My fingers are stiff on the knob. “You are?”

“Mr. Gonzalez.”

I pull back. “Who?”

The woman answers, “We left a card the other day?”

The card. I’d tossed it on the stack of mail, tried to push it away, like everything else.

“We received word that two minors are living here without a guardian.”

A slow burn as I realize: Mrs. Flannery. Her door, down the hall, shut. “It’s a mistake,” I start to say, but the man steps forward. He’s thickly built, like the woman, only bald, and he suddenly reminds me of one of those guys in a TV show. I half expect him to start throwing tarps over the furniture and stretching yellow tape across the doorway. But it’s not a crime scene.

“My uncle,” I plead. “I’m going to see him this weekend.”

The woman gives me a gentle smile. “You can straighten that out at the shelter.”

Shelter. The word knocks into me, like a block of ice.

They’re actually very kind, as kind as they can be. The woman and I go into the bedroom and talk softly with Kamal, who starts chewing on his collar but lets me fill his backpack with his favorite Transformer toys. The man, Mr. Gonzalez, has brought an old-fashioned yo-yo and he squats down before Kamal and distracts him, his wrist bending up and down, the round disc winking with tiny lights.

My eyes swing around the apartment. I take it all in—the clay pots with spider plants on the sill, our small sofa covered with an embroidered throw, the TV on the beat-up table. I keep saying, “We have an uncle. I have family,” even though I’m not sure, and the woman puts her arms around me and says, “Dear, it will just be for a few days, until it’s sorted out.”

I don’t know why I believe her.

Now my muscles know just what to do, every part of me springing to life: Pull out the luggage tucked under my bed, the one with the safety pin on the zipper. Fold up the quilt. Grab whatever is nearest—phone, laptop, books, headphones—and stuff it into my backpack. Don’t linger on the Nelson Mandela poster over my bed or the photo strip with Fatima tacked to my mirror, the carnival beads draped on its rim from a school Mardi Gras. Text Maria, tell her to water the plants and move the car. Text Fatima and say I can’t meet her at the subway tomorrow morning. Grab the jacket I bought from the Jamaican guy. My lace-up black boots, my Converse sneakers, my flip-flops. My graduation robe and cap, in their plastic. Maybe at some point we can come back for the rest.