Lisa Allen-Agostini, Contributor

I turned down the long white highway, lecturing to myself softly in my head, like a litany or mantra, You will get there, you will not get lost, you will find the bus station, you will catch a bus, you will get home.

I was cold, but not so cold that I couldn't think. It must have been about 17°C that afternoon, warm for Canadians but cold for me; I hadn't gotten used to the weather yet. For them it was a nice day, and they'd put on shorts and tank tops and walk around like I would at the beach or in the park, but for me it was just another wrap up tight day, wear my coat day, feel too cold day.

I could feel the wind blowing through my short black hair, trying to ruffle it and failing. Canadian wind, I thought, oh, you don't know anything about hair like mine. You haven't seen enough of it in this quiet backwoods on the prairie. You think my hair is gonna just submit to you, flip and dance in you, fly and move in you? Not my hair. It's worked too hard for too long to just give in to you, it's tough hair, wiry hair, strong hair, hair that won't be cowed by some damn prairie wind. No siree, not this hair.

All this time I walked and I looked at the summer flowers outside the houses I passed. This wasn't really a highway, just a long concrete road, four lanes wide across and full of zooming, beeping, clanking, whooshing cars, buses and trucks. The trucks especially - they weren't allowed to pass on the cross streets - were reserved for these major roads that ran the length of this section of Edmonton, Alberta, where I happened to be living in penance.

I forget a lot of things but I'll never forget the trucks, big lumbering things that passed too close to me as I walked along that white road, pavement and road the same colour, same texture. I remembered that roads at home were black, the way roads should be, I thought, and that bone white, cold concrete scared me in some primal way.

That wasn't a road into anything good, it couldn't be. And the trucks were like huge devils with horns blaring and fangs showing somehow in their grills, evil grins, bad intentions, bearing down on me from behind, leering at me from the other side of the road as they sped past, warning me they'd be back for me, not now but at some unspecified but real date in the future. The wind they raised was bitter and hot, not like the real wind that blew cold and odourless, sterile. The wind from the sides of the trucks was dusty; it tasted like ash in my mouth.

Houses ran alongside the road. Stretching over the four lanes every now and then was a big blue road sign that said where I was. I also kept track by counting the street signs at each corner. Twenty-first Street. Twentieth Street. Nineteenth Street. The streets seemed inordinately far apart. There were about four houses on each stretch separating the streets. I had four more blocks to walk before I turned into the bus station.

I could have been on a bus, saving myself a long walk, but I never remembered quickly enough which bus I should stop. I was always easily confused. Rice or pasta? Lettuce or cabbage? I never knew how to decide things like that. The seventeen or the eighteen? So I walked to the little station, with its heavy, warm air panting out of buses that crouched in a waiting lane, engines still running, while the drivers used the bathroom or made phone calls home to their families, or just shot the breeze with other bus workers in the small office behind the bullet-proof glass of the customer service counter.

I had a crumpled couple of bus schedules in my pocket, clutched tight too many times to have resisted becoming grimy and old through the month I'd used them. No matter how many times I took the bus, I'd always forget which one I needed. Mornings was the fourteen, going north into the city; evenings was the eighteen, going south into the suburbs. Oh, how easily said and how hard to remember! I had to pull out the schedules, both of them, every time I walked to catch a bus, smooth out the wrinkles, squint down at them and look to see which bus went where. And as soon as I'd put them back into my bag I'd forget again. Which bus went where? What time was it running? Was I in the right place?

The wind was determined to get to me, to find something it could ruffle. It crept under my long skirt and under my high collar, trying to penetrate to my skin. I could feel it swirling under my clothes, trying to make me shiver. But I was prepared, too wily for the wind. I had on long underwear.

Summer in Edmonton is not hot, but it's not cold. Unless, that is, you're used to living in a furnace. I was. I am from the Caribbean, where an average day might easily be twice as hot as an average Edmonton summer day. What is sixteen degrees when you're really built for 32? So I was always cold, bundled myself up in layers and more obscene layers, wearing all of my wardrobe at once.

