Kindergarten

Wally is smart. Very smart.

He knows he's smart, too, because he gets gold star stickers on all of his shape matching sheets, happy faces on his progress reports, and– most importantly– because his parents tell him so.

His smartitude (and his awareness of it) is both a blessing and a curse in the West household.

"Are you sure you want to do them all by yourself, kiddo?" Mary West asks, snipping her scrapbooking scissors around the edges of the last bright red, heart-shaped, construction paper card.

"Yep," Wally says, popping the 'p'. He reaches across the table for a card.

Mary slides the finished stack closer to him from across the kitchen table and puts her scissors down, resigning herself to the fact that they're going to be sitting at this table for a very, very long time if Wally gets his way.

"Alrighty then, that's going to be nineteen different names. That's a lot of writing," she notes, and Wally's eyes positively sparkle with determination.

Mary immediately regrets lacing a challenge into her words.

Wally picks up his pencil and nods quickly. "I'm ready."

"Okay, you write the names and I'll read the list out. Let's start from the top." Mary drags her finger over the first name on the class roster. "Buddy Baker. That's going to be a big B-"

"Nooo," Wally whines loudly, replacing his ready smile with a pronounced pout, "I can spell it myself."

"My apologies," Mary says quickly, raising her hands in surrender. "Go ahead and spell it then."

"Buh-d-y." Wally sounds out his classmate's name determinedly as he puts his pencil to the card. "Bee-you…dee…dee-Eeeeeeee-oops."

He doesn't hesitate to erase the 'e' on the card.

"Buddy's the same as Wally, isn't it?" Wally asks, waiting for his mother to validate his theory.

"Yes," Mary says, proudly nodding, "and since it is the same, how would you spell it?"

"Bee-you-dee-dee-why," he recites, adding a smiley face to the card.

He hands the card over to Mary and she smiles in approval. Every letter is facing the right direction and he didn't curve his 'y' the wrong way again. She tapes a Kit-Kat to the back and puts it in a bag. Maybe they'll get through the roster faster than she thought.

"You're so smart, sweetie," she says, handing him another card from the stack. "Let's keep going. Next up: Artemis Crock."

Wally places the pencil down and stares at the card in front of him. Mary practically hears the screech of the brakes in his mind. His eyes dart from the card, to his pencil, to the roster in her hands, and back to the card. He looks up at her, momentarily defeated.

"…Uh…"

"Would you like me to spell it?"

"…Yes, please."

The last thing Wally expects to see when he hands out the super special cards he wrote all by himself is someone crying.

The whole classroom is covered in reds and pinks, there's confetti and glitter all over the floor from one girl's crafty cards, they have free time, and there are unlimited cookies. Wally can't think of a single reason why anyone would be sad when there were unlimited cookies. But someone is, and that someone just so happens to be the last person standing between him and a trip to the goodie-bag covered table at the back of the room.

After Mr. Carr had set them loose to hand out their cards and candies, Wally had made a beeline through the room with his mother in tow. He made a show out of passing his cards out faster than anyone else, exchanging his for the cards his classmates had made for him and handing them to his mother as they walked. When only one remained, he whispered to his mother that he would pass this one out all by himself and meet her at the cookie table after he completed his special assignment.

(On her way to the table, Mary makes a note to herself about the continuity she'd unwittingly signed up for when she'd initiated playing secret agent before bathtime the previous night).

Artemis doesn't seem to be as concerned as Wally is about the lack of treats in her vicinity as she pushes around a pile of confetti back and forth across her desk with the edge of a valentine. Her eyes are fixed on the glimmering hearts and stars, and every so often she swipes her sleeve over her cheeks and sniffles.

Wally glances around for a good amount of time, searching for his mother, Mr. Carr, or another grown up to handle the situation, but then he remembers: he's a smart kid.

He can figure it out all by himself.

And so, determined to understand, Wally takes his preferred path to answers: questions.

"Hey, Artemis, why are you crying?" he asks abruptly, taking care to tuck his card behind his back before she sees it.

Candy is distracting and Wally wants the Facts.

