It started on a Tuesday.
Scarlett was eating breakfast when she noticed the calendar on the wall.
Someone - her mum, probably - had written something on one of the squares in red pen.
Back to school.
Scarlett counted the days.
Eight.
She put her spoon down.
The cereal suddenly didn’t seem very interesting.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go back. She did, sort of. She missed her classroom and she missed the structure of the day and she even - though she would never say this out loud - missed the particular smell of the school corridors in the morning.
And she also felt something else. Something fluttery and uncertain that lived just below her ribs and wouldn’t quite settle.
By Thursday it was six days.
By Saturday it was four.
The fluttery feeling got louder.
On Sunday evening Scarlett sat on her bed with Lenny and Pudding and stared at nothing in particular.
“You’re very quiet,” said Lenny.
“Four days,” said Scarlett.
Lenny nodded. He understood immediately.
“Tell me about the feeling,” he said.
Scarlett thought about it carefully. “It’s like excited and scared at the same time. All mixed up together so I can’t tell which one it is.”
“That’s a very accurate description,” said Lenny. “Those two feelings live very close together. Sometimes they’re so mixed up it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins.”
“Is that normal?”
“Completely,” said Lenny. “Your brain is getting ready for something new. It doesn’t know exactly what to expect yet, so it sends out a little bit of both; excitement because something is starting, nerves because it hasn’t happened yet.”
Scarlett pulled Lenny a little closer.
“What if my teacher is strict?” she said. “What if I don’t sit near my friends? What if everything feels different?”
Lenny was quiet for a moment.
“Those things might happen,” he said honestly. “Some of them probably will. And if they do, you’ll find your way through them. You always do.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” said Lenny, “you found your way through the whole summer. The wobbly first days, and the long afternoons, and the hill, and the seagull, and all of it. You’re much better at finding your way through things than you think.”
Scarlett considered this.
The fluttery feeling was still there.
And somewhere alongside it, something else had arrived too.
Something that felt a little bit like ready.
🫶 Dream big dreams.