asked.
“Good.”
“I was talking to your little sister and she said your mother is never home and she leaves them home by themselves.”
“That’s not true. My mom be working all the time. When she’s not home, I’m there. I’m seventeen and my other sister is eighteen.”
“She wasn’t home when the fire started, right?”
“No. She stepped out for a moment.”
“Do you know where she went?” she asked, frowning.
“No.” I knew better than to say the bar.
“Okay, thanks for speaking with me.” She went back to the nurses’ station and jotted something down. Then my mother came out of the room and asked her for a blanket. The nurse gave her an attitude and said she would bring one in there shortly. We all sat in chairs around Bilal’s bed.
It was two in the morning, and Alanna had called Bruce and he came to the hospital. Moments later she announced that she was leaving and for us to call her later. I was starting to get sleepy too. Bubbles was already balled up in the chair next to my mom. I went and got another soda. I couldn’t wait to go home. Then it occurred to me that we might not have a house to go home to.
“Excuse me, do you have a phone I can use?” I asked one of the nurses.
“Yes, it’s over there on the wall. Dial nine and then one to get an outside line.” I called my dad’s house. Charlotte answered the phone.
“Let me speak to my dad,” I demanded.
“Do you know what time it is?” she asked.
“Yeah, it is an emergency,” I said, sighing.
“John, the phone.”
My dad picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”
“Dad.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Our house caught on fire.”
“What? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Bilal is in the hospital and I don’t know how bad the house is yet.”
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I told him what hospital we were at and he said that he was on his way. After I called him I called Marcus’s house for John. Marcus said that John wasn’t there. I told him what happened and he said he was going to try to reach him. I didn’t have Nitra’s number on me.
I took a deep breath and went back into Bilal’s room and sat next to my mother. I closed the door and then the curtain. There was a light knock on the door. The nurse came in the room, asking if were we okay and if we needed anything else. My mother told her we were fine. A few moments later she came back in with a tall brown woman, with a short, black spiked haircut, and wearing a blue trench coat. She introduced her as Ms. Norton and said that she needed to speak with our mother.
“Why don’t you come with me and bring your sister?” the nurse said. I awoke Bubbles and figured out that the nurse had called the Department of Health Services on my mother. She sat us in a room a few doors down the hall from Bilal. I heard my mother down the hall cussing.
“Don’t be asking me no questions about my children. Bitch, get the fuck out of my face!” Then I heard a door slam. I jumped up to see what was going on and the nurse sternly told me to sit down. I looked at her like she was crazy. She stepped out of the room and I followed. Then I heard someone say, “Call security.” I ran down to Bilal’s room and saw they were pulling my mom out of the room.
I screamed, “Get off my mom,” and then I swung on one of the guards. Someone grabbed me, and I started biting and kicking. I saw them dragging my mother down the hall. They finally pulled me back in the same room with Bubbles. I tried to get out.
“Where are y’all taking my mom? Yo! Y’all better let me out of here. Yo, let me out,” I screamed. “Where is my mother?” I ran toward the door, and the guard grabbed me.
“Get off me! Get off me!” The guard finally let me go and then the woman with a blue trench coat came up to me and said, “Settle down. Your mother is fine. We just need to speak with her.”
“Well, I want to make sure she is fine,” I said, looking around for my mom.
“No, actually you can’t. Listen, you and your younger sister are going to stay the night with a foster family until we can get things settled.” I looked over at the woman as she stared me directly in my face.
“No, I can’t do that. My mother really needs me,” I said.
“She’ll be okay,” the woman said.
“Okay, I’ll say goodbye to her, then.”
“I’ll walk you,” she said. I guess she knew I was about to leave.
I went back and forth with the woman, then she told me she could send me to the Youth Study Center if I couldn’t cooperate with her. She said that they just took my mom downstairs to calm her down. She finally let me talk to my mom, who said, “Don’t give them any problems.”
Ms. Norton put us in her silver four-door Honda Accord and slammed the door. She eyed me from the rearview mirror the entire ride. We drove for a while, then pulled up in front of a big old house in North Philly. She introduced me and Bubbles to a foster mom named Ms. Waters. She was an older lady, about sixty with silver hair that showed through her burgundy dye job.
It was five in the morning. The sun was rising and we were just getting in. Ms. Norton introduced us and then Ms. Waters asked us if we was hungry. We told her no and she walked Bubbles and me upstairs to our room. Inside were two dark wood-frame beds and a tall, narrow dresser with an old-fashioned silver alarm clock on the top.
I said thank you as Ms. Norton pulled me to the side and whispered in my ear, “If you think about running I’m going to have you arrested and sent to the Youth Study Center.” I didn’t even respond to her. I was so tired, and I just wanted to go to sleep and figure everything out when I awoke.
Bubbles looked at me after they left us alone in the room and asked, “How long you think we going to have to stay here?”
“I don’t know, not going to be that long,” I said as I gave her a hug. We settled into our beds, and before I knew it we were both asleep.
The next thing I knew Ms. Waters was knocking on the door saying, “It’s time to eat.”
It was twelve-thirty in the afternoon. I got up and looked around, trying to place where I was. At first I thought I had dreamed what had happened the night before. It seemed unreal. As soon as I realized I hadn’t been dreaming, I thought about my mom.
“We’re not hungry,” I shouted out.
“I’m hungry,” Bubbles said as she got up, walked past me and opened the door.
“Okay, I’ll be right down,” I said.
A few minutes later I went down the steps and joined the other three kids. There was this slightly retarded boy named Dennis and a teenage girl named Tianna. She wore a large black T-shirt with no bra on, and her hair was braided to the back. Then there was Charles, a short boy with big, thick glasses looking like he was out of it. They all were eating sandwiches.
Later on Ms. Waters took Bubbles and me to Kmart. She bought us underwear and horrible clothes. The jeans she picked out for me were fake paper-thin jeans that looked like back-in-the-day stretch pants with a tapered leg at the ankle.
That evening she came into my room, gave me a token and said that I needed to come straight home from school or she was going to call Ms. Norton.
I called Chantel to ask her to bring me something else to wear. She picked up in three rings.