Isabelle was walking to the bus stop when she noticed the gravel glittering with frost beneath her. She placed her feet carefully, one in front of the other, keeping her eyes on those shiny, black, buckled boots, her white socks warm and snug over woolen tights. They’d be soaked through by the end of the day. Isabelle never managed to keep her feet dry.

Thankfully, her path was clear. The farmers had been down with their plows already to make sure they had access to the fields. Farmers started work at five in the morning and Isabelle thought this was awe-inspiring. She didn’t know if she’d ever been awake at that time. It was a moment, to her, that didn’t really seem to exist, a spooky place where the world was quiet and dark, where everyone wore gloves and spoke in whispers, watching their breath fog up the air.

It was eight in the morning. The sky was bright grey and the air tasted as cool and clean as toothpaste. Isabelle was always on time for the school bus. There wasn’t any pavement when the end of her path met the main road, so the bus stop was jabbed into the grass, a pole with its tiny metal square that told people the bus times (twice daily). Isabelle felt they’d installed it just for her.

She might have to wait a while. With all the snow, school may be closed, but she wouldn’t know for certain until the bus didn’t show up. Her mum would sit on the kitchen table in her dressing gown, nursing her coffee while listening to radio. She’d shake her head at Isabelle: “Nothing yet, love.”

If the bus didn’t come she knew she could go back home and sit with her mum, watching cartoons on the TV, drinking hot chocolate. That would be nice, but secretly Isabelle wanted it to come. She liked school. She liked the neat timetables and the designated hours. She liked hot lunches and the sound of bells letting her know when things were done. The library was the best part. It was warm and cozy and hardly anyone used it. She could hide in the corner on her favorite comfy chair reading through all the books. Most of the time she didn’t get to finish them. Sometimes, she’d pick up a book she didn’t recognize and, with joy, realize that she’d already started it, and she could carry on from the middle. What mattered wasn’t really the story. Isabelle just liked the feeling, the mystery of not knowing whether she’d be in a zoo this lunchtime or a circus, a broken home or an American farm, the past or the future, Africa or Asia or Antarctica. She held different tastes in the back of her throat when she read these books. She craved that element of surprise.

Isabelle liked her lessons. She liked her meticulously ordered pencil case with all of her colors sharpened to a neat point, her gel pens each smelling like different sugary fruits. Isabelle wrote each day in a different color. On Monday’s lessons, she used blue pens. For Tuesday, green. Wednesday was an orange day, then Thursday was black and Friday was pink. Friday and Wednesday were her favorite days. Thursday used to be yellow, but she could never read her own writing. Her planner was her pride and joy. She jotted down all her homework in tidy handwriting, and then she would cross through them with her red strawberry gel pen when she completed them later that night. Normally, she did it straight after school before tea, showing her mum what she’d learned. Her mum was supposed to be helping her, but Isabelle didn’t need help. Still, they sat together, and her mum would offer unnecessary advice, like: “Don’t forget to put the date at the top, love,” and “Maybe those shapes would look nicer if you colored them in,” and Isabelle would nod seriously and immediately get to work, as though the comment was inspired.

The bus came. It was only a single-decker because there were so few people from her side of the village who went to school. The students were raucous and the floor was already slippery with muddy shoeprints. The chatter was loud and overlapping. Isabelle couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. That didn’t matter. They didn’t speak to her.

Because of the snow there was an aura of excitement. Everyone was wearing extra gloves and scarves, scraping snow from under the outside windows so they could pack it tightly into balls of ice. They weren’t allowed to throw them in the bus, so they just packed them tighter and tighter until they could finally disembark onto the concrete playground, already sprinkled with salt. Then, explosion. Isabelle was glad she could skip out first to avoid it all.

A Year 8 boy threw a snowball at a Year 10 girl with eyebrows drawn on like upside-down Nike ticks, who immediately charged towards him as he scarpered. Isabelle watched all this from a low wall. It was cold and hard on her bum, even under her long jacket. She kicked her shoes against the brick as the snowballs flew around her. There was calm amongst all the screeching of girls and boys getting hit. When the bell went, Isabelle jumped down, enjoying the crunch of her feet in the snow. The back of her legs were numb. She walked along, leaving little horizontal stripes of shoe soles behind her.

In her form room, her teacher was trying to calm down the chatter.

“Right, coats off, please.”

“Sir, it’s freeeeeeezing.”

“Get ’em off or you won’t feel the benefit.”

Isabelle removed her coat. She was right next to the radiator and, as always, placed her hands on the vertical bars until she couldn’t stand the burning anymore. She’d use her hot hands to rub up and down her skin, turning her cheeks pink.

The teacher went through the register. They all practiced their variations of saying “Yes,” “Here,” “Here, sir,” etc. When he got to Isabelle, he just smiled.

“And Isabelle’s here, good.” And she smiled back at him as though in confirmation.

Isabelle hadn’t spoken for a few years now. Not since she found the man. His body had been lying on the road outside her old house, and she’d screamed for help so long that she went hoarse. No one came. It was quiet in the countryside, after all. When she walked home from school at three o’clock, all the grown-ups were still at work. She’d never thought to check if he had a phone. On icy pavements, it’s easy to slide and crack your head open, and that was something they’d all been taught at school, which was why Isabelle made sure to walk so very, very carefully across the gravel. The man died, of course.

Because she didn’t speak, she didn’t have friends. Sometimes, loud and confident girls would try to take her under their wing, and she’d sit with them while she ate lunch, but afterwards she always replaced her tray and sneaked back to the library. People tried to bully her, but it wasn’t much of a fair fight, so they stopped. Now, she floated along the corridors, always making it to lessons, always handing in her homework, but never fully present. The doctors said there wasn’t anything physically wrong. Despite clear evidence of trauma, she didn’t seem depressed. Isabelle felt she’d found a loophole in which she could experience the world without participation.

Outside the window, a flurry of white opened from the sky. The snow came down and instantly stuck to the ground like Velcro, spinning in thick, fat flakes so perfectly and quickly that they seemed to blow horizontally. Isabelle felt a jolt of excitement in her stomach. While she was the first to notice, others soon crammed round the window and jabbered and pointed:

“Sir, look at that, sir, we can’t walk in this, sir.”

It didn’t take long for the school to be closed. They realized that there was no way of continuing with lessons during a blizzard. The buses were called back, much to the drivers’ discontent. Parents were called and asked if they could come and collect their offspring. Isabelle waited for her mum in the library, settling on the comfiest chair she could find. She picked up a book about schoolgirls and read for the first few pages, but then she stopped. She looked about her and took it all in, the smell of the books, the sound of the wind circling and hooting through the window space, the quickly darkening sky. She stayed like that for a few moments. It felt nice just to breathe.

Driving home, her mother comforted her, but there was really no need.

“I’m glad you’re coming home,” she said. “I worry about you on days like this. I know you don’t tell me, but I understand it must be hard for you.”

Isabelle listened to the crackly song playing on the radio—a gentle, slow acoustic guitar. She watched the white lines on the road disappearing beneath the bonnet of the car, and then rested her forehead on the cool glass to see the crooked, black trees softly struggling under the weight of snow like thick hunks of white icing. Her mother’s hand was resting on the gearstick, and Isabelle placed her small pink-mittened hand on top. It was the only way to tell her that one day she would be fine.

Cathleen Davies is a writer from East Yorkshire, England. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, a scruffy list of which can be found here: cathydavies1995.wordpress.com/. She also co-runs Aloka, a magazine for non-native English speakers. Her hobbies include creating neurotic to-do lists and never finishing them.

Photo by Jamie Azevedo