking our game out of my house meant being away from Dad’s grumbling about my grades slipping and Mom’s whimpering every time she moved.

  We finally agreed that the Great Babosan Trio, as Beto and Yesi had named us, would go on our adventure in the halls of our middle school the last week of sixth grade before summer break. Not only did my gut tell me this latest plan was a bad idea, I still disagreed with our group name, Babosan, since it sounded way too close to the Spanish word for someone who drooled all over themselves.

  Beto, Yesi, and I gather around the slushie machine pushed in the corner of the cafeteria, next to the empty vegetable cart that students ignore to get in line for the frozen goodness. My stomach flip-flops at the thought of being discovered by a teacher or cafeteria worker. I squeeze my eyes shut, but all I see are Mom’s trembling hands with thin skin and purple veins as she tries to open a bottle.

  I shake my head, flinging the image from my mind. “Let’s do this,” I say. “What’s next?”

  Beto looks at Yesi and me. “Travelers, you have entered the banquet hall and selected the magic fountain of icy sweetness. Now you must extract the fountain from the castle safely without alerting the guards. What spell will you choose to execute your mission?”

  Yesi shrugs. If she had her choice, she’d ride the slushie machine straight out of the cafeteria, whooping and hollering the entire time.

  I bite my lip. “I choose a cloaking spell to conceal our treasure from those who…” I raise my eyebrows. “Well, like, from Principal Khouri, obviously.”

  Beto nods. “Ah, from the usurpers who wish to see your endeavor fail.”

  “Yep, definitely them,” I reply, pulling from my backpack a long, flowy pink skirt that belonged to Mom before it got too big for her. I slide it over the top of the slushie machine, the elastic waistband straining, and shimmy it down to the metal cart the machine is perched on. Yesi unzips her blue Miami Marlins baseball hoodie and wraps it around the machine, pulling the hood over the top.

  “The spell is complete. You have successfully transformed the magic fountain into a lovely maiden,” Beto tells us.

  I snort and roll my eyes.

  Yesi winks. “Rafa, you can take this maiden to the beach this weekend.”

  “She will return to her true form once she is freed from the castle,” Beto says, shaking his head. “Also, she doesn’t like sand.”

  We slowly move the slushie machine across the floor, its flowy fabric catching on the wheels. Beto yanks the bottom of the skirt up.

  “Hey, careful with the maiden,” Yesi says.

  I peek out of the cafeteria, making sure we don’t run into a custodian, a teacher, or Principal Khouri. Luckily, it’s the last week of school and most employees have been zombie-walking right behind the students the moment the final bell rings. I’ve been staying in the library after school until the librarian kicks me out and makes me go home, something she’s been doing earlier and earlier each day.

  “The dungeon masters are exhausted from their long day of torturing peasants and have all retired to their quarters,” Beto says.

  “Huh?” I look at Beto, scrunching my eyebrows together.

  “The hallway’s clear, bro.”

  Yesi pushes the cart down the hall as Beto holds the skirt up. I scan the hallway, praying no one sees us. What if Principal Khouri has a secret dungeon below the school where she strings students up by their toes over pits of mutated piranhas? What if the slushie machine suddenly explodes, plastering our kidneys, intestines, and shriveled brain bits all over the windows?

  We roll the cart toward the side doors at the end of the hallway. All we have to do is make it out the doors and then we can roll the slushie machine down the sidewalk, across the street, and into the record books of The Forgotten Age. As long as the slushie machine doesn’t careen out of control, knock me over, and crush me under its metal weight, putting me in a full body cast for summer vacation.

  The hallway slopes down before the doors, the floor covered with bumpy plastic circles to keep kids from gaining too much speed as they launch themselves out the door after the last bell rings. The slushie cart starts to speed up as we slide down the ramp, the wheels echoing loud clacks through the hallway.

  “Ño! Beto, it’s going too fast!” I hiss as the wheels catch on the pink skirt, tearing the fabric. The ruffles wrapped around the wheels don’t slow the cart down. It barrels toward the door. I stick my foot in front of the wheels in an attempt to stop it. All I get is a sore toe as the cart bumps over my foot, continuing its race down the ramp.

  “Ah, babosan bomb! We’ve got to stop it!” Yesi shouts. Any hope of sneaking down the hallway is shattered as her voice bounces off the windows. I watch for the glass to crack as she shrieks our catchphrase.

  I try to jump in front of the cart as it careens toward the doors but end up pushing Beto over in the process. He falls to the ground and the cart runs over his hand. He yelps and clutches his fingers to his chest as he scrambles up to join Yesi and me in our race after the runaway cart. Yesi reaches out, and her fingers hook the blue hoodie as it flaps behind the cart barreling down the hall.

  But it’s too late.

  The slushie cart maiden, her skirt torn, bursts through the large blue door and speeds down the sidewalk, only coming to a stop when it crashes into a car bumper.

  Principal Khouri’s car bumper, to be exact.

  Her bumper that is currently three feet below her frowning face and crossed arms.

  I put my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. My purple twenty-sided die tumbles from my pocket and clatters across the sidewalk. Principal Khouri holds the die wi
th her pointy black shoe, stopping it on one.