Aunt Jillian and Julie laughed at me all the time, couldn't understand why I was always kitted out like a bag lady in sweater, shirt, long underwear, pants or skirt, and sneakers. On really bad days I wore my coat, a long velveteen number I bought at Goodwill because I wasn't going to be there much longer and nobody wanted to spend real money on my penance clothes. My velveteen coat was rich, electric blue, the colour of the sky at just about sunset, except when you're looking at the wrong side of the sky. Not the side with the lightshow but the other one, the side where night is already creeping up and day is already a memory. On that side the sky could be an elegant, intense, impenetrable and unutterably lovely blue. When I saw the coat on the hanger at Goodwill, it seemed it was waiting for me. Everybody laughed at me, especially Julie, who called it my Princess Di coat. In truth it was too formal for everyday use, but I didn't care; it fit me and I loved the colour and the smooth, short nap of the velveteen. Plus, the lining was real silk, which I found felt heavenly against my skin when it had the chance to touch it.

On cold or windy days I would shrug myself into it and hide away, feeling like the Michelin Man and looking much like him too, but in my fine blue coat who cared?

I kept walking, sticking my hands into the silk-lined pockets, balling them into fists. My short nails cut crescents into my palms, the pain keeping me from screaming out when the scary trucks passed with their boooohhhhhppp! horns blazing.

Nobody ever stopped me or said hello or anything; Canadians are so into their own space that they try not to interfere with anybody else's. To me, used to stopping and talking to perfect strangers at home, or just smiling at them and seeing in their faces some human emotion, it was a strange and hostile silence that zipped along beside me when I saw the occasional person coming towards me. Not that I saw too many people. Nobody walked here. I was a freak, trekking unnecessarily far. Aunt Jillian and her girlfriend Julie didn't know I walked. They would have suggested they pick me up from the city if I had told them, but that would have meant them driving out of their way - they didn't work in the city but from home, on a computer-based business that they ran from the cool, dry basement of their little house in the suburbs.

I wasn't enrolled in school. And as it was summer anyway, school was out. I spent the day at the library, reading, or sometimes I went to the gym. Sometimes I went swimming. Sometimes I went to the museum. Sometimes I just walked around the city and listened to it breathe.

I wasn't enrolled in school because I was officially in Edmonton on holiday, resting from my recent troubles. My family had shunted me off to the distant city to while away the rest of the term I had started by trying to kill myself. It was now June and I was tired of my penance, which they saw as a vacation. I missed the sunshine, I missed my room, I missed my house. I didn't miss my mother as much as I should, maybe, but then every time I thought of her I remembered the sour and hurt expression on her face, the first thing I saw when I came to at the hospital. She couldn't believe that I was so unhappy that I wanted to die and felt it was a personal indictment of her and my upbringing. Depression, I tried to tell her, the doctors tried to tell her, Aunt Jillian tried to tell her, my father tried to tell her, had nothing to do with her. It was inside of me, like some kind of flaw in my basic programming. My operating software told my body I was unhappy and that I wanted to die. Didn't matter if she was a good mother or not. I would have taken the bottle of pills anyway.

The summer flowers outside each house were brighter than I would have imagined while in the Caribbean. I thought of Canada, any temperate place, really, as dull and somehow less colourful than home. I was surprised to see that the flowers could be as red, as yellow, as blue, as my own garden's. Not knowing the names of anything, I called them by their sizes and colours. The big pink flower, the small blue flower. The wind had more success with them than with my wiry tight curls. They understood how to dance in it, little heads nodding and twisting in the strong breeze.

All the houses looked much the same. I remember once, before I got the courage to take the bus, I tried walking home. Twenty-four blocks didn't seem like much - and it only took about fifteen minutes by car to get from my aunt's house to the heart of town, so I figured I could get away with walking it. Uh huh. It was long. I walked for about three hours and just kept counting streets and counting streets until in frustration I stopped a little kid and said, did he know where Second Street was? Turned out I was on it, right in front of Aunt Jillian's house, but they all looked exactly the same to me and I just hadn't recognised it. But there it was, a small brownish white cottage, surrounded by jewel-green lawn and tubs of summer blooms, separated by a hedge and a chain link fence from its neighbours. On one side of the house was a black-door'd garage with an extra car parked outside on the driveway in front of it. Aunt Jillian had a couple of ironic garden gnomes cavorting in a little grotto she had made of some dark green perennial shrub, Japanese rocks and some driftwood from home. It was not a shrine but she tended it carefully, raking it and keeping it looking spiffy, washing down the garden gnomes until they shone even though she made constant fun of them.

