I buy this CD from the Kmart on Santa Maria Way with a friend the summer before 6th grade. We walk to the store via a shortcut behind the thoroughfare without her parents as chaperones. My family lives across town, so we return to her house for the first listen. Summers are like this: my mother shuffles me to a friend’s house, and I start to equate car rides and leaving home with something fun. We didn’t always live out here—in the bad part of town, in a dirty house on a big lot full of rats. Everything about this house is red: terracotta tiles and maroon carpet and my parents fighting and stacked bills with bold font and a burgundy-painted deck in the backyard dealing out splinters.