We getting out this place today. Moving to Pecan Landings. Momma is so happy. Me too, ’cause finally we gonna be living someplace nice, where bad things don’t happen to you all the time, and Daddy won’t be able to find us. So, August 3rd is a day I’ll never forget.

Our house is full of people: Dr. Mitchell, Odd Job, The Cousins, Ming, Ja’nae, Zora, and Sato. Mai is on punishment again.

Ja’nae’s got a cherry Popsicle in her hand. Sweet, sticky juice is dripping down the side of the stick and running over her fingers.

Zora is over by the fence, talking to Sato. She ain’t said one word to me all morning, even though I spoke to her three times. Dr. Mitchell made her come help out. Said he had enough of our nonsense. But you can’t make people be friends, I guess. So she’s here, but it still ain’t no different between us.

“Help me carry this,” Ja’nae says, licking her fingers and looking down at a big box of plants Momma pulled out the ground yesterday.

I’m looking around the yard. It’s a mess now with holes in the ground from all the plants me and Momma dug up, and bags full of junk we ain’t want to take with us to our new place.

“Raspberry. Let’s get going, girl,” Momma says, walking over to me. “Everybody’s working but you.”

“Okay,” I tell her. But I don’t move. I stand on my tiptoes and look over the fence. Watch Miz Evelyn sitting out on the porch in a long white robe. Momma already said good-bye to her. I want to, but I can’t.

“Stop playing around, girl,” Sato says, pulling the back of my hair when he walks by.

I open the fence. Walk out to the pavement and sit out on the curb. Ling sits next to me.

“Mai likes living in Pecan Landings,” she says.

I smile and look at Miracle’s place.

“I ain’t gonna miss being here,” I tell Ling. “Not one little bit,” I say, standing up and going back inside.

It takes us three more hours to finish packing. After we done, we stuff ourselves in Momma’s car like too many vegetables in a crisper. Ling steps on my foot and tries to push my legs out the way so she can sit by Sato too. Momma looks back and tells her there ain’t no room. That she needs to get in Odd Job’s car. Ling’s got her mind made up, though. She squeezes her little butt in between me and Sato, then starts whining that it’s too tight back here.

“Get out, then,” I say. But it don’t matter. Sato sits her in his lap. Ling pokes out her little pink lips and kisses him on the cheek.

By the time Momma gets in the car, we all sweating and Ling is crying ’bout something else.

“Miz Hill, where’s the air?” Sato asks. “You got a new ride so I know you got some air in here.”

Momma slams the door shut. Turns to him and says, “Soon as I start driving, you’re gonna have all the air you ever wanted. Your window’s down, right?”

Everybody laughs. Momma says for us to wait a minute, then goes back inside and gets pop for all of us, even the people in the other cars.

“Let’s go, Miz Hill,” Ja’nae says, hanging out the window. She’s in Dr. Mitchell’s ride with Zora, Ming, and a whole bunch of clothes and boxes.

Zora’s sitting up front. She got the visor down and she’s staring at her eyes. She don’t take the drink, like everybody else in the car, or answer Sato when he stick his head out the window asking who she getting pretty for.

“Let’s go!” Odd Job shouts out his car window. Then he beeps his horn. Dr. Mitchell does too. Su-bok reaches over Momma and presses down her horn. We drive right behind each other off the street, beeping our horns nonstop, yelling out the windows and waving tissues and socks like we in a parade. I look out the back window and see Miracle sitting on her front steps. She’s glad we’re leaving, I bet. Me too.

Our place in Pecan Landings looks brand new. The landlord repainted it inside and out. He replaced the stove and refrigerator. Dr. Mitchell, Momma, and me went over there and repainted my room though. It’s blue with stars on the ceiling, just like Momma and me always talked about. When you cut the lights off, the stars glow in the dark.

After we unload everything, all the kids sit down and do nothing. Momma gets on us to unpack some things.

“We tired, Miz Hill,” Sato says, laying on the living room floor next to me. “This here is hard work.”

Momma says we have ten more minutes to rest. If we don’t get moving then, everybody better just go on home and leave things to “Raspberry and me.”

I tell them to get busy, ’cause I don’t want to do all this work by myself.

Momma gives everybody a partner to work with. Naturally, she puts me and Zora together. “Do the basement,” she says.

