I just looked out the window at the concrete wall outside it. Being in Rasul’s home had enlightened me to our standard of living. The fact that I hadn’t chosen where I live made no difference in the disdain I experienced upon my return to my own apartment. Not a home, barely an apartment, just a place where emotions grew restless before they fled. Had it been a person I was passing on the street, I would have thought it was deformed. Ma’s diligence alone had spared us the curse of rodents—though simply glancing at roach motels and mice traps on the counters, under the sink, and behind the toilet stung because they were reminders of the possibilities. No effort had been put into creative motifs and color schemes for our rooms. Instead, I lived among an odd assortment of cheap, unoriginal dollar-store finds and forgotten hand-me-downs. The wall above our stove was dotted with years of cooking grease. Our sorry curtains were dingy and in need of washing as they hung from cheap, bent, rusty rods. Patches of paint peeled from our ceiling. Our floors were scuffed with everything from the wheels of my first bright red ten-speed to skid marks made when Ma and I had to push the dining table we found in an abandoned apartment across the kitchen floor ourselves. Cigarette burns marred the carpet in every room and the stale odor of smoke hovered like a toxic fog. Our paper-thin lamp shades were crooked. We had no books except my schoolbooks and plastic-bound ones Jewel had brought from the library. We only had plenty of old, crinkled, even yellowing copies of Jet, TV Guide, and The Enquirer. The rugs were worn thin in patches and the metal stand our television rolled on was leaning. Black mold had collected in large circles along the bathroom window-pane where shower water daily pelted. Even our bath towels were hideous—hard, holey, and cheap. I had felt repelled just walking through the front door.

To Jewel’s question, I hunched up my shoulders and mumbled, “So.”

Jewel leaned in quicker than I could have predicted and shocked me by slapping me—hard—against my face. Hakim had stayed close for a reason. He grabbed her arm to prevent her from slapping me again.

“Let me go, Hakim!” she yelled at him. “Stay out of this. It has nothing to do with you.”

“It do now,” he proclaimed. “Now we need to be civil about this …”

“Civil? Civil? When you bring a child into this world and don’t know where it’s at for days, then you come back and talk to us about being civil.”

“I may not have ever given birth but I do have tree children, do you remembah?”