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“You live in an apartment? I think it must be cute,” offered my friend naively when I reluctantly admitted I lived in the apartment complex everyone called Fat City. I coveted her home, her two-parent household, her sunken bedroom, her thriving Barbie collection. 

Much like Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink (“I don’t want you to take me home, okay?!”), I was petrified to ever let anyone in my hometown see where we lived, whether it was the green shag apartment in Fat City, the converted bunker deep in the woods on the edge of town, or the apartment with the gaudy splash of Hawaii mural wallpaper.

Outside Ohio, I was less self-conscious. Easily lulled by road trips, I found strange comfort in the unknown. Moving cross country in our clunker one winter, I served as navigator, smoothing out the map over my skinny lap and calling out which exit to take. Checking into highway motels each night, Erika and I knew to stay hidden under blankets until we were ushered in while the manager wasn’t looking. I may not had known what lurked outside on the midnight freeway, but one thing was certain: no one out there cared whether I lived in a house or an apartment.

Scrappy kids with holes in our jeans, we fit right in at the alternative school in our new Seattle neighborhood. It turned out to be a haven, where we called teachers by their first name and hid out in the makeshift castle if we didn’t feel like studying. Where I traded Lip Smackers and wasn’t ashamed of my thrift store threads. Where I made friends with an older girl who included me on an important Leif Garrett mission. Where I skated around the university district in my rainbow suspenders and green felt beret.

One day out of the blue Mom pinned a poster of the Greek alphabet on the wall, declaring we needed to memorize it. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta…. these funny shapes and sounds would be our ticket to a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, where there was an art school apparently beckoning our mother.

My classmates carried on with their tween lives while I begrudgingly packed my duffel bag. I was heartbroken to be leaving behind our recently inherited pet hamster, for which I had crafted its own cozy cardboard home, with cut out window frames, a door, and colorful crayon designs on the exterior. I was also leaving behind my first major crush, a kid named Ben who loved KISS.

On the last day of 1979 we left American soil, nervously nestled aboard a double decker jumbo jet with a spiral staircase, direct to Athens, Greece, our first flight. Once there, we lost half our luggage when it rolled off the bus en route to the port. Swiveling around in our seats, we witnessed honking cars angrily dodging our worldly possessions in traffic as the bus sped onward. Erika was traumatized losing her carefully curated collection of stuffed animals, practically sentient beings to her. All she had left was Snoopy, who was fortunate to have boarded the bus with us.

Decades later, I am still in awe of our young mother, how she managed to transport us from the corn fields of Ohio to the stunning Aegean Sea on a microscopic budget. She scrimped and saved and did odd jobs — like the time she painted church saints for the $800 that got us to Seattle. When we took flight that winter, I think she had about $1,000 to last the entire year abroad.

Our home on the island was a cottage in the hills. We had goats, eucalyptus trees, and unobstructed views of the Milky Way each night. We were cradled between an ancient monastery perched atop a large hill and the seashore village of Parikia, with donkeys as the main mode of transportation. We learned to live without indoor plumbing and electricity.

While Mom studied block printing, photography, and painting at the Aegean School of Fine Arts, Erika and I scrounged up drachmas and made our way into the village to score Ion chocolate bars, the ones with the red wrappers and pink flowers. Mom enlisted the help of Liz, a friendly, freckled backpacker from Scotland with a pierced nose, to teach lessons during the week. But this didn’t last long, and we ended up skipping an entire school year.

How did two rogue American girls pass the hours on Paros in 1980? We played with goats (or mourned their death when they ended up on the neighbor’s Sunday dinner table), imagined the ‘3-legged’ branch was a horse named Charlie, tattled on two British siblings who terrorized us all summer long, and avoided death by drowning when our floating lounger took us too far out from shore.

Sunburn, zinc oxide, and jelly fish stings were a way of life. I wondered what all the kids back home were doing. Likely roller-skating, reading Teen magazine, and having sleepovers. We were a family whose feet never seemed to touch the ground. Deep down in my conflicted 11-year-old heart, I felt a strong connection to the island, sobbing on the eve of our departure. It hurt to say goodbye to the moody sea, my constant companion.

Stateside again, I entered Morgan Middle School as a sixth grader with the rest of my original class in Ohio. Turns out missing a year of school wasn’t such a big deal after-all. “Greece? You mean the movie Grease?” was the reply I got when I tried to explain where I had gone.

Not a soul could relate. And neither could I actually. I couldn’t articulate a thing. I couldn’t explain where we had been, what we had done, why we had left. It would take years to fully digest the experience, to see it as the unique gift that it was. For now, I was back at square one, moving into yet another apartment and praying the other kids wouldn’t notice.

Nicole Irizawa grew up in landlocked Ohio and now calls Japan home. She works as a communications professional in Tokyo and enjoys hiking, yoga, paranormal podcasts, and café hunting. Her writing has appeared in Five Minutes and elsewhere. She lives with her husband, daughter, and pet yorkie in Chiba Prefecture. https://www.fiveminutelit.com/five-minutes/lifespan