The uniform was clean and pressed and hanging on the back of the door.
The bag was packed.
The pencil case had new pencils in it, proper new ones, not the stubby old ones from the bottom of the drawer, and Scarlett had sharpened them all the night before because sharpening pencils was something to do when you couldn’t sleep.
It was the morning of the first day back.
Scarlett sat on the edge of her bed in her uniform and looked at Lenny.
“I don’t know what classroom I’m in yet,” she said.
“No,” said Lenny.
“I don’t know who my teacher is. I mean, I know her name. I just don’t know what she’s like.“
“No,” said Lenny.
“I don’t know if I’ll sit near Maisie. Or Sam. I don’t know if the classroom will feel right. I don’t know any of it yet.”
“No,” said Lenny. “You don’t.”
Scarlett looked at him. “You’re not going to tell me it’ll be fine?”
“It will probably be fine,” said Lenny. “And you don’t know that yet either. Plus pretending you do won’t help much.”
Scarlett felt something loosen slightly in her chest.
Somehow that was more comforting than fine would have been.
“What do I do with the not knowing?” she asked.
“You walk in anyway,” said Lenny. “That’s all. You don’t have to know how it will go. You just have to walk through the door.”
At school, the corridors smelled exactly as she remembered, that particular school smell that she couldn’t describe to anyone but would know anywhere.
A list of the new class groupings hung on the wall outside the hall.
Scarlett found her name.
Maisie was in her class. Sam wasn’t; he was in the class next door. The list of names alongside hers had a few she recognised and a few she didn’t.
She found her new classroom.
She found her name on a peg, a new peg, lower down than last year’s, with a little label in the teacher’s handwriting.
She hung her bag on it.
And then she stood there for a moment in the doorway of the unfamiliar room, with its unfamiliar arrangement of tables and its unfamiliar display boards and its unfamiliar view from the window.
Unfamiliar. Not frightening.
Just new.
I don’t know how this year will go, she thought.
And then, quietly, from somewhere that felt a lot like Lenny:
And I walked in. That’s enough for today.
🫶 Dream big dreams.