"I'm not," Artemis says quickly, looking up at him with hard, watery eyes, but the look does little to distract from the wobble in her voice.

"Are too," he informs her, using his free hand to point at the wet spot on her sleeve.

She uses her hand to hide the spot and shakes her head. "Am not."

He moves his finger to point at the spot on her other sleeve. "Are too."

"Am not," Artemis huffs, narrowing her eyes before crossing her arms and effectively covering both spots from view. "Go away."

Wally is not so easily deterred. "Why are you hiding now?"

"I am not hiding. I like sitting like this," she explains pointedly, scooting further down in her seat.

"But why?" Wally whines, tapping his foot against the floor with far more force than necessary.

"Because," Artemis sighs, the same way his mom does when it's almost bedtime and he's not tired, "it's my seat and my arms and I sit how I want."

Well, she's got him there. As Wally tries to think of a new approach, he gets pushed by a passing classmate as they rush past him to get to the snack table. The air current that follows knocks some of the confetti off Artemis's desk and onto the floor. She pouts at the loss.

"Hey, wait a minute," Wally says, gesturing at her card-sparse desk. "Where's your valentines at?"

Artemis uncrosses her arms and protectively places her hand over the one valentine on her desk. "Right here."

"Yeah, but where's the rest?" Wally presses, pointing to the desk beside her where a stack of mismatched cards is one desk-bump away from being scattered across the floor.

Artemis looks around the room warily before she hesitantly admits, "No one will give them to me."

"What?" he asks, his eyes wide with shock.

"Yeah… I don't have mine, and everyone's trading, so they skipped me…" Artemis carefully picks up the lone card on her desk, examines it in her hands, and adds, "Megan gave me one though."

"Well, where's yours at?"

Artemis frowns and her sniffles make a reappearance as she starts looking around the room again. She puts down Megan's card before answering.

"My dad was supposed to bring them before snack time, and I told him ten times what time, too, but-" she pauses to quickly rub at her eye, but the attempt to hide her tears falls short as her voice breaks as she continues, "but he's still late."

Ignoring the siren blaring in his mind, the one that exists to let him know when getting a grown up would be a really great, big boy idea, Wally takes a deep breath and decides to prove he can fix this all by himself.

"Here," he says quickly, holding out her card, a heart with a lollipop poking out like an arrow on one side. "I made this one for you."

Artemis's eyebrows knit as she sits up in her seat and asks, "Really?"

"Yeah," he says with a nod, holding it closer to her, "I don't need a trade. It's your Valentine. Look it, I even wrote your name all by myself."

Artemis's last tear stops in its tracks at the edge of her eye as she takes the card from him and places it between Megan's card and the pile of confetti.

"Thanks, Walter," she says with the tiniest of sniffles and biggest of smiles, before she gasps, stands up, and nearly knocks her chair to the floor in her haste.

Wally has to jump out of the way to avoid her as she sprints towards the front of the room and straight into the arms of the tall man at the door. Using his secret agent detective skills, he deduces that the man must be her father and the bag he passes to Artemis must be filled with her cards.

"That's not my name," he grumbles to himself as he watches her rifle through her bag.

"Hey, kiddo," his mother says from behind him, calling his attention and presenting him with a napkin with a heart-shaped cookie on it. "I found your favorite."

The cookie solves everything.

"Yessss," Wally cheers, taking the cookie off the napkin and shoving half of it into his mouth before he adds, "Tanks, Ma."

Before he can eat the other half of his cookie, he feels a hard poke on his shoulder and turns around to find a pink heart in his face.

Artemis beams at him from behind the card and says, "I got yours first. Here."

"Fanks," he says through a mouthful as he takes the card and the candy attached to it. Before he can say another word (read: correct her on his name), Artemis takes off to hand out her next card to the only other redhead in the class.

His mother laughs lightly and runs her fingers through her son's hair as he huffs at the lost opportunity and starts opening the Smarties taped to the card. Mary, having watched from the sidelines as her son diffused his crying classmate, finds herself beaming with pride.

She's always been proud of her son, for a lot of reasons– the gold stars, the happy faces, never a bad note sent home- but today, if he asked, she'd say she's proudest of his heart.