“Whatever,” she answered, then got up and grabbed a towel from the counter to wipe up the mess.

Soleil went in search of Lexie, whom she found lying on her bed upstairs, staring at the ceiling.

“You and Angelique are going to work separately for the rest of the day,” she said as she sat on the bed opposite Lexie’s.

In response, the girl sighed but said nothing.

“Do you want to tell me your side of what happened?”

“I got sick of her bragging about her rough life and how hard she has it and all that crap.”

“You think she was bragging?”

“Yeah, ’cause I’m not street enough since I grew up in a nice house and my family has money. She said I might as well be white, for all I know about being black.”

Soleil had seen this dynamic of clashing cultures played out before here at the farm, and there wasn’t always an easy way to engender respect between kids with vastly different life experiences. But sometimes, with patience, she succeeded.

“I know how it feels to be told I’m not black enough. It hurts.”

“Just because I speak using proper English, I’m white? We’re never going to have equality when we’re racist and judgmental.”

Soleil was more intimately familiar with this issue than most people. She’d felt the same pain as a kid. Having a mother who was a famous poet and a Berkeley professor hadn’t done a damn thing for her street cred.

“You know,” Soleil said, “my mother is white and my father is black, but we never lived together as a family after I was six years old. So here I was, this girl with black skin being raised by a white woman in Berkeley, living in a white neighborhood. When I went to school, I felt like I had more in common with the white kids, but I so wanted to be accepted by my black peers.”

“So what did you do?”

“I tried to be true to myself. I am who I am. I’m not a race, and I’m not a racial identity. I’m an individual. I hung out with the kids who accepted me-and I tried not to get beaten up by the kids who didn’t,” she said wryly.