Halfway through my tenth-grade year I had to change schools because we left West Deer Park and moved back to Germantown. My mom never told me why we were moving. All I remember is packing up and not wanting to leave and feeling fuckin’ bummed out, because I liked where we lived. It wasn’t like my mom was moving for a new job or to be in a relationship; she was moving to be alone on welfare in a different place. And to be closer to my sister. Germantown was where Geanie had settled and she had two kids now, Brianna from the time she got pregnant with Ricky and now Daisjha with Donnie, who was about to die from a heroin overdose.

There was no acknowledgment from my mom that maybe ripping me out of my school and taking me away from all the friends I’d ever known wasn’t in my best interest. She didn’t care about that at all. I think it was mostly that she’d lived in this place for ten years and she was always “starting over” with her different phases and she’d probably started over as many times as a person can start over while staying in the same place and she wanted something new. Of course if you’re bringing the same shit from one fucked-up apartment to the next fucked-up apartment, nothing’s going to change. But good luck telling that to my mom.

One day a friend of hers showed up in a white moving truck and while we were packing I accidentally dropped my laptop. For most of my life, the idea of getting a computer would have been crazy, but technology was advancing fast and computers were getting cheaper, so more and more kids had them and their parents were always getting them new ones and my mom always knew these families with money through the program, which was how I got my shitty old laptop, but even though it was a shitty old laptop it was still my most prized possession and I freaked out when it fell. Then I opened it up and the screen was cracked and I almost lost it, but then I realized I could still plug it into a monitor so I ended up getting one of those old gigantic dinosaur monitors that are the same color as a manila folder, like one you’d find in an elementary school library in 1987, and I started plugging my laptop into that.

The place we moved to in Germantown was this apartment complex called Grey Eagle Court, which was where Geanie lived. It was a bit of an upgrade from West Deer Park in that it was newer and didn’t have as much wear and tear on it, but otherwise it was the same white floors and beige carpets and linoleum kitchen tiles as everyplace else. My mom took over the living room and set up all her shutters and her dance mirrors and her cinder-block shelves. I took the bedroom and set up my crappy desk and my laptop and my enormous manila-folder monitor and then I jumped in midsemester at my new school, Seneca Valley.

All I knew about Seneca Valley High School was that when I was at Gaithersburg High School, people would say, “Everyone at Seneca Valley has AIDS.” When I got to Seneca Valley, people would say, “Everyone at Gaithersburg has AIDS.” So that’s how it was. The school itself was cleaner and newer and definitely nicer. It was fucking gigantic, too, thousands of kids. But it was the same as Gaithersburg in terms of being extremely diverse, everything from rich kids to poor kids, black kids and white kids and lots of immigrant kids. So it was the same shit, minus the familiarity.

I mostly remember feeling alone and unhappy. I didn’t make any friends, not like my real friends back at West Deer Park. I didn’t feel safe. As a kid I’d been around all the gangster shit and the hood shit but I always felt protected because of that weird code that nobody messes with kids. But the protective feeling was starting to erode because I wasn’t a kid anymore. I looked more and more like the teenager I was. I started seeing other kids my age getting jumped after school, so I started bringing a knife to school, this fillet knife with a twelve-inch blade, like the kind you’d use to gut a catfish. I had no intention of ever using it, but I’d take it with me everywhere and I had all these stupid ideas about how if I got jumped I’d pull it on the guy and tell him to get lost. It made me feel safer, but only because I was too much of a fuckin’ idiot to know that bringing a deadly weapon into school didn’t make me or anyone else safer at all and it didn’t matter anyway because I was there maybe five months before they kicked me out.

Since I hated the place, the few friends I did make were the burnouts, like this one Indian kid Jay whose mom worked during the day, so his house was empty. I would skip and go hang out with him and this Shrek-looking ogre motherfucker who was the school bully. We’d smoke weed and rap on instrumentals on YouTube and fuck around on Myspace and that was about it. After a few months of that, one of the counselors called me into his office and said, “Look, you’re barely showing up. Your grades are terrible. You’re out of here.”

I can’t say they hadn’t warned me. They’d been telling me for months, “You need to shape up. You need to come to class.” But I was so ignorant I wasn’t thinking about the repercussions. The only thing that was crazy was that it hadn’t come with any kind of intervention or outreach. There was no “Is everything okay at home? What’s going on in your life? Why is it that you’re not coming to school? Are you scared to come to school?” There was none of that. It was just “Clean out your locker and don’t come back.” In hindsight it pisses me off that they didn’t try harder for me, but at the time I didn’t argue because I didn’t care. I already knew I wasn’t going to college. Even if I’d had the grades, I didn’t have the money. So when this counselor told me to pack up and leave, I wasn’t mad at all. I was kind of like, “Cool. Fuck it.”

I went home and told my mom that I’d been expelled. She didn’t care. I mean, she cared a little, but it was like when you tell someone, “Oh, it might rain tomorrow.” They’re not thrilled with the news, but they don’t get that worked up because what are they going to do about it? She didn’t call the school, didn’t fight to get me back in, nothing. She was like, “Okay, fuck it. You don’t seem happy and I’m still getting my check for you from the government, so it’s whatever.”

