Nine Stops

On Monday, Leila missed the first bus because she was standing on the wrong side of the road.

She realised it when the bus she needed passed in the opposite direction, carrying three people and the possibility of arriving at college without an explanation. She crossed at the lights, checked the timetable twice and stood beside a man eating a banana with the solemn concentration of someone taking medicine.

The next bus came sixteen minutes later.

From the hotel to Briar Sixth Form there were nine stops if she changed near the old neighbourhood. She had counted them on the route planner the night before, tracing the road with her finger while Toby watched a programme with the sound too loud and Mum tried to understand a form on her phone.

Nine stops did not sound like much until she had to sit through each one.

At the first, a woman got on with a pram too wide for the space until everybody moved a little.

At the second, nobody moved at all.

At the third, the bus waited while a driver coming the other way explained something through an open window.

Leila checked the time and tried not to look like a person blaming strangers for having ordinary mornings.

Her sketchbook was in her lap. She opened it to the red door and saw at once that she had made the letterbox too high. She closed it again.

The retail park gave way to low houses, a school field and the back of a row of shops she had never looked at before. From the bus, places appeared unfinished: delivery doors, bins, drainpipes, small gardens filled with plastic chairs. She knew the fronts of some of these buildings. The backs seemed to belong to a different town.

She began drawing a fire escape on the edge of an old envelope.

By the time she reached the interchange, she was twelve minutes late and had drawn the same rail three times without noticing.

Esme was waiting by the college gate with two folders under one arm and a banana she apparently had no intention of eating. She saw Leila come round the corner and raised both hands.

“There you are.”

“Bus.”

“You normally walk.”

“I know.”

Leila kept moving. Esme fell into step beside her.

“Where have you been?”

“Staying somewhere else for a bit.”

“Why?”

“House stuff.”

“Leila.”

The way Esme said her name made it clear that two words did not count as an answer.

“There was a problem with the place,” Leila said. “Mum's sorting it.”

“Are you staying with family?”

“Sort of.”

It was a terrible answer. She knew it as soon as she heard it. She was staying with family, technically. The family consisted of the same two people she had lived with on Friday morning, now in a room with a kettle attached to a plastic tray.

Esme frowned.

“Why didn't you say?”

“Because nothing's actually happened.”

They reached the corridor outside their first lesson. Through the glass, Leila could see everybody already sitting down.

“Clearly something's happened,” Esme said.

“I'll tell you at lunch.”

“Promise?”

Leila looked at the door.

“Can we go in before it gets worse?”

The teacher paused when they entered. Leila apologised. Esme apologised too, though she had been on time before deciding to wait. That made Leila feel both grateful and irritated, because she now owed an explanation in two directions.

She sat down, took out the wrong notebook and tried to write a date at the top of a page already containing a drawing of a windowsill.

For the rest of the lesson, she was half a sentence behind.

At break, she went to the toilets rather than the common room. She washed her hands she did not need to wash and looked at herself in the mirror. Nothing visible had changed. Her jumper was the same. Her hair was tied in the same knot, with the same piece escaping near one ear. She looked like a girl who had slept badly, which described half the people in the building.

Her phone had a message from Mum.

Got Toby there. Housing call after lunch. Need your student number for transport question when you can.

Leila sent the number, then typed: Don't tell college everything yet.

She looked at the sentence before sending it. It made her sound eight years old and in trouble.

Mum replied three minutes later.

They need to know why the journey's changed. We can decide together what to tell whom.

Leila put the phone away without answering.

In art, Ms Armitage asked the class to clear the large table. There were six weeks until the summer exhibition, and the department wanted a connected set of work from each of them rather than a collection of whatever happened to be least unfinished.

“Place,” she said, writing the word on the board. “Not necessarily a landscape. Not necessarily a house. A place can be a route, a corner, a room you aren't allowed into, somewhere you work, somewhere you wait.”

Leila looked down at the envelope in her bag.

“Three linked pieces,” Armitage continued. “You can use different materials, but I want to see a reason they're together. Start with what you actually notice, not what you think looks like an art project.”

Across the table, someone asked whether a shopping centre counted.

“Of course.”

“What about my bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“What about a place that doesn't exist?”

“Yes, but you will have to make me believe you've thought about it.”

Leila took out her sketchbook. The red door was on the first page she opened.

Armitage stopped beside her.

“This is new.”

“Friday.”

“Your house?”

Leila's hand moved over the bottom corner of the drawing.

“Yes.”

The word was small and easy. She disliked it more than the clumsy answers she had given Esme.

Armitage pointed to the smooth patch beside the letterbox.

“From looking or from memory?”

“Memory.”

“What did you leave out?”

“The paint was cracked.”

“Did you mean to leave that out?”

Leila looked at the drawing.

“I don't know.”

“Find out. That's a useful question.”

The teacher moved on. Leila sat with her pencil above the page, suddenly unable to decide whether correcting the paint would make the picture more honest or simply uglier.

At lunch, Esme found her by the lockers.

“You said you'd tell me.”

Leila had spent the morning arranging an answer that would be true enough to survive ordinary questions.

“We've had to leave the house for a while. Mum's looking for somewhere. We're staying somewhere temporary.”

Esme's face changed.

“Oh. Leila.”

There was the voice she had been trying to avoid. Softened around the edges, already preparing to be careful.

“It's not a huge thing,” Leila said quickly.

“Where are you?”

“Near the retail park.”

“With someone?”

“Mum and Toby.”

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean. Can we not do all of it in the corridor?”

Esme looked round. Nobody was paying attention, but Leila could feel the possibility of attention waiting everywhere.

“All right,” Esme said. “Come home with me after college.”

“I can't. I need to get back.”

“Then call me.”

“I will.”

“Actually call me, not send a photograph of something weird and hope I forget.”

Leila almost smiled.

“The weird things are important.”

“So are you.”

She looked away first.

On the bus back, she counted the stops in reverse. At the retail park, a boy in a supermarket jacket was collecting a long line of trolleys that wanted to go in several directions at once. One wheel had locked sideways. He stopped, looked at it and said something she could not hear through the glass.

The bus moved on before he freed it.

At the hotel, Mo asked whether she had survived Monday.

“Most of it.”

“Plenty left. Don't get comfortable.”

Upstairs, Toby was sitting on the floor doing homework on the lid of a suitcase. Mum had gone to work. The television was off because the remote had disappeared into somebody's bedding.

“Did you tell Esme?” he asked.

“Some of it.”

“What some?”

“That we're staying somewhere else.”

He looked around the room.

“She could probably have worked that out.”

Leila put her bag down and sat beside him. His worksheet showed a floor plan of a house with blank spaces for labels.

“What are you doing?”

“French rooms.”

He pointed to a word he had written twice.

“What's a dining room if you don't have one?”

She looked at the worksheet, then at the narrow desk holding their cereal box, her art folder and Mum's work bag.

“Still a dining room,” she said. “You don't have to own one to know the word.”

Toby accepted this and went back to writing. Leila opened her sketchbook to the page after the red door.

This time she drew the bus window.