Zora looks at me with them green cat eyes she got on today—they match her shoes and shorts. Then she stomps all the way down the basement stairs. I don’t wanna work with her. She don’t wanna work with me neither and tells me that. She says just because her father made her come today doesn’t mean she likes being here or that we friends again.

I stack Momma’s old albums on the shelf, even though we don’t have a stereo to play ’em on. Then I ask Zora to help me move a desk, after Momma said it’s in the wrong place.

She looks at her nails. “I broke one over at your old place and messed up my shorts,” she says. “So you need to get somebody else to help you.”

I wanna tell her father on her. To let him know she don’t wanna do nothing but try to look cute. But if I tell on her, she might just tell on me. So I move the heavy desk all by myself. In between wiping sweat off my face and neck, I watch Zora. She could care less about me right now.

I tell Zora I ain’t working with her no more. So I go to my room. Su-bok’s there all by herself. She’s glad to see me and I’m glad I came in, ’cause she’s putting all my clothes in the wrong places. I’m dumping out those drawers, telling her how mean and selfish Zora is.

“Ja’nae just told me that you took Zora’s money,” Su-bok says. Then she tells me how she goes to school with a boy who steals money outta people’s lockers.

I snatch my jean shorts out her hand. “I ain’t no thief.”

She asks if I took Zora’s money or not.

I look at myself in the mirror on the closet door. “It’s not like that,” I say.

I tell Su-bok I don’t wanna talk about Zora no more. She starts talking about my dad, then. Asking if I ever found the money he took off me.

“Crackheads don’t never give you your stuff back,” I say, throwing a box of clothes on the bed.

We don’t talk for half an hour. Then Ja’nae comes in, saying she called Mai on the phone downstairs. “Her mom says the two of them need to get away—alone—and talk about all the things Mai’s been going through.”

Su-bok stops working. She starts talking ’bout what happened yesterday at the mall when Mai punched a boy.

“Him and his friends were so cute,” Subok says. “Nuh-moo nuh-moo gui yoh woh!”

“What?” I ask.

“Very, very cute,” she says.

“Black?” Ja’nae wants to know.

Su-bok puts sunglasses on. “Two black. One white. All cute,” she says, sitting on the bed next to Ja’nae. “I gave one boy my phone number. Another boy asked Mai for hers. When she gave it to him, he asked if she was mixed. Ling with her big mouth said that she was part black too, just like Mai.”

The boys thought that was funny, Subok says. So they started making jokes. Telling Ling that she didn’t look black. Asking her to point to where the black was. “My sister is so stupid,” Su-bok says, kicking off her sandals. “She starts looking at her fingers and toes. Feeling her face and nose. Saying for Mai to tell them that she was black, too, just like her.”

Mai flipped. Told Ling she was not black, not even a little, tiny bit. Ling started crying real loud. One of the boys tried to be smart and asked Mai if she was really mixed. ’Cause he “couldn’t find no black in her neither.”

“Mai popped him in the forehead for saying that,” Su-bok says. “I don’t blame her.”

Zora walks in the room, right then.

I ask Su-bok if she’s sorry she came to visit. She says no. She likes all the cute boys we got here.

Zora sits down next to Su-bok and turns away from me.

Su-bok keeps talking. “I go to a private school, far from my neighborhood. It’s mostly white. Sometimes I want to scream because people don’t get who I am.” She’s sitting cross-legged on my new blue rug. “They think because I’m Korean that I’m not an American. That I’m supersmart at math and science.”

Zora turns to her. “Are you?”

Su-bok laughs. “Yeah, but not because I’m Korean. My stupid father makes me study all night long and take special classes on Saturdays.”

Ja’nae asks Su-bok if she talks to Mai about stuff like this. “A little,” she says, using my brush on her hair. “I tell her that people don’t know what I am either. They ask me if I’m Chinese. Call me Japanese. Ask me if I know karate or if I can speak kung fu. But at least they know I’m Asian. They can’t figure out what she is, so they’re always saying something stupid and hurting her feelings.”

I look at Ja’nae and Zora, sitting close and laughing ’bout something. “Is it better to be a hundred percent something, or half and half, like Mai?”

Su-bok looks at me like I lost my mind. “It’s just better to be you,” she says, holding her nose and picking up a box of my old shoes.