Kelly (21), a recovering heroin addict, has been living in a bed and breakfast in Gardiner Street, Dublin, for just over a year. It's a step up.
From 16 she had been sleeping rough or, now and then, staying in hostels. Like many other teenagers, who bed down nightly on the pavements of the city centre, she had made her way there from the suburbs.
In Kelly's case, it was in Clondalkin/Ronanstown, an area of sprawling local authority housing estates in Co Dublin, that she first found herself "out of home". Her mother had asked her to leave.
One of nine children, her parents split up when she was about 14. "I got started on drugs when I was about 12 I think, started on cigarettes, which led on to hash, which led on to LSD, then ecstasy, then benzos, then cocaine and then, when I was about 15, I got badly into heroin. My eldest sister, she's 24, is on drugs too.
"To get enough money for the drugs I was getting into shoplifting and dealing. My father was a heavy drinker and he didn't pay maintenance and I suppose my mother couldn't cope. When I was 16 she started throwing me out. I was living in town with my fella. Actually we robbed a car once just to sleep in it."
Using heroin again - she lapsed from the addiction support programme she had been on some weeks ago - Kelly's speech is sometimes incoherent and, sitting in the Ronanstown Youth Services Centre on a sunny Friday afternoon, this tall, attractive girl rambles at length into points not perhaps necessary to her overall story.
However, she wants to tell her story, making no claim that it is different to those of hundreds of other young people she has known.
"There's plenty of us," she half smiles. And like plenty, she says, she never tried to access the Out of Hours Service for young homeless people because that meant going to her local Garda station. "I was into drugs and shoplifting. I didn't want to go near the police."
This is common, according to Mr Eddie Darcy, education officer at the Ronanstown Youth Services. "Youth homelessness is something that has grown much worse here in the past four or five years. There is no adult homelessness in the area - all young people and nearly all drug based."
The absence of emergency accommodation in the suburbs and the fact that State payments to the homeless are made in the city centre draws young people there where they are more vulnerable, he says.
Kelly describes sleeping rough was "horrible". "I was always dirty, my clothes were dirty. I used to run in the back door of the house when my mam was out, to try and get clean clothes, and I'd stand in the kitchen scoffing food, just to eat. She'd know I had been there and she threatened to get a barring order against me."
Asked how this made her feel, she says simply she felt "numb". "The drugs covered everything. I didn't even know I had feelings until now."
She spent a lot of time in the city centre partly because she had to go there to pick up her State allowance from the homeless persons unit in Charles Street and partly because she thought she might get hostel or other accommodation there. However she also spent some time around Ronanstown, living in abandoned cars or squats.
She recounts in detail witnessing a friend being murdered and herself being raped during her years of sleeping rough.
"They," she nods, "were the worst things that happened."
Of her future, she says she hopes to get back on the addiction support programme and continue the training course she is on.
"I'm on Level 2 in computers. I'm proud of myself and what I've achieved, getting off the streets and, hopefully, getting off drugs. I don't brag about it, but I know drugs is the only thing holding me back."