The day Dad told me he wanted to apply for a job as a theme park manager in Arizona, I thought it was quite possible aliens had taken over his brain—either aliens or the government. I knew from my great-grandma the government was capable of dreadful things. She was always saying stuff like, “If the public only knew what the government was up to, there would be a revolution!” and pumping her spotted, wrinkled fist in the air. I wasn’t completely sure why an eighty-six-year-old woman who lived in a trailer in Kansas was the only person privy to this top-secret information, but she clearly was. So I wouldn’t put it past the government to insert some kind of mind-control chip into Dad’s brain and force him to run a crumbling theme park in the desert.

My parents discussed it with me one night over a dinner of buttered noodles, my favorite meal. Oh, man—I just realized they deliberately buttered me up with buttered noodles.

“So I got an email from a guy by the name of Joe Cavanaugh,” Dad said over his noodles. “He owns a place called Stagecoach Pass.”

“What’s that?” I asked, slurping up a noodle.

“It’s this western-themed amusement park in Arizona. I guess he found my résumé on one of the job sites where I posted it. Anyway, he invited me to apply for the position of general manager at the park.”

“He must have been impressed with your résumé, Mister-Big-Time-Restaurant-Manager,” said Mom.

“Well,” said Dad, “I’m not really sure how managing a restaurant relates to managing an entire theme park, but I guess a huge part of their business is this steakhouse there, so that’s probably why he contacted me.”

“Are you going to apply?” I asked.

“It does sound interesting,” said Dad.

I scowled. “Arizona is really far away.”

“Don’t forget you were born there, Sheebs,” Dad said. “We spent a lot of time there during your adoption, and we really liked it. We even thought it might be a great place to retire one day. The winter was so beautiful—warm and sunny. I’m sick of icy winters.”

“What’s the summer like?” I asked.

Mom grimaced. “I’ve heard it’s kind of like the surface of the sun.”

“It could be an exciting adventure.” Dad waggled his eyebrows at me. “Swimming and soccer all year long.”

I glared at my noodles. “I don’t think I want to play soccer on the surface of the sun.”

“Come on,” said Dad. “You’re such a pro, you could play soccer anywhere.”

“Stop trying to entice me,” I said. “You haven’t even applied yet.”

“Well, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to.”

On the one hand, the thought of leaving Kansas, and the only home I could ever remember, sounded worse than anything. On the other, Dad had lost his job nearly six months earlier, when the restaurant he’d been managing went out of business. He really needed this.

“It’s okay with me,” I mumbled, feeling like I might cry.

Dad applied. And then he and Mom were invited to go to Arizona for an interview and to check the place out. And then they were invited to stay and run the theme park together. Turns out it was more of a two-person job.

And so we sold off a ton of our furniture and donated the junk we didn’t need and packed the rest of our belongings into a giant pod that would magically disappear from Kansas and magically reappear in Arizona a week later. We drove our old car over a thousand miles westward across the country, praying the entire time we wouldn’t break down.

We managed to make it in one single long day without stopping at a hotel until we got to Phoenix. By the time we arrived, Dad’s eyes looked like Atomic Fireballs and Mom’s hair looked like she’d taken a spin in a hairspray cyclone.

Early the next morning, we drove by the giant covered wagon with STAGECOACH PASS printed on it in large brown block letters, and I saw the park for the first time.

Then I knew for sure the government and mind-control chips were involved.