11. WITH STRANGERS

SADIA knew her relatives would not take her in; her mother would see it as meddling.

But she walked about a mile to her aunt’s house near Mohawk Street—and knocked on the door. Her aunt, Bishara—who was 28 and had four kids—just looked at her.

“I was at the door for two minutes,” Sadia recalled. “She said, ‘I don’t want nothing to do with your mom’s stuff.’ ”

So, Sadia went two doors down, to a house that belonged to a Somali woman who had once been friends with her mom.

A single mother in her thirties, this woman had developed a bad reputation in the community: She smoked hookah, and took in runaway Somali Bantu girls, letting them stay with her in exchange for doing domestic work.

Sadia hoped she could stay there for a few days. But the woman immediately started putting her down. She kept looking at her and saying, “What’s wrong with you?”

“She thought she was better than us,” Sadia said, “because she is Somali, not Somali Bantu. But her house was dirty as shit. She said if I didn’t work hard for her, she’d call my mom.”

“She was like an evil stepmother. She was looking for a slave, for some drama.”

For a couple of days—feeling miserable—Sadia swept and made beds. Then surreptitiously, when the woman was not looking, she called another former friend of her mother’s.

Maggie was a young white woman, a convert to Islam, whom her mother had befriended at the mosque. “She was poor,” Sadia said, explaining that Maggie lived in a housing project. “She’d lost her kids. I think she used to be a drug addict.”

Recently she had stopped practicing Islam and cut ties with Zahara and others in the community. “I think she felt ashamed,” Sadia said, “that people would judge her.”

But Maggie was kind—and when Sadia called her, she immediately drove over to the Somali woman’s house.

Spotting Maggie’s car from a window, Sadia ran outside. The Somali woman followed her, yelling, “Don’t get in the car!”

As Sadia jumped in, the Somali woman chased the car down the block.

Sadia was always uncomfortable in a stranger’s home; she was so used to her own. Maggie kept asking if there was anything she could get her. Her apartment was neat and immaculate. “I think she had OCD,” Sadia said. “She had to have everything clean.”

It was a new experience for Sadia to be in an apartment without children.

Sadia could not understand why Maggie liked visiting her family. “We’re so boring,” she said about her mother’s household. To Sadia, it was the norm: the dizzying number of little girls in jewel-colored jilbabs running around, her two younger brothers with their noses always dripping.

But Maggie—who wore long patterned skirts, and sometimes dyed her short hair green—seemed to enjoy the tumult.

Sadia did not want to worry Maggie: “I tried to make it seem like things with my mom were OK,” she said. “Like we didn’t have family problems. That I just needed a break.”

She was too depressed to eat what Maggie cooked: fried zucchini. “I only took a bite,” she said. “Later, I went to the store and got a bag of chips.”

Over the next two days, Sadia’s sense of hurt grew: “My mom didn’t check up on me,” she said. “Nobody did.”

She made only one call—to her older sister Ralya.

Ralya—who worked in the bakery at Walmart—helped raise Sadia. A pretty, big-boned young woman, she was the one who attended parent/teacher conferences and school plays as their mother worked. She showed up with treats when Sadia was babysitting. “She spoiled me,” Sadia said.

But when Ralya, usually so upbeat, heard Sadia’s voice on the phone, she was brusque: “Go home,” she said.

The next morning, Sadia checked Ralya’s Facebook. Then Mana’s. And Sofia’s.

Sadia sat there, frozen.

“They blocked me on Facebook,” she recalled. All her sisters. All her young aunts and cousins. “I cried. ‘Why are they doing this?’ ”

But she knew: Somali Bantu families function as a group: “If one person—like my mom—gets mad, everybody else gets mad. None of them would talk to me.”

But Sadia was tough, too. She immediately retaliated: “I blocked them off group chats.”

She felt she needed to get out of Utica. And she started thinking about her father, whom she had not seen in years. He and her mother had broken up when they lived in the refugee camp. Sadia was their only child together.

“He lives with his own tribe in Lewiston, Maine,” she explained. “He has a new wife, other kids.”

She decided to buy a bus ticket with her babysitting money and go visit him.

Nothing went as Sadia had pictured.

Her father, in his forties, was extremely tall—about 6’ 4”—and skinny.

“He looks like me,” she said. He has the same large brown eyes and broad nose.

“But he wasn’t interested in me,” she added, matter-of-factly. “He didn’t care.”

It turned out he was not living with his wife and kids. He had left them and was staying with a friend. Sadia’s stepmother let her stay with her for a few days. But she was busy with her own kids, and they began to get on each other’s nerves. “She kicked me out,” Sadia said.

The next two weeks were disorienting: “Every single day, I was at a different house.”

Her family in Utica was still blocking her. “I was losing more and more weight.”

Then she stayed with a friend’s mother, who was very caring. “She would worry about me,” Sadia said. “ ‘Oh, you’re going to the store, do you have your phone?’ She used to cook for me all the time.”

Sadia heard a rumor that her mother was calling people: “My daughter is bad. She doesn’t listen to me. Don’t let her inside your house if she tries to come.”

“That was like killing me,” Sadia said. “If you don’t have your family, you’re cut off from everything.” But she kept her feelings to herself, pretending she was fine, that she was enjoying her time away.

But the pressure was enormous. After a month, she took a bus back to Utica.

Sadia thought she could stay with Maggie for a while. But Maggie worried she could get into legal trouble—and told her to leave.

After that, “I was just homeless,” Sadia said.

She entered a kind of shadow existence in East Utica, just a few blocks from her mother’s house. A friend hid her in her bedroom; Sadia managed to go to school every morning.

But the girl’s parents found out: Her friend took her to an old vacated apartment in the same building.

The place was torn apart; there was a refrigerator lying on the floor.

“I was so scared,” Sadia said. “It was so quiet there.” She worried a homeless person would show up. That she would see rats.

And then, when Sadia could hardly take it anymore, an acquaintance of Zahara’s stepped in.

“A Rwandan woman called my mom, and said, ‘Your daughter wants to come home.’ ”