I was lying in bed this morning sort of sulking a bit about Joshua, when my dad knocked on my door and shouted, “Woo-hoo! Shiraz Bailey Wood. There’s been a special delivery!” And suddenly everything felt better ’cos I knew Joshua had been joking all along and he’d bought me a pressie.
So I went downstairs in my pajamas, and sitting on the floor in the living room was a massive red envelope about a meter high. A massive soggy envelope. With SHIRAZ BAILEY WOOD written on the front in magic marker, but the letters had all ran ’cos the envelope was damp from being outside. When I looked closer there was a bug crawling up the front.
“Where did this come from?” I said, ’cos right away I knew this wasn’t from Josh.
“It was sitting on the front doorstep just now,” said my dad. “Someone must have brought it round in the night. It’s a bit wet, look.”
“Did you see them?” I said.
“No, it must have been really late,” said Dad. “Oh, and they left this too.”
Dad passed me a tube wrapped in shiny paper. Inside was a tube of candy Smarties. But when I looked at it closely it wasn’t any old tube of Smarties. It was all blue Smarties. Somebody had bought lots and lots of tubes of Smarties and fished out all the blue ones and put them all into one tube so I could have lots and lots of my favorite blue ones. Then they’d come in the middle of the night in the rain with a big card and dropped them off. The card didn’t say who it was from. It just said, “For Shiraz, the most beautiful girl in Goodmayes xxxx.”
Me and Dad never said to each other but we both knew who it was from. It was from someone who cared.