I lay back and thought about what woke me up. The man who was killed, Martin Luther King. But I couldn’t see his face, only his name in chalk on the blackboard. I blinked, and saw the girl falling slowly in her sari, floating down through the air, with me watching from the ground, only it was snowing and she was shaking her head. I wanted to lift my arms to catch her, but she saw me sweating from the burning cold of the snow, and turned away and vanished on the pavement.

Frost

The school bell rang out over the roofs and into the streets as my mum was holding me back at the door, buttoning up my duffel coat because it had turned cold. I could feel the sharpness of the air in my nose and my breath was smoking, but I wanted to catch up with Manus and Connor who were joining the other children coming out the houses on to the street and running to school. Busola was staying home because she had a temperature and wasn’t well. It meant she had to stay in bed all day, but I wanted to get out even though I had a runny nose. My mum put her hand on my forehead but I shook it off because she felt cold.