My eight-year-old home, broken into by divorce, didn’t feel different than any other Midwestern kid’s, with their two-parent homes, single income, dad works at the Ford plant and mom home making the house smell like fresh baked goods. All of us played until the streetlights came on, but we were not the same. At nine, my broken home migrated from Midwest suburbia to Las Vegas suburbia, and these, too, were not the same. 

There were rules. You learn very quickly in Las Vegas where you can and cannot go, what you can and cannot touch. You cannot go anywhere. You cannot touch anything. Las Vegas was not for children—even if you could make friends with other kids who waited for a parent to finish with the grocery store poker machines. Avoid the park, because of gangs and the playground flasher, and head straight home after school, even if no one’s waiting for you. 

In Las Vegas, the streetlights glowed neon—always on, nobody home—and I learned about the Latchkey Kids. See I had never known the latchkey kids before; my whole elementary school seemed to walk home as one mass of knobby knees, all together, all of us knowing someone would always be home to greet us.

In Las Vegas, I learned never to expect anybody at home. The latchkey kids were rounded up after the bell, and I’d wave leaving the school yard, then I took the long way down the streets with the prettiest names, always strolling alone. The long way felt safer than passing the toxic oleander bushes, filled with black widows, where I felt hunted as I walked by the middle school. Had I only imagined I was being followed, or was everything a danger here?  Most days the front pocket of my backpack held a note about another creep who had flashed the kids on the playground that week. When I finally arrived home, my latch key in my hand, I would place my backpack on the floor and lock the door behind me.

I would call for my mom late into the night, have her paged away from her favorite slot machine to the concierge desk, and I’d ask if I was allowed to make a frozen dinner—I was hungry and my brothers didn’t seem concerned (were they even home?). I preferred poultry: rubber roast turkey slices balanced on dried out crouton stuffing, waterlogged mashed potato paste, something they called cobbler that tasted like sour cherries bathed in acid, fried chicken meals that went soft and gummy after too long in the microwave. But if you didn’t overcook it, the brownie was passable, especially if I closed my eyes, which helped me ignore the bits of freezer-burned peas and corn that had slipped out of their plastic compartment and into the brownie’s part of the tray.

When I played with my dolls—long past the age when girls stopped playing with dolls—I pantomimed coupled parents who never left their children alone for too long. Or I would take my Walkman outside and pretend to dance on an enormous stage, watched by smiling grown-ups waiting to applaud my routine whenever I took a bow.

I started shaving at nine, springing it on my mom, excited but expecting to be in trouble, so desperate to be an adult in this adults-only city that I had picked out my own razor and slipped it unnoticed into the cart a few days earlier, next to the Teen Beat and a few more frozen dinners. 

“Mom, I shaved my legs for the first time.” 

“Okay.” 

“And I only cut them a little.” 

She nodded. Had she even heard me? The best she could give me was indifference. So I decided to spend my desire for mothering elsewhere. I adopted a kitten from the pet store, the smallest one in the bunch because nobody seemed to want her either.

Then, at ten, I planted seeds in the sand alongside the house’s foundation, careful not to disrupt the black widow—so long as I could see her, I was safe—and I tended them, everyday checking for new growth, singing to the sprouts, standing proud over the tennis ball-sized melons that begun to swell on the vines. When I returned from summer vacation, my mother had placed a grocery store melon amongst the greenery. I was so excited I didn’t even notice the sticker on the 10-pounder. (I am still teased for this.) I did not understand that watermelons would not mature in the desert. It took thirty-plus years to realize that I had not thrived there, either.

Three years in Las Vegas left us all brittle and dry; my mother, brothers and I moved back to the Midwest, where the needs of my oldest sister lived. Returning felt like landing on another planet, one with cool air and nuclear families. The midwest offered me three grades of kids to judge the weird girl from the desert, the sixth-grader with the fire engine red “Wet and Wild” crop top from the water park on the Strip and the shitty 1992 perm, every bit her mama’s daughter: the girl who had grown up too fast.