“Where’s he going to sleep?”

“What? I don’t know, Ben. He’ll find a hotel.”

“Because I can sleep on the sofa, if that makes a difference. I don’t mind.”

“It wouldn’t be you on the sofa anyway,” Mom says. “Anyway,” she says again—she seems distracted. “You know what he’s like. There are plans and plans. It’s a long way from London. It’s a long way from Houston, too. But either way you need to be prepared, that’s why I mentioned it. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mom. Don’t worry about me.”

She looks at me, holding me at arm’s length—like she’s checking my face for symptoms or something. “I’m going to say goodbye here.” And then she laughs. “It’s a little early in the morning for kids to have to talk to one of their teachers. That goes for the other way round as well.”

On the bus, Mabley sits on the seat in front of me—there are four kids squeezed on her bench. Normally, the driver doesn’t allow more than three. But today she doesn’t care, it’s the last day of school. Everybody’s talking about Christmas. Mabley’s going to San Antonio, where her grandparents live. They have a ranch, with chickens and pigs and a cow and three horses. “Basically,” she says, “they just put me to work. I love it.” Even when she talks about this place, her voice changes. Her grandmother has a real Scottish accent, even after fifty years in Texas. “She calls me that child,” Mabley says. “Is that child ever going to grow? What do you give her to eat? A crust of bread?”

The sun comes up while we wait in traffic at one of the lights. It’s so low in the sky, the driver pulls down the flap over the windshield. It’s a weird kind of white light; you can see the sunshine climbing over the raised highway, which casts a wide stripe of shadow over the road. All the cars sparkle.

Mabley leans over the back of her seat to talk to me.

“Are you going somewhere for Christmas?”

“My dad is coming,” I say.

She doesn’t say anything, but she makes her eyes wide and opens her mouth in wonder. Her face has a lot of expressions she can do. She uses it like that, too, like she doesn’t care about how she looks.

“Well, he said he was going to try to,” I tell her. “I don’t know.”

Something’s gone wrong with the heating when we get to school. It’s turning into a pretty warm day, but nobody can control the temperature. Ms. Kaminski opens all the windows; you can hear the cars going by outside. She has a Santa hat on, and the apple on her desk is a candy apple with a ribbon around it—Pete gave it to her as a present. Some kids leave early to get set up for the concert; there’s going to be an assembly in the afternoon. But nobody does any work anyway, and after lunch we all troop over to the main gym. The good thing about assemblies is you just have to sit there—you don’t have to do anything, or pay attention, or talk to anybody.