The streets
The concrete imagery that shapes Hayley's life is the life that she is forced to endure with her father because he doesn't have the emotional wherewithal to support them. His slide into drug addiction makes him hate himself, but to Hayley it is just part of life. She sees the drugs, the dealers, the homeless people with their own cocktail of troubles, and she learns to be smart as if she grew up in the absolute wilderness.
The school
Hayley's orientation to street life makes her feel absolutely perplexed and tortured by the rigid structure of school. She is not designed to obey. For her whole childhood, she has been in charge of taking care of her father, which often means breaking a lot of rules, but here, she always gets caught, because the school is highly structured. She is oppressed by the authority of adults, and without understanding her, they often mishandle that. Her emotional experience of high school imagery is like she is being held against her will as a POW and being tortured.
The family
The family that Hayley goes home to reminds her of the stakes of her life. Her home life is not safe. Her father is not safe from drug abuse, and she is not free of her duty to protect him (she feels). This means that she is locked in a cycle between two different worlds, and every day of school is like a harrowing journey into the underworld. Then she comes back to the family, and slowly, she starts to realize something about her home life.
The awakening
This leads Hayley to a full-blown, epiphanic awakening that is described in the book through imagery, but isn't directly observed. She is awakened to the sublime strangeness of life. She realizes that, as horrifying as it may be to be herself, she is unequivocally equipped to face the world, if she can free herself from the emotional binds that keep her continually wrapped up in unhealthy dynamics. She realizes that the trap of her life can be escaped through independence, freedom, and deliberate joy.
