I’d waited the entire last drag of spring for summer school to start. New country, new house. Disney audiobooks and public television had become a telescope into my new life. I craved the familiarity of a teacher, a schedule, and books.

At seven, I’d already been to Disney and its fiction announced itself loudly through hand-rendered illustrations. But Barney? Barney was different.

For the uninitiated, Barney & Friends was a live-action television series aired on PBS through 2010. Its titular character was an anthropomorphized tyrannosaurus rex who extolled the virtues of the imagination. His Gatorade-purple and highlighter-green exterior felt as real and as accessible as the blue stars on my shorts.

Barney and his friends-- which included other dinosaurs as well as human child actors -- bounced into the screen with a giggle and would begin their school day with a tune based on the “Yankee Doodle” nursery rhyme. My cousins had warned me that American life would be different. I wondered at the use of anthropomorphized dinosaurs as teachers, but who was I to question it? I barely knew English.

As the American children sang on the screen, I belted alongside them, “I love you, You love me.” Where there was carpet, I felt the grass of their idyllic playground between my toes.

The night before summer school it felt like the world was opening itself up to me. Like a derecho rolling through the South Florida halls and blowing open the doors. Would Min and I become best friends? I was becoming an American child.

That morning, I found my name in neat marker on a desk attached to a blue plastic chair and took a seat. Unlike Colegio Santa María, my private school in Bogotá, boys were allowed. But no adolescent girls rolled their eyes at us. No one wore chicken-yellow gingham uniforms. Everyone, it seemed, wore bedazzled jeans. Barney had prepared me for this.

A woman about my mother’s age grabbed a piece of chalk and wrote her name on the board. An opening act? I would allow it. But as the seats filled, I found no BJ, no Min, or Tina.

I raised my hand when the nice woman solicited questions but was not prepared for her response. I found myself bolting out, and to the playground. It sat empty. Imagination. Barney was right. I’d quickly find refuge there.