I had been confused that day maybe, too, because of perspective. I'd never seen the house from that angle, from outside of a car, standing up, approaching it from a different direction. It looked like somewhere else. I had always driven up into the garage in the passenger seat of Aunt Jillian's car, jumped out and entered the house through the door inside the garage.

Nobody used the front door at all, I noticed. It was there for decoration. People entered through the back door by the kitchen or through the side door by the garage. The front door was seldom even touched, except by Julie during her Saturday morning cleaning rampages, when every bit of brass and glass in the house was spit-polished till it gleamed. It was formal and austere, like the living room into which it opened, and nobody wanted that feeling to be sullied with ordinary dirt and cat fur and Doritos smudges.

I turned the corner to get to the bus station, counting corners laterally this time. I knew the street names by heart now, ran them over in my head as if I was afraid some day I'd be walking by and someone would have changed them. Evergreen, Fir, Pine, Wisteria, Aspen; then the bus station hove into view.

Two cops idly watched my approach. They were wearing summer uniforms of short sleeves and short pants, and looked with obvious amusement at my over-padded appearance. I smiled faintly at them and clenched my fists tighter. It was a strange contradiction; I hated how nobody talked to me but I didn't really want them to talk to me, either. I was afraid of what I'd say.

The taller of the two cops, a young blond man with a moustache and strong, thick legs, grinned back at my little smile. Soon as I was in earshot he asked if I was sure I was warm enough. I said yes, thanks, and hearing my singsong accent he immediately did what every other Canadian I'd ever met did: asked me where I was from.

I told him, eyeing the sheltered Plexiglas booth of the commuter queue with obvious yearning, and he finally let me go to get my chilled bones into the sanctum of the windbreak.

Standing, protected from the wind, I quickly warmed up. I looked at my little watch, which my father had given to me when I sat my secondary school entrance exam two years before, and saw that I had another ten minutes until the next bus drove up. Bus service on this line ran every twenty minutes, roughly on time, waiting for no one a minute past their schedule. It was shocking to me at first to read the schedule and find that the buses actually would be there at 9:20 if they said they would be; at home, no such thing had ever happened, to my knowledge. Buses ran when their drivers felt like it. End of story. But here, the drivers drove like serious professionals, saying goodmorningma'am and goodeveningsir to everyone who came in, not asking anybody how their grandson or their diabetes or their macomere was keeping. Didn't matter that I saw the same driver more often than not; the tone didn't change and he didn't ask any more than I provide him with correct change.

I could see the cop looking at me still, and even though I turned away to look in the other direction I knew he would soon amble over to make small talk. So said, so done: he came over, swinging his arms and catching his fists together in front as he did. The gray and yellow of his uniform was different from what I expected of a policeman's; the jaunty yellow stripe was unnecessarily frivolous, I felt. Like a party hat on a pig. The cop came over and talked about the weather and the neighbourhood and then asked what I did and I told him nothing, just hang out all day in the city.

He looked at me again and must have seen that I was younger than I looked but wanted to know just how much younger, and so he asked how old I was and I told him fourteen and he stepped back in his head and made some little quick excuse and quickly ambled back to his partner.

One of the purring buses suddenly emitted a little burst of wind, a sharp mechanical fart, and rumbled awake. It drove up to me and I anxiously checked my schedule once more before it reached me. I was alone in the queue. When it reached me the door came open with a gasp. I got on and asked was it the 18? Yup, goodeveningma'am, and I paid the fare and lurched to a seat in the middle of the bus and sat down on the cold, slippery vinyl gratefully. Another mechanical breaking of wind and it was off. I counted the streets again, and then I was home. Not home home but home at Aunt Jillian's house and that was good enough for now. I reached up, pulled the stop cord and got out when the bus stopped rolling. The stop was a half-block from the house but I'd done it so many times it was hardly something I had to think about anymore. My anxieties were left on the bus, for now. I was home. Not home home, but it was good enough for now.