Home Life (Ch. 6)

I got my first matching bedroom furniture set while living with my father. It was an off-white four-poster bed that I thought was really cool, along with a matching dresser with a large mirror. I also had a TV that I liked to watch Sailor Moon on before school and BET After Dark a little past bedtime… a lot past bedtime. Later, I got a Snoopy-themed computer that ended up getting spammed with porn after a one-time visit.

The housing we lived in had two bedrooms. You had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the main level, which held the living room and kitchen. The second floor had a bathroom and two bedrooms. I stayed in my father’s room until my bedroom was furnished. My father always made a habit of sleeping downstairs on the couch, even in the second place we moved to, so his room had a stale, unused feel to it. He didn’t have many clothes, so it stayed mostly bare and could have easily been a guest room—except we never had guests. I didn’t even know guest rooms were a thing until I got older. It felt like something only rich people had, but now I have two.

Growing up, I was used to someone giving up their bedroom for guests or making pallets on the floor with whatever could soften it enough. One time, I fell asleep on the bare floor and woke up unable to move. The pain was so bad my father had to lift me up and put me in the tub until I could move without crying. Lesson learned: always make a pallet. My friends didn’t stay over often, but we all lived within walking distance anyway. Sade would stay sometimes if her mother said it was okay after my dad called her. We would make up dances to Diana Ross and the Supremes or get on the computer and pretend to be older in chat rooms.

I usually kept my room clean, but there were times I had to yell out of the upstairs window to tell my friends I couldn’t come outside until it was done. Cleaning your room as a kid always felt like it took forever. What felt even stranger was hearing other kids say their parents cleaned their rooms and did their laundry. My dad taught me how to do laundry in elementary school and never did it again after that. The most he would do was buy detergent. The laundromat for our housing unit was in the building behind ours, directly across from Sade’s. It had about six washers and six dryers and took up half of the building. I was responsible for washing all of my clothes and uniforms, along with ironing them. I wasn’t allowed to leave while my clothes were washing because someone might steal them, but thankfully that never happened.

One of my close friends was Johanna, who lived in the building next to mine. She was two years older than me, but that didn’t matter in the neighborhood. It wasn’t like school, where age differences stood out. Johanna also had a single father like I did, but I don’t remember what happened to her mother, just like I don’t remember what happened to Sade’s father.

BET After Dark was exciting because it showed provocative videos, like girls “pussy popping on a handstand,” a song by Juicy J. This was before you would even hear curse words on the radio. Around that same time, I saw porn for the first time. One weekend, I went on a fishing trip with Johanna and her dad. Their van had one of those box TVs in the middle console with a built-in VCR. While her dad was out fishing, Johanna snuck and showed me a VHS tape of porn. I had never seen anything like it before. I didn’t even know what sex was. In that moment, a lot of things started to make sense.

Johanna was friends with a group of sisters who lived in the building in front of hers. By now, you can probably picture how many buildings were packed into that block. I only remember one of their names—September. They always seemed odd to me, and other kids thought so too. They were also being raised by a single father and weren’t allowed to leave the front of their home. Years later, when I ran into Sade as an adult, she told me those girls had been molested by their father for years. It made everything make sense. Their dad had always seemed off—now I understood why.

Around that same time, I got my first pet—a yellow parakeet with a blue beak. I was told the blue meant it was male. I didn’t know anyone else with pets since they weren’t allowed in our housing. I was also terrified of dogs, even familiar ones. Shannon and Jasmine had moved from Chicago to Kentucky/Indiana a year after we did, and when they visited, they would take my bird out of its cage and let it perch on their fingers and fly around the room. I would stand at the door, half-closed, screaming while watching them. Those were the only times it ever came out—until Sade accidentally let it fly out the window.

I got another bird, but it didn’t live long. I brought its cage outside in the fall while I was rollerblading, and it slowly died overnight in my father’s room. It was traumatizing. I think it died from hypothermia because it just laid at the bottom of the cage until my dad finally told me it was gone. I would sometimes see the first bird flying in the trees for a couple of years after that, if that’s any consolation.

My betta fish died because I neglected it out of fear. Someone told me to put a mirror next to the bowl so it would think it was another fish and try to attack it. It would ram itself into the glass. I became scared of it because of that and avoided cleaning the bowl. Sade would help sometimes, but I didn’t take care of it the way I should have. Looking back, that was on me. Pets just weren’t my thing during those years.

Cheerleading was.

I joined a team that practiced across the street at the park where I met Sade. There was a tennis court and a large open field. The girls practiced cheers on the court, which wasn’t used for tennis. I hadn’t even seen tennis played until much later. The only sport my dad watched was horse racing. I was good at cheerleading, even my toe touches, but I wasn’t a flyer. I was scared of falling. One day, I had to fill in for a girl who broke her ankle. Two girls stood on either side of me with another behind me. I went up—and grabbed someone’s hair to pull myself down. I was never asked to be a flyer again.

I started hanging out with the wrong group of girls from the team. They were mean and known for fighting. Somehow, I’ve always attracted “bad girls.” They didn’t smoke or do anything illegal, but they did things we weren’t supposed to be doing at that age. There was a biracial girl in the group that none of them liked. They constantly talked about her behind her back. I think she knew but stayed anyway.

They would make up reasons to fight her—saying she talked about them or that she was messing with someone’s boyfriend. One by one, everyone in the group fought her, except me.

I was told that if I didn’t fight her, they would all fight me. They made me go to her house. Neither of us wanted to fight. We didn’t have any real issues with each other and had always been polite. One of the girls put something on her shoulder and told me to knock it off to start the fight. I don’t know how it started, and I don’t know how it ended. The whole thing was a blur, and I ended up with a ripped sleeve. Her mother tried to stop it, and they fought her too. They later told me it was a tie, but my brother still jokes that I lost my only fight and they just didn’t want to say that.

(Updated April 7, 2026)