So now I was expelled, hanging out with my mom with nothing to do and my days and nights got totally fucked up because I’d sleep all day and stay up all night fuckin’ off and watching Conan. After a month or two of that Josh came by one day and said, “ ‘Yo, I’m going to Florida. Wanna come?’ ”

Josh had this buddy down in Florida named Vince. Vince was a skinny guy with diabetes and Josh always talked about how they used to be best friends, and that week Josh was in one of his moods where he was like, “Fuck y’all in Maryland. I’m going to Florida to stay with Vince because fuck it.” He asked me to go with him and because I was a stupid sixteen-year-old kid who didn’t know not to get on a Greyhound bus with a mentally unstable drug addict and travel nine hundred miles to another state, I said, “Sure. Lemme ask my mom.” So I asked my mom, “Hey, can I go to Florida with Josh?” And instead of doing what any sensible parent of a sixteen-year-old would do and say, “Absolutely not,” she was like, “A’ight. Cool.”

Which was weird.

So one morning I packed up this ghetto-ass suitcase I had with some snacks and a change of underwear and my busted old laptop and my Discman. The whole thing was completely insane, because I was still a kid—and when I say “kid” I mean I was terrified of the world. Other than a few trips here and there, like going to Ocean City one time, I had never been twenty minutes outside of my own area code. I had maybe twenty-five dollars on me for the trip. I didn’t even know where in Florida we were going. Miami, Tampa, the Panhandle—I didn’t know the difference. To me it was all just Florida. I was looking up to Josh like he was this big brother who was going to protect me, having no idea that this was a dude who wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving me on the side of the road anywhere at any time. So one morning Mary Jo drove me and Josh down to the Greyhound station in D.C. and Josh bought our tickets and we jumped a bus.

It took us two days to get to Florida because there was so much waiting in different bus stations and transferring from one shitty Greyhound to the next shitty Greyhound and it all looked the same. When you’re on a Greyhound you’re either in the middle of nowhere or you’re in some shit area on the shit side of town and the back part by the bathroom smells and everyone’s sketchy and you maybe talk to someone if they’re sitting right next to or across from you but for the most part you keep to yourself. The thing that sucked the most was not having money. My twenty-five dollars ran out pretty quick and I had to ask Josh to buy me snacks, which he seemed pissed about having to do.

The whole ridiculous scheme started to unravel the minute we arrived in Florida. We showed up on Vince’s family’s doorstep and they were all excited to see Josh but then they took one look at me and were like, “Who the fuck is this?” At which point it was immediately obvious that Josh hadn’t told them I was coming.

So there we were: a mentally ill nineteen-year-old drug addict and this sixteen-year-old minor with no parents and no money. This family had no idea what to do with me. They invited me in and told me stories about alligators and were fairly accommodating, given the circumstances, but it was clear from the jump that they didn’t want to be responsible for me. I was so pissed at Josh because I felt like he’d used me and manipulated me. He hadn’t wanted to ride down by himself, so he’d dragged me along to have someone to talk to and boss around, but he didn’t care what happened to me once we got there, and other than seeing a palm tree for the first time, which was awesome, what the fuck had I gotten out of it? It made me feel dumb. Had I really been stupid enough to think I was going to live in some random family’s house in Florida with no money? How could I not have had enough sense to see how insane that was?

I stayed maybe three days max. The only thing I remember other than the palm trees was they took me to this house where there was this old white dude in his fifties with a buzz cut who was sitting around ranting about “something something something niggers.” I heard that and I froze. I didn’t know what to do. He kept going on about killing niggers and he didn’t know who he was talking to because I was this little black dude in a white kid’s body and to this day I feel like I was a coward because I didn’t stand up and say, “You can’t talk about black people that way” or “Yo, I’m black.” But I was sixteen years old and weighed about ninety pounds and I was alone in this strange place with this psychopath skinhead who probably had a gun. The whole thing was crazy and scary. It was also the moment when I realized “I have to get the fuck out of here.”

At some point Vince’s family must have called my mom and sorted things out because the next day they were buying me a bus ticket to D.C. to get me out of their situation. The mom bought me some snacks for the trip, like Pop-Tarts and shit, which was cool, but I didn’t have any other money left so I asked Josh, “Can I have some money?” and he said, “No,” and I said, “How am I supposed to go back with no money?” so he said, “I’ll buy your laptop for twenty bucks.” Shitty as it was, my laptop was totally worth more than twenty bucks even with the broken screen, a couple hundred at least. It was the most valuable thing I owned, my prized possession, but I didn’t have any choice, so I sold it to him and he gave me twenty bucks, which I thought was really fucked up.

I climbed back onto a Greyhound by myself with some Pop-Tarts and the twenty dollars from my laptop and I was terrified and alone with a bunch of weirdos and creeps and I got scared again. But the trip wasn’t a total loss because Josh had bought me some new Wu-Tang albums as well as the Roots’ Do You Want More?!!!??!, which was an album that really hit me.

Josh, for all his fucked-up bullshit of dragging me to Florida and ripping me off for my laptop, was still the guy who’d buy me music because he knew I couldn’t afford it. He was still the guy who’d take me through the music store, pulling different CDs out of the racks, going, “Here’s this and here’s this and you need this and this and this,” and he never stopped pushing me and telling me, “You need to be rapping, you need to be rapping, you need to be rapping.” For the whole rest of the ride home I did nothing but huddle by the window, staring out at the highway, plugged into my Discman, listening to the Roots and to Wu-Tang and memorizing the beats and thinking up rhymes in my head.