life in Brooklyn had consisted only of home, school, the store—the neighborhood wasn’t safe, and she had no places in it, nowhere to go when she was in high school. And she’d thought herself fortunate, compared to her classmates in Bed-Stuy; for the first time, at RISD, Penelope wondered whether she had been poor. She quickly realized she hadn’t been, although her mother had, and her father, when they were children.
