When I first started high school in Nassau County, the campus felt unreal.

The lawns were big and green. The buildings were clean. There were lockers in the hallways. And outside, lined up like a scene from television, were rows of bright yellow school buses.

We used to call them cheese buses.

Coming from Queens, I had never seen anything like that. In Queens, we didn’t ride yellow school buses to school. We had student bus passes and rode regular city transit. You showed the driver your little card that said half fare or free and that was it. No swiping, nothing fancy. Just hold the card up and go.

But here, in Nassau County, students actually rode yellow school buses.

The whole thing reminded me of Saved by the Bell.

For a moment, it felt like I had stepped into the version of America I thought I was immigrating to.

Back when I was still living in Jamaica, that was the picture I had in my mind when people talked about America. Big schools. Clean campuses. Opportunities everywhere.

What I didn’t realize was that I would have to pass through a three-year detour first.

I came to the United States when I was twelve years old. I didn’t step into a school that looked like this until I was fifteen.

Those three years in between were my Bricktown phase.

My mother was proud that I was attending that school. She would tell me it was a good school and that now I could focus on studying and make something amazing of my life.

In her mind, the equation was simple.

Good school. Good future.

And for a moment, I wanted to believe that too.

I tried to fit into that world.

I relaxed my hair and wore it curled the way girls were wearing it back then. My mother helped with the relaxer, although her styling was a little from a different generation, so I would adjust it afterward to make it look more current.

I wore tight high-waisted jeans that today people would probably call skinny jeans. Keds sneakers with slouch socks, even in winter. Sometimes I wore a flannel shirt tied in a knot at the waist.

I had a small hourglass figure and I knew it, so I dressed in ways that showed it. In my teenage mind, baggy clothes made you look fat, and that was absolutely not happening.

My makeup was simple.

Bright red lipstick, because it made my teeth look whiter. Sometimes my eyeliner doubled as lip liner.

That was the vibe.

On the outside, I looked like any other teenage girl trying to figure herself out.

What people couldn’t see was everything happening after school.

Some nights my stepfather and my mother would erupt into screaming arguments so loud that nobody in the house could sleep. And these weren’t the kind of raised-voice disagreements some families brush off as normal.

More often than not, the fights turned physical.

Sometimes the police were called. Sometimes he was taken away in handcuffs. It happened often enough that it almost became routine.

And sometimes, when they knew we were awake because of the fighting, they would drag us out of our rooms and make us pick sides.

Imagine being a teenager and being forced to decide which adult in your house is right, in the middle of a violent argument.

That kind of environment doesn’t exactly make it easy to focus on homework.

My mother believed that because the school was good, everything else would fall into place.

But it doesn’t work that way.

You can’t concentrate when your nervous system is constantly waiting for the next explosion. You can’t study when you’re listening for raised voices in the next room.

A beautiful campus doesn’t quiet that kind of noise.

Still, I tried to build a normal teenage life.

Friends came over sometimes. That was always a gamble. I would quietly hope that my stepfather would behave like the roaches in our old Bricktown apartment—polite enough not to come out when company was over.

Most of the time, he stayed in his room.

Most of the time.

And that was good enough for the moment.