"We really are theonlyblack people in this neighborhood?" Aeisha always gets right to the point. "Yes." Khatib and Aeisha were quiet for a few seconds, and I moved down one step. "And we're really gonna be theonlyblack people at our schools?" "Yes." I moved down another step. We were all quiet now, and I knew what everybody was thinking. Living in Boston, you know that there are rules. Everybody lives in their own neighborhoods.

Everybody goes to their own schools. People break those rules all the time, but if they do, they usually end up on the six o'clock news. Were we gonna get in any trouble for living here? I moved down another step until I was squeezed in tight between Dad and Mama. "So we're theonlyblack people in this town?" Khatib asked slowly. "How are people gonna feel about us?" An Excerpt fromOla Shakes It Up Dad pulled the car back out into the street, and in a few seconds we pulled into the driveway of another blue-and-white house. "Number seven-twenty-seven. Home." I stared out of the car window at the house.

It made our house back in Roxbury look like a beat-up old shed. This house had big, wide windows instead of the small, tight windows in our old house. This house had a tall, polished wood double door instead of a too-low single door with peeling paint, like our old house. I felt like I was looking at a blown-up-to-life-size version of those dollhouses we used to see in the store catalogs. Aeisha had always wanted one of those dollhouses, but they were too expensive. Then I looked at the other houses. They looked like dollhouses, too. In fact, they all looked like exactly the same dollhouse.

How was I going to find my way home from school in this neighborhood? Even Dad didn't know his own house. "It's all wrong," I said. Khatib and Aeisha nodded with me. They put on their most sorrowful expressions to show Mama, except that Khatib's expression looked more like he was sick than upset. Mama twisted her neck to look at us. "It'll look prettier in the spring, when the grass gets back to being green and the trees fill out." Ha, I thought. What about the humongous front lawn? It looked like it &.