Norma and Julie are arguing again, and we know it is about money. The money we don’t have—they don’t have. It has gotten so that we think what’s theirs is ours— their dream coming true, a place to have a life like the one we dreamed of. Like kids on television. Like white kids.

What we got was trouble: money trouble, school trouble, lots of trouble between Norma and Julie with us in the middle, loving them both because they were dreaming for us and not for themselves. Now it’s all going worse than wrong because pretty soon we are going to have to leave, and we don’t know any of us where we could go that would be anything like the home we made for ourselves.

Me, I know I’ll never find a place like this for myself, a place where you can sit under a tree and think about the things you need to know: a place where sleep goes on for hours, all the hours you need; nobody hollering, beating down the door; or doing stuff to you that you don’t want to happen, not ever, ever, ever.

“They sure is arguing,” JeTohn says. He’s been here the longest but never as a student. When Norma and Julie started the school, he had been living on his own. Norma just went over to where he was working and told him to come on. She had a home for him, no strings attached. He said that he was fine the way things were, but she nagged him so much that he just went along with her.

Even though I’m the last one to move here, I can see that his touch is everywhere. Walls painted an earthy red; tiles laid so carefully in the courtyard; the bookshelves in the commons room and the cabinets for dishes in the dining room rubbed down so lovingly, stained layer upon layer. The fine little flowers on the wallpaper in the bathrooms all lined up perfectly like they had been growing there according to some gardener’s plan.

“Where’d you learn to do this, JeTohn?” I asked him while he was lying under the sink, installing a garbage disposal unit.

“Girl, you know I can read,” he snarled. He is the kind of person who doesn’t believe in simple talk or civil talk, and you think he has no feelings at all until you read his writing. That’s how he probably got Norma to care so much about him. He writes like some people know how to sing.

When they argue— and we knew that the arguments were about closing down or holding on—it was hard for all of us, but especially JeTohn, who poured all he ever dreamed of home into this falling-down house.

“We should go outside and maybe pull some weeds,” Damon said. “We shouldn’t be listening to this.”

“Yeah, we should,” I said. “It’s us too. They go, we go. We should know when.”

“Waste of time,” JeTohn snarled. “I’m fixing the latch on the gate. You all can pull weeds from around the tomato plants and the green peppers. Don’t be pulling up the wrong things. You don’t know, ask me.”

Weeding was what we did when things got bad. It was the big cure for everything because you could think and not think at the same time. By the time you got up from the ground, your knees all crinkled from the grass or the turned soil, your fingernails are lined with dirt, your back sort of aching, you didn’t care about much except how much an area you had cleared; how far you had managed to push back the enemies of your efforts.

We went out, six of us. I don’t know where the rest were. Sleeping maybe because it was the hot part of the afternoon or in the studio messing around with clay or watercolors. You could think you were alone in the house, that’s how big it was and how silently calm each room was, all the time knowing that everyone was there. No harm could come to any of us behind these silent walls.

Maybe that’s why we didn’t mind staying at home so much.

I don’t mind weeding either even when it’s hot. I like the feel of the sun on my back and on my legs, even the sweat. I like concentrating with my fingers, reaching down into the soil, grabbing that tiny, living thing by the roots, and easing it out of life. In a way weeding makes me sad because it is something alive that I am throwing off to the side on the pile of greenness that’s beginning to wither. But there is accomplishment in these little deaths: the tomatoes, wobbly on their stalks, the carrots, pushing their roots downward, their green tops upward. It is more important for the carrots to grow and the tomatoes. Still I would like both of them to live side-by-side. There should room enough in the world for weeds and tomatoes and peppers and carrots.

I work beside Damon, who pulls out as many plants as he does weeds. I have to watch him because if JeTohn sees that some of those sprouts could have grown into vegetables for the table, he would kill Damon.

“Boy!” he once shouted. “You were born to destroy. Can’t tell good from bad. Probably never even seen a blade of grass in your whole stupid life.”

Damon is terrified of JeTohn and hasn’t known enough good in his small life to tell good yelling from bad. Still he weeds with enthusiasm, squinting knowingly at each plant he rips from the ground before he throws it in his growing pile.

Norma comes out. She always looks calm even when we know that bad things have been going on. Julie is something else. She has to cry in order to keep going, so after the fights, she goes to her room or maybe the office. At the next meal her eyes are all red, but she is ok. But Norma, she doesn’t believe in burdening children with the troubles of adults. We have heard her say that a million times.

We don’t think we are children. We have been through things that don’t belong in the world of children. Norma takes it on herself, the heavy load we have carried until she found us.

“Watch out for the zucchini,” she says, more to announce her presence than as a warning. “No zucchini means none of that great zucchini bread like last year.”

