“No,” I answer a little too quickly. “I, uh… I haven’t.” The truth is, I’ve been trying to avoid them as much as I can. I barely even saw them during the last weeks of school. Adam only messaged me once, a few days after my dad got deported. He apologized for making things about himself, for letting it slip that he has feelings for me, but I couldn’t find the strength in me to write back to him. Kimmie, on the other hand, has been doing what she always does and texts me constantly. I do my best to reply to her, even if it’s one-word answers, but I haven’t written back in a while.

“Why not?” Pa asks me.

“They’ve just been busy this summer,” I say. I’m not about to explain the full story to my parents—they have more important things to worry about.

“And Jorge and Amy? How are they?”

“They’re good,” I say. They’re not home right now. They went out to run errands, and they took the baby with them. They’ve been doing that a lot lately—going out on their own. I think it’s Amy’s idea. Uncle Jorge tries to include Sophie and me in everything they do, but Amy seems to be okay with leaving us behind, especially now that she’s gone back to work at the gallery and her time with Ellie is limited. Maybe she just wants to be reminded of what life was like when it was still only the three of them. “Ellie’s growing so fast.”

We’re all silent for a second. We don’t like to say it out loud, but I know we can all hear the same clock ticking in our minds, reminding us that Ellie’s going to need her bedroom back sooner rather than later, and Sophie and I will have to find a new place to live.

“Tell us about you,” I say to my parents, trying to push those thoughts away. “How’s the new place?”

They’ve only been back in Mexico for a few weeks, and they’ve already had to move twice. After they were deported, they had nowhere to go, so they made the trip down to Puebla, where Pa is from. They slept at a hostel for a couple of nights while they figured out what to do. After being away for over twenty years, there weren’t many people they could turn to. Pa’s brothers and all of his childhood friends have moved away, or started their own families, or are in no position to help. In the end, Ma and Pa found a small room to rent, but it wasn’t long before their landlady kicked them out, and they had to look for a new place to live.