Brookland Manor is an apartment complex that houses about 1,200 mostly low-income tenants and sprawls across 18 acres on the border between the Brookland and Brentwood neighborhoods in Northeast Washington.

Brittany Gray was still hopeful she wouldn’t end up that way. But she was also embarrassed by the lawsuit against her. Who loses their home over $25? Her subsidy pays 98 percent of the $1,168 owed in rent. Too ashamed to confide her problem to anyone, especially her 8-year-old daughter, she had arrived at landlord tenant court alone, without a job or a dollar in her pocket, and was now trying to figure out what in the world the word “quash” meant.

A clerk had handed Gray a form and asked her to fill it out using the nomenclature of the court. “This is the live writ they filed against you,” the clerk said, calling up the eviction order against her. She explained that if Gray wanted to contest her expulsion, she needed to tell the judge to “quash” the “writ.”

Blank stare.

“You want the judge to stay your writ or quash your writ?” the clerk asked again.

Blank stare. “Quash is spelled q-u-a-s-h,” the clerk finally said. “Writ is spelled w-r-i-t.”

She didn’t want to mess this up, so Gray, who dropped out of school after she got pregnant, first typed her contestation on her phone. “I never received any papers about court or that a writ has been put out for my home the only paper I received about court was mailed to me but for someone else that rent” at Brookland Manor, she wrote. She left unmentioned that she claimed she didn’t pay her rent to try to force the property owners to fix a hole in her ceiling and broken floorboards.

And then, form in hand, she waited to see the judge in the tenant courtroom, where the only sounds were benches groaning under the weight of their occupants, paper rustling, and the door creaking open and slamming closed.

A brown-haired woman noticed Gray sitting alone, looking confused, and asked whether she needed help. Gray said she did, and then she was sitting on another bench, this time outside a legal aid office at the courthouse, where a nice woman at the window said she would find a lawyer to assist her.

It was past 3 p.m. when Gray finally left. She hadn’t eaten all day. But a lawyer with Bread for the City had taken her case, submitting a request to stay her eviction, which a judge granted. Her case is now pending.

“We had to file some more stuff, and then the stay thing,” Gray said as she walked out.

“I feel like this weight is lifted off of me,” she added. “I feel way better.”

But that feeling of elation was short-lived. It was March 30. Gray, who hasn’t worked since she lost her retail job at Gymboree last year, still didn’t have any money in her pocket. The next day was still the first of the month. And rent was due in the morning.

Jennifer Jenkins and Darla Cameron contributed to this report.