In the elevator, standing in front of me, is a girl my age dressed up. Her collar is tacked in the back with a safety pin, ready to come loose. That pin makes me want to cry. Everything feels so patched together. Maybe she’s one of Lidia’s clients, on her way to court. I want to ask her: Are you scared too?

Outside, I wobble a few steps on the street and stop. There’s a garbage bin in front of me. I swing my leg at it and kick and kick, pain jolting through my boot toe. The ash taste in my mouth surges up. I stagger over to the side and throw up onto a grate. I can feel people bumping past me, but I don’t care. I let it all out, head bent, elbows on my knees, until I’m scraped raw.

“Hey! You okay?”

A thin, blond woman hovers near. She looks worried, but also a little grossed out.

“Yeah,” I say weakly. “Greasy breakfast.”

“I’ve had bad days too.” She pulls out a water bottle from her bag. “Why don’t you take it?”

I cradle the cold bottle against my chest, watch her walk off, hiking her bag up on her shoulder. I want to call after her and say, “Please, take me with you. My mom’s gone. In a detention center. Pennsylvania.”

But the words would make no sense. Nothing makes sense.

That afternoon Kamal and I are dragging up the stairs, since the elevator is broken, when we’re met by the glaring eyes of our next-door neighbor Mrs. Flannery.

“There you are!” She’s elderly and rarely goes out, except to push her grocery cart down to Key Food. Sometimes she sits on a folding chair in the front, scowling at the street, complaining at the kids on bikes or the delivery guys who park their scooters. She wears large glasses that give her eyes a cloudy, swollen look. In the beginning, Ammi befriended her, bringing over food or offering to fetch something at the store. I think Ammi had an angle—maybe Mrs. Flannery could get us into a better school, even give her a teaching job. But at some point she soured on us. She would slam her door, or if she heard us in the hall, she’d crack it open and peer with her angry eyes. At least half a dozen times she complained that she heard Kamal’s video games through her wall.

“So, that was quite a lot of nonsense the other night!” she declares. She is standing with her cart, which is filled with V8 cans. “What did your mother do?”

I wince. “She didn’t do anything. It was a mistake.”

“Mistake,” she sniffs.

“It was,” I say evenly and look her in the eye.

“There were some people looking for you too.”

I stiffen. “People?”

“They didn’t say who they were. But I know.”