She's just finishing the d when the teacher appears over her shoulder. "I can't read this, Amy." Miss Francine takes the name card from little girl's desk. "Please start again, neatly this time."
"Amelia." Across the room, Mels folds her arms and speaks for her friend. "Her name is Amelia."
The little girl sends a smile to the Time-Away corner, where Mels has already managed to wind up on the first day of the year, then begins to pick through her pencil box for the bluest crayon to reprint Amelia Pond across the paper. She adds a princess with flowing red hair and red galoshes to one side and a floppy-haired prince with a tie to the other. "Amelia Pond is a fairytale name," she whispers.
When Rory's mother has them over for biscuits and telly the last day of school, she introduces herself as "Rory's friend, Amy Pond" and doesn't know why. Rory asks if he can call her Amy anyway, and she decides he may. She still doesn't know why.
Leadworth Secondary is right next door to Leadworth Primary, but she decides to reinvent herself for the move across the parking lot. She buys herself some Converse, picks out notebooks covered with boy bands instead of spaceships, and uses an orange marker to scrawl "AMY POND" across them. No one notices but Rory.
Rory offers her a galaxy bedecked pencil he just happened to find in the hallway one day. She wears it to a nub, and he offers her another that just happened to turn up in his locker.
In the ninth grade, she enters Dr. Brown's office for the first and last time. He greets her with a "Hello, Miss Amelia" as she sits down and he leaves early that day with a dripping suit and a dying goldfish in his pocket, the glass bowl still overturned on his now-ruined case file.
Mels positively glows with pride.
Her rugby-star boyfriend remembers their one-month anniversary with chocolates and a poem of his own laboured composition. The last couplet runs
Of you my heart grows ever fond,
My only, lovely Amelia Pond.
She tears the pink paper up and wads it back into his hands, crying. "I'm Amy, Amy Pond. Nobody calls me Amelia."
They break up.
She still draws. The girl who covered the walls in crayon portraits of a raggedy doctor and his box has moved on to pencils and pastels and the occasional watercolor, but her favorite color is still the bluest blue and her favorite subject a man with a tattered shirt and swirling tie. She signs these pieces Pond, Amelia and adds the date for flourish.
Amy Pond lives in Leadworth. Amelia Pond doesn't, and hasn't for a long time. But she's waiting, and if that stupid noise ever comes back, so will she.