The Valentine's Card That Went the Wrong Way

In the village of Stonebridge, where the February frost still clung to the grass in the mornings and the first brave snowdrops pushed up through the cold soil along the garden walls, there lived a boy named Felix. Felix was nine years old, had sandy hair that flopped over one eye, a collection of forty-three erasers shaped like different animals, and a problem.

The problem was this.

He had made a Valentine's card for his classmate Amara, and it had completely and entirely disappeared.

Felix had worked on the card for three evenings. He was not a particularly artistic person, he was the first to admit this, his drawings tended to look like one thing when he started and a different thing entirely by the time he finished. But he had tried his absolute best. He had cut a heart shape from red card, which had taken four attempts before it looked symmetrical enough. He had written a poem inside, a short one, four lines, which had taken even longer than the heart because every time he wrote a line it sounded either too soppy or too much like a weather forecast. He had decorated the envelope with small gold stars using a gel pen he had borrowed from his sister.

He had not written his name on it, because that was not how Valentine's cards worked. They were supposed to be a mystery. A secret. The whole point was that the person receiving it would wonder who it was from, and then perhaps have a think, and perhaps work it out, or perhaps not, but either way feel pleased that someone had gone to the trouble of making them something.

Felix had placed the finished card in his school bag on the morning of the fourteenth of February, planning to put it in Amara's tray when nobody was looking during morning registration. This was his plan. It was a good plan. Simple, direct, with a clear objective and minimal risk of embarrassment.

Except that when he reached into his school bag at registration, the card was not there.

He checked every pocket. He turned the bag upside down over his desk, which produced a ruler, a conker from last autumn that he had forgotten about, several biscuit crumbs, and a library book that was three weeks overdue, but absolutely no Valentine's card. He checked his coat pockets. He checked under his chair. He retraced his steps to the cloakroom and checked his peg. Nothing.

The card had vanished.

Felix sat through morning lessons in a state of quiet dismay. He found it very difficult to concentrate on long division when a carefully made Valentine's card containing a four-line poem was somewhere unknown, potentially being read by entirely the wrong person.

At morning break he went back to the cloakroom and searched again, more thoroughly this time, checking behind the coat pegs and along the shelf above them. Still nothing.

Then his friend Zach came in.

Zach was tall, cheerful, and noticed things. He noticed immediately that Felix was searching the cloakroom with the focused expression of someone who had lost something important.

"What are you looking for?" he asked.

Felix hesitated. But Zach was his best friend, and best friends were specifically for situations like this. He explained about the card.

Zach listened carefully. Then he said, "Did you have your bag open on the bus this morning?"

Felix thought about this. He had, in fact, had his bag open on the bus, because he had been trying to find his reading book when the bus jolted on the bump at the end of Orchard Road, which it always did because the road had been slightly uneven there for as long as anyone could remember.

"Yes," said Felix slowly.

"The card probably fell out when the bus jolted," said Zach with the confident air of someone solving a simple puzzle. "It's probably still on the bus. Or someone picked it up."

Felix thought about a stranger on the school bus finding a handmade Valentine's card with four lines of poetry and gold stars on the envelope. This was not a comforting thought.

"I have to find it," he said.

The school bus was driven by a man called Barry, who was large and cheerful and kept a bag of mints in the tray beside his seat, which he offered to children who remembered to say good morning to him properly. Barry always parked the bus in the school car park during the day and read his newspaper until it was time for the afternoon run.

At lunchtime, Felix asked his teacher Mrs Osei if he could go and speak to Barry. Mrs Osei, who had a fondness for children who were polite and purposeful, said yes.

Felix walked across the car park to where the bus sat quietly in the pale February sunshine. Barry was in the driver's seat with his newspaper. He lowered it when Felix knocked on the door.

"Hello, son," he said. "Everything all right?"

Felix explained about the card, carefully and clearly, leaving out the parts about Amara and the poem because those felt too private even for Barry.

Barry listened with the serious attention he gave to all problems brought to him by children, which was considerable. Then he folded his newspaper, climbed out of his seat with some effort, and led Felix down the aisle of the empty bus.

They found the card under seat seven, which was the seat directly in front of where Felix had been sitting. It had slid forward when the bus jolted and tucked itself neatly against the metal leg of the seat, still in its gold-starred envelope, completely unharmed.

Felix picked it up and felt an enormous wave of relief wash over him from head to boots.

"There you are," said Barry with satisfaction, as though he had personally arranged for the card to be exactly where it was. "Right then. Off you go."

Felix said thank you three times and walked back across the car park holding the card very carefully with both hands.

Back in the classroom, the afternoon was quieter. Most of the children had exchanged cards during the lunch break. There were envelopes on several desks, red and pink and white, some with stickers, some with glitter that had distributed itself generously across the surrounding surfaces. Mrs Osei had a small bunch of daffodils on her desk that her class had given her collectively.

Felix waited until everyone was settled with their reading books. He waited until Mrs Osei was at the back of the classroom helping someone with a tricky word. He stood up very quietly, walked to the other side of the room, and slipped the gold-starred envelope into Amara's tray beneath her reading folder where she would find it when she tidied up at the end of the day.

Then he walked back to his seat, sat down, opened his book, and stared at the page without reading a single word.

At the end of the afternoon, when Mrs Osei told everyone to tidy their trays and pack their bags, Felix kept his eyes on his own bag and focused very hard on organising his pencil case. He heard a small rustling sound from across the room. He heard nothing else. He did not look up.

They filed out to the bus in the usual end-of-day scramble of coats and bags and lost gloves. Felix sat in his usual seat and looked out of the window at the grey February sky and the snowdrops along the school fence, small and white and quietly determined.

Someone sat down in the seat beside him.

He turned. It was Amara. She had brown eyes and a yellow coat and she was holding a gold-starred envelope.

Felix felt his face go very warm.

"Someone left this in my tray," said Amara. She was not smiling yet but she was looking at him with an expression that was considering smiling very seriously. "It has a poem in it."

"Does it," said Felix. This was not a question. It came out as a statement, slightly strangled.

"It's a good poem," said Amara. "The rhymes actually work, which is more than you can say for most poems."

Felix looked back out of the window. The bus pulled out of the school car park. It went over the bump at the end of Orchard Road and Felix automatically tightened his grip on his bag.

"I made one too," said Amara. "But I didn't know who to give it to."

Felix turned back from the window.

Amara reached into her own bag and produced an envelope. It was purple with small silver moons drawn on it in felt tip. She held it out.

Felix took it.

He held it carefully with both hands, the same way he had held his own card walking back across the car park, and he thought that sometimes things that go wrong have a way of going right again that you could not have planned for even if you had tried.

"Thank you," he said.

"Thank you," said Amara.

The bus rolled on through Stonebridge, past the garden walls with their snowdrops and the frost still clinging to the shadowed grass. The February afternoon was pale and cold and quietly lovely.

Felix looked out of the window and smiled at it.

That evening he put Amara's purple envelope on his windowsill next to his collection of animal erasers, where he could see it from his bed. It had a small paper heart inside, cut carefully and symmetrically, and three lines of writing in very neat handwriting.

He read it four times before he turned his light off.

Then he lay in the dark, listening to the quiet of Stonebridge settling into its winter night, and felt the particular warm feeling of someone who has been brave about something small and found that small brave things sometimes lead to rather wonderful outcomes.

Outside, the snowdrops stood in the frost, white and steady, waiting patiently for spring.

*The End.*