New York was different than I had expected. I had been out of state before but this was different. Just the city atmosphere even startled me a bit. We were left downtown. Funny part was our family didn't even know we were coming. We didn't talk to them at the safehouse at all. They just bought tickets and sent us across the country. Upon arrival we called my grandparents to come pick us up. It was big. EVERYTHING was so big compared to what I was used to; In Kentucky there were no skyscrapers, no office buildings only businesses and homes. At one point an old home improvement store was re-purposed as a childcare facility. We simply didn't BUILD things. It costed too much in the mountain town we lived in. Walmart even turned us down to build a location and that's saying A LOT.

We got to the house and my mother had to wait for paperwork and clearance from the school-board to enroll me. I was home-schooled for what seemed like MONTHS and I hated it. I was so much further along than my classmates when I re-entered school, to this day I'm not sure if it was due to the homeschooling or because curriculum in Kentucky was so strict in order to keep kids OUT OF TROUBLE. Good news is I can read roman numerals lol. I lived within two miles of the school so I had to walk. I remember it was terrible. Remember that scene from A Christmas Story; The one where the boy falls over and can't get up because his winter clothes weighed so much, it actually happened to me once I remember I had to take off my jacket to get back on my feet. In New York you have to APPLY to schools, when you GRADUATE from elementary school you put in applications much like you would a college. I remember all of my friends went to a school named Athena and they were separated from me when I went to Apollo. Apollo was on the other side of the city. It was COVERED with guard patrol EVERYWHERE. It was a small but very upright school. There had to be at LEAST 5 floors. They had an Administration on the top floor followed by the 6th,7th,8th grade floors. The lower floors contained the infirmary, cafe, locker rooms, dance hall, auditorium and all other extracurricular rooms. The curriculum was intense, maybe that's the reasoning in being split from my friends. All of my friends and neighbors near the house attended the other school and I was jealous of all the free time they had to themselves; while I sat at home studying for exams, doing HOURS of homework to prepare for the next class. Even the DAY1 DAY2 schedule didn't help. In fact, I ended up taking more classes than I knew what to do with. I ended up taking 18 classes a week. 9 a day and lunch of course. I didn't know that there were so many schools available in New York versus Kentucky. In Kentucky there were NO choices. There was one school building per so many grades. In fact ALL schools released at the same time and rode the schoolbus together. It was crazy in New York I had to take the city bus to get to school. It was the first time that I couldn't WALK anywhere I needed, considering the town I lived in contained about 5 miles of area TOPS.

The scariest part of everything was that we found out that our paperwork from the safehouse meant NOTHING. The safehouse in Kentucky rushed the process so much so that we were almost immediately moved into ANOTHER safehouse to protect us and get the necessary paperwork done. Unfortunately that would have caused me to transfer schools and start ALL over again. With everything going on Namechange was on the agenda as well. There were quite a few variations thrown around. To this day I have to think about the name in the system when I go to the doctors. I could have been anything from my grandfathers name (deeming me as ferrari) or a much less known name as (crociata.) THAT'S right I'm not hiding anymore. I am an adult and though I'm scared of a lot of things, I am not afraid of what I have been through. It didn't kill me... so I guess I won