JeTohn doesn’t turn away from the gate where he repairing the latch. “Norma, I’m going back to work. Someone needs to bring in some money.”

“You aren’t. During the day you are going to take classes at Wayne, and at night you are staying at home where you belong.”

“You think we don’t know about how there is nothing left? You think we want to see you shut the doors on us? We can work. Ain’t none of us.... sorry...none of us are strangers to work.”

“I don’t need to worry about you out all times of the night. Let me worry about something I can handle, but not about you.”

“I’m not a child, Norma.”

“I’m not calling you a child, but I am saying that you are my responsibility.”

“Remember when you were a teacher? Remember back then when you said you were convinced that you would end up a bag lady? That’s where you’re heading, Norma. You haven’t left anything for yourself.”

“At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I have never had more in my life.”

“Damn, Norma! You just love being a martyr. All those books taught you a bad lesson. Let me help. Give me the privilege of helping.”

“JeTohn, we’ll work it out. Together. You’re just as much a part of this place as I am. I won’t keep you from helping. Just let me find the right way.”

“Find it soon. ”

We were all scared, but we couldn’t believe that it would end. Not our School Home, not the world we made to keep the world from getting to us. If we have to leave, then I’ll know for sure there isn’t any God. Or if there is, He is a mean, white man, so mean that He doesn’t even give any credit for Norma and Julie being white, too.

JeTohn says that it isn’t about whiteness or about God; it is about life being mean because that’s all people deserve to begin with. “We aren’t any more than the weeds you pullin’ out, Nefertiti. We’re just weeds who sprung up with no one wanting us around.”

Nefertiti, that’s my name, and it is not easy going around with a name like that, but I believe like JeTohn. It’s all I deserve, a name that has nothing to do with me.

I want to say to JeTohn that we mean something to Norma and Julie, but I am afraid of what he will answer: That Norma and Julie don’t matter either. If he says that, then all the world is a pit that we are falling down all the time.

It’s starting to get cooler, so the other kids are drifting outside from wherever they’ve been. We don’t ask each other things like: What you been doing? Where you been? That’ s small talk for white kids. Not that we don’t like stories, too, but daily events, they kind of get lost in the bad stuff that can happen. Some things just aren’t worth talking about, like what have you been doing, sleeping or something? Where have you been, to the art studio or what? And the big things, well, I don’t think there are words for the big things.

For instance, when my baby died, I couldn’t think of anything to say. The words were too flat. MY. Something that belonged to me, someone I loved so much even with the hardship that came with her. MY. It is too tiny, only two letters for how she grew inside of me and then inside my heart, all tangled up in my days. MY. MINE. Not any more. So MY just disappears, stops being a word that could mean all that she was to me.

BABY. That could be anyone. And it is not a pretty word. Say it. BABY. BABY. Your lips hardly move with a word like that. It doesn’t take any effort. It doesn’t have any music to it. Not like Angelica. That takes effort to say like the Shakespeare poems Norma loves to read to us, saying all the syllables.”

That’s what I called my baby. Angelica. Or Angel, a nice name for morning and for rocking her on my lap. If I had had a rocking chair, I could have rocked her and said to her over and over: See how nice, Angel. See how peaceful it is for the two of us to sit here rocking in the early morning with no one around but me and my Angel.

But Angel is dead. DIED. I don’t know how or I don’t want to say. Riding in the cab to the hospital, the cabby saying all the time: You sure you got the money. And me throwing all the dollars in my pocket on the front seat. This got to be enough. It’s all I got. Then he didn’t say any more, and I had to think about her. She was so still and I knew what the stillness meantwithout ever having seen it before. Stillness meaning death, all the little quivers of life gone out of her.

My baby died. Died in a cab about 11:00 at night, and I don’t know what I did to make her die like that. Maybe she couldn’t do anything but die because all she had was me to keep her from the danger. And who am I?

In the emergency room I said, “I think my baby has died.” Just like that, and then I couldn’t hear what the nurses said back to me. Their mouths moved, and one of them took Angel from my arms. I don’t remember any more. It was like a dream under water, moving with a lightness that takes you nowhere, everything one color, and all the sounds in the world low like thunder as it moves away. Rumbling, muttering, rolling over into silence.

It is more peaceful now. Late afternoon here at the School Home is always peaceful when the sun moves off to the side, and the light softens. We rake our piles of weeds together with our fingers. Wynikki is there, Darryl, Charissa, even James, who only likes to hang around Norma because of his troubles. Sharnell and Mario. Oh, we are the lost children, but now in this golden-rosy light, just before everything we have in the world is about to disappear, we are all right. We are together, and we are protected by two women who have nothing left to give us.