At school the next day, she had asked Miss Clancy where Madison was. Miss Clancy showed her a map of Maine.
"So it's really close?" Emma asked excitedly, spanning the distance between the two points with her finger and her thumb.
"No, not really," said her teacher laughed good-naturedly.
She photocopied the map and drew a line along the map from their school to Madison. Each time she went through a town, she circled it.
"Each of these circles is a town, like ours. They have schools and shops and houses with and lots of people living there. Can you count the towns for me Emma?"
"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… Madison," Emma counted the circled dots on the map. "Six towns?"
"Yes, that's exactly right!"
Emma beamed at the praise. She loved Miss Clancy; she was Emma's favourite grown-up.
After a pause for thought, Emma frowned.
"So Madison is a long, long way away then?"
Emma had trouble picturing how far away it must be, to have six towns in between, but she thought it must take a very long time to get there, because when she took the bus to school that felt like a long time and her bus didn't even go through one whole town.
"Is it so far away that you'd go there on a plane?" she guessed.
"Oh no, not that far."
Miss Clancy pointed to one of the towns she'd circled on the map, about halfway to Madison.
"See this place here? This is where my parents live, and sometimes I take a bus to go there and visit them. It only takes me about an hour and to get there. I think Madison would only be about three hours away by bus. That's about how long you have left at school today."
"Oooh," Emma said and nodded. So it was only a bus away. She could do that – she took the bus to school every day, all by herself.
"Here," Miss Clancy said, and passed Emma the photocopied map they'd been drawing on.
"Would you like to take this home? You can show your parents what you've been learning about at school!"
Emma didn't tell Miss Clancy that her foster parents didn't care what she did at school because they were too busy – she knew from experience that telling people things like that got you in trouble. She just smiled.
"Thank-you Miss Clancy!" she said, and took the map to her school bag and tucked it safely inside.