“Sounds like this girl’s a little bit of a bridezilla,” says Dad.

“A what?” I can’t help but picture a half lizard, half human in a puffy white wedding gown and glittering veil, slithering down the aisle, claws full of a bouquet of flowers and a tail dragging behind her.

Dad chuckles. “A monster bride,” he says. “Someone who’s hard to work with. Not all that flexible.”

“Well, mayyyyyyybe this mom should just let her son’s fiancée plan the wedding she wants?”

“Dear Mom on a Mission,” Dad says in an official-sounding voice, “perhaps a parent’s most noble mission is to do whatever will make their child happiest, and in this case that includes your future daughter-in-law’s plans for her concrete-jungle wedding. This is one safari you won’t want to miss.”

“Clever,” I say through a bite of cheesy eggs.

I finish my breakfast and fill up my water bottle before grabbing my backpack and lunch. I give Dad a quick hug goodbye and sprint to the bus stop at the end of the street before it leaves me behind. On the bus Oscar is waiting for me with a saved seat in the second row.

He lets out a yawn so big I can see his tonsils. “How was night one?”

I pause and think about telling him that I felt my whole body hiccup every time the house creaked in the middle of the night or that it was weird to see Dad’s family pictures piled up in a box instead of hanging on the wall or that I couldn’t find the hand soap when I went to the bathroom.

Instead, I shrug. “It was fine.” I shake my head. Oh heck, who am I kidding? “It was weird,” I blurt. “It was like waking up from a dream but then just finding out you’re still dreaming. Like, it was my room, but it wasn’t. Everything was just a little bit off.”

“I don’t know why your parents don’t just do like what my tía and tío did. Tía Lisa kept the house and Tío Rudy got a tiny little one-room apartment at the edge of town before moving to Odessa after he met his new girlfriend in the Classifieds section of the newspaper.”

Oscar comes from a large Mexican family and sometimes just listening to his mom talk on the phone to her sisters is more interesting than most TV shows, but his tía Lisa and tío Rudy were the first divorce in the family ever, making them the big family gossip for a long time now. “Aren’t the Classifieds for, like, used furniture and odd jobs?”

His whole body flops dramatically when he shrugs. “Maybe people try to trade their boyfriends for recliners?”

“A recliner sounds way better than a boyfriend,” I say, trying my best to hide the way the thought alone of a boyfriend makes my mouth go dry. “Well, I don’t want my dad to move-move. You don’t think he’d actually do that, do you? But maybe he doesn’t have to live one house down from my mom, and maybe his place could look totally different. Like it’s just his instead of theirs.”