We hurry through the dust and noise to the far end of the bus ranks. My heart lurches against my ribs. We are too late. All the good spots are already taken. If Delia, my best school friend, hasn’t saved a place for me, I will be forced to the middle of the bus, where the lower-class students sit dressed in hand-me-down clothing, or, worse still, I’ll have to make the long walk to the very back of the bus, where the poor and smelly students group together like livestock. I walk faster, and the corner of my suitcase bumps against my knees.

“There.” Rian points to a decrepit bus with a faded blue wave painted on the side.

All the buses have names. There’s Thunder Road, True Love, Lightning Fast, and finally, the Ocean Current, which drops students off at Keziah Christian Academy at the beginning of the school term and picks them up again on the first day of the holidays. It’s a public bus, but today the exclusively mixed-race students of the academy will take up most of the spaces. Black people with common sense wait to catch the next bus heading south to the sleepy part of Swaziland. They know that mixed-race children only stand up for white people.

On paper, we are all citizens of the British protectorate of Swaziland, but really, we are one people divided into three separate groups: white people, mixed-race people, and native Swazis. Each group has their own social clubs and schools, their own traditions and rules. Crossover between the groups happens, but it’s rare and endlessly talked about on the street corners and inside Bella’s Beauty Salon for All Types.

My sweaty palms grip the handle of my suitcase, and my shoulders ache from hauling its dead weight from the crossroads where Father dropped us off on his way back to Johannesburg.

“See? The bus is still here.” Mother’s breath comes fast. She is annoyed that I rushed us to get here. “All that fuss over nothing, Adele. We have plenty of time.”

I give my suitcase to a skinny black man, who throws it onto the roof of the Ocean Current, where another skinny black man, barefoot and shining with sweat, adds my case to a mountain of luggage already piled there. Faces peer out of the dusty windows. I look frantically from the front row to the back. I cannot see a vacant window seat.

“Here.” Mother gives me a small cardboard box of impago, food packed especially for long road trips and enough to tide me over on the eighty-eight-mile journey ahead. Inside will be boiled eggs, strips of air-dried beef, thick slices of buttered bread, and maybe an orange. Whatever the cupboard had to give.

I say, “Sorry for the rush.”