“It’s the first weekend of the year.” Braden cuts me off. “The kid wants to actually go to college, Blondie.”

She bares her teeth at him. “Don’t call me Blondie.”

“I’m sorry, Sara, I really am.” I swing my bag over my shoulder. I leave before she can reply.

I step onto the engineering quad, strictly organized with its rectangular buildings and perfect, half-circle hills. I hop on my bike and head toward the Cal Ave train station.

When I’m at school, I’m not far from home, at least as the crow flies. But it is quite the journey on public transportation.

I pop headphones in my ears as the train pulls up to the station. It takes me a while to find a seat among the young employees of Silicon Valley. Twenty-somethings who prefer to live in bustling San Francisco rather than the sunny suburbs near the tech campuses, they usher through a sort of reverse commute every day.

When the train gets to SF, I hop off the Caltrain in favor of the BART, which is faster but has far less seating, to cross the Bay. Outside the window, trendy places with purposely misspelled names like Flur and Cheeze that sell artisan rugs and fifteen-dollar truffle-infused grilled cheeses give way to chain stores, diners named after their owners and taquerias with pictures of the food on the wall.

Telephone wires run overhead and street art and tags start to pop up on the sides of buildings. It feels like I’m thousands of miles, not a few zip codes, away from where I started. Here, a yard is a decent patch of grass in front of a house that looks like the kind you’d have drawn as a kid—a solid square with a triangle on top. In Silicon Valley, yards are rolling, professionally landscaped hills surrounding castles the likes of which I’d seen only in picture books or episodes of My Super Sweet 16.

I know we are leaving the “nice neighborhoods,” the ones people move to “for the schools” and brag about by underlining their zip codes on envelopes or tagging their location on every Instagram post. But there is something more real about the towns that pass outside the window now. Everything is less polished, sure. And yeah, grass springing up from cracks in the concrete is less aesthetically pleasing than cobblestones. But at least it’s a sign of life.

This is an actual neighborhood. A town people have lived in for a while.