All of us children of immigrants were hopelessly lost. I do not mean “lost” in the upper-class aspirational sense of being on a journey of self-discovery, but lost in the very physical sense of not knowing who we were and where we came from. The schools could not tell us. Our parents could not tell us. The streets tried to tell us, but those answers posed their own problems.

We tried to compensate for our lack of purpose by sagging our pants and tilting our hats. We rapped Jay-Z and Nas lyrics like they were verses from our respective holy books. We were desperately trying to signal that we, too, had power — even if that power was a fantasy.

It was worse for the girls, especially the Muslim ones. They faced the same struggles we did, while also living in complete terror of their fathers. Misogyny told them they were inferior to boys and should be married. They lied to protect themselves. That year, a teenager in my neighborhood named Aqsa Parvez was murdered by her father and brother for running away from home and wearing “Western” clothes.

When aimlessness meets alienation, violence is certain. Before I picked up a serious book, I knew boys who had stabbed other kids or had themselves been stabbed. Before I started high school, a boy four years older than I was killed when someone smashed a hammer through his skull. Before I graduated from high school, a childhood friend died in a car accident while fleeing from the police. I knew who had a gun, who had knives, how to say hello to them, when and how to run. Enormous mental resources went into navigating this world — and this was just one world; the others, of the mosque and the home, were equally complex, equally hazardous.

That summer, I had an epiphany: If I continued to do poorly in school, what lay ahead was either the street or, if I was lucky, the factory. And this made me afraid — unutterably afraid. I belatedly understood that my fate was connected to the boys on my block, that the kids who dropped out, the kids who got arranged marriages, the kids who fled to the mosque and came out with long beards, the kids who mocked the smart students, were all doomed, because they, and I, did not have the luxury of a second chance.