  Chance of success? Unlikely.

  CHAPTER 2

  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 bedroom 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 almost 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.

  It was dark when Jonas Webber, the ranch director and Dad’s friend from when they were both studying at the University of Miami, picked me up from the airport in Santa Fe and drove me to Rancho Espanto, my prison for the month. Rain pelted Jonas’s Jeep our entire drive, so he said he’d show me around later. For all I knew, I’d landed in the stinky Hedor Swamps, my least favorite place in The Forgotten Age after Beto, Yesi, and I got stuck there on a quest when Yesi kept rolling a two.

  Jonas informed me the ranch doesn’t have cell service or internet, so I can’t even text Beto and Yesi to complain about the ranch’s poop smell. They made me promise to chat with them every day, but my only option here seems to be tying a note that says Save me to a bird’s leg and launching it in the direction of Miami.

  I sit up and rub my face. Stretching my back, I wonder if the mattress I slept on is stuffed with pine cones and rocks. After Jonas called Dad from the landline phone in his office to say I’d arrived safely, he showed me where I’d be staying—a small mud-colored building next to a long wooden fence. I thought maybe Dad had secretly sent me to one of those Scared Straight programs for at-risk youth. My room has a bed and a small dresser. The bathroom has the expected sink, toilet, and tiny shower but also a few surprise roommates, like the large spider perched on the shower faucet, waving its leg and daring me to bathe.

  I skipped cleaning up last night.

  I yank a shirt out of my suitcase and something floats to the floor. It’s a photograph and a piece of paper. I pick up the photo and stare at me, Dad, and Mom standing in front of a Christmas tree. She must’ve snuck it in there when I was busy being yelled at by Dad. I touch the top of her head in the photo. She’s about four inches taller than I am in the picture, and her long dark brown hair is flowing loose over her shoulders and down her arms.

  She’s an inch shorter than me now even though I haven’t gone through any growth spurts. And her hair, well …

  Grabbing the paper off the floor, I recognize Mom’s careful handwriting.

  ¡Oye, Pollito! I can be sneaky just like your character, no?

  I smile. Mom’s been calling me Pollito since I was born. She said I was completely bald the first two years of my life and looked exactly like a plucked chicken. Thanks, Mom.

  I know you don’t want to be in New Mexico. Ño ñame, I wouldn’t, either, honestly. How do people live so far away from the ocean? I couldn’t stand it, ya tú sabes.

  But before you know it, you’ll be home soon. I’ll try to make you a big plate of quesitos.

  The last sentence of the letter is written so messily, I can barely read it. Mom must’ve gotten tired. But I think it says, No hay mal que por bien no venga.

  I sigh, staring at Mom’s handwriting. I don’t understand how she can possibly believe that every cloud has a silver lining. Sometimes clouds are just a babosan bomb, dark and stormy, waiting to pelt you with rain or hail. And even after the clouds pass, your shoes are muddy and the air smells moldy.

  Before Dad drove me to Miami International Airport, I hugged Mom, my arms wrapping completely around her, feeling each of her ribs. She went up on her toes to kiss me on the forehead. I wanted to cling to her as long as I could, but Dad, not looking me in the eye, grunted that we needed to go.

  I set the photo on the dresser and tuck the letter under my pillow. As I change my clothes, I knock my shoes against the wall before I put them on, uncertain if Señor Spider found a new place to hang out and scare me.

  Stepping outside, I glance around. Now that it’s light and the rain has stopped, I get a good look at my prison. The small building with my room is up on a hill, giving me a decent view of the rest of the ranch. There’s only a few buildings here, tucked between towering rock cliffs that burn orange as the rising sun hits them. All of the buildings are exactly like mine—one story and covered with brown clay. Some of them have wooden poles sticking out under the roof, but I have no idea why. There’s more dirt here than I’ve ever seen in my life, only broken up by scraggly bushes, rocks, and cacti. It’s definitely like the Cambimuda Realm, where you have to battle shapeshifters that look different every time you come across them. Which is a way cooler place than the Hedor Swamps and probably where Beto, Yesi, and I would be adventuring all summer if I hadn’t been exiled here.

  I shove my hands in my pockets and groan as I stretch my neck. Even with the rain last night, the air is dry, and I cough.

  Jonas explained that Rancho Espanto serves as an artists’ retreat where painters come to be inspired by the landscapes. He told me a famous painter used to live in a cabin here. There’s even a museum in Santa Fe dedicated to her and filled with a collection of her huge flower paintings. So artists from all over the country come to Rancho Espanto because they want to be like her. They hike trails, ride horses, and take classes together. All I can think as I look around is they’d better be good at using every shade of brown in their paintings.

  But Jonas also explained that the ranch is a place where scientists study. They work here digging up dinosaur bones, particularly of Coelophysis, the state dinosaur of New Mexico. I didn’t know states had official dinosaurs.

  And a ranch full of artists and scientists seems like an odd combination to me. I wonder what kind of job Jonas is going to give me to do. Refilling paint palettes for landscape painters? Digging in the dirt with paleontologists?