Sophie by Guy Burt

soul-searching before I resolved to give it to her instead of keeping it for myself, for while I knew what a good present it would make, I was deeply in love with it myself. I had come across it in the quarry one afternoon, and something had made me stop before calling Sophie over to me. All that afternoon I had worried at it, gradually easing it from its firm seating in the grey stone, and when it eventually sprang loose—there was a small section missing on its other side, but nothing too serious—I had pocketed it, instead of surrendering it to the quarry bag with the other shells. It was quite different from anything I had seen before in the quarry: a round, spiralled shell as wide as my fist and perfectly made. Compared to the thumbnail shells that littered the rock, it was a work of art. Prising it out without breaking it had taken me the best part of four hours, but Sophie, making her unintelligible notes in the quarry books, or sunning herself happily under the oval sky, didn’t seem to notice. I took the shell with me to school the next day, a warm, flat medallion in my shorts pocket. During games, when I was left alone in the classroom to read a book, I carefully painted the shell with white glue—the kind that dries clear and shiny. And so my gift for Sophie was complete.
    Seeing her face when she opened the small, untidily wrapped parcel made all the time and effort well worth it. She gave me a huge hug. “It’s fantastic,” she said. “And you’ve made it shiny as well.”
    I nodded happily. “Do you like the card?”
    “I love the card. I’m going to stick it on the wall in my bedroom where I can look at it. You must have been collecting those bottle tops for weeks.” She held the card out at arm’s length to admire it. “It’s really good, Mattie,” she said. “You didn’t do this at school?”
    “No,” I said, feeling proud that I hadn’t. “Mrs. Jeffries always tells us to draw our cards in crayon, and I wanted to make one that glitters.”
    “Well, you’ve certainly managed it. It really shines, doesn’t it? And your writing’s much better, too.”
    A few days later it was my turn. There were more dry cakes and lemonade, and, once these had been endured, more beautifully made, totally unsuitable presents. My mother sat in her chair, not meeting my eyes, tapping one foot slightly against the thick carpet. As soon as we were able to escape, Sophie and I retired upstairs to her bedroom to start the birthday celebrations in earnest.
    Her present to me was neatly wrapped in red paper and tied with blue ribbon. Eagerly, I tore it open. Inside there was a small hardback book, a bar of white chocolate and a badge with
I am 6
on it.
    “The chocolate’s for now,” she told me seriously. “I was going to get you the Winnie the Pooh book called
Now We Are Six
, but we can get that from the library. This is a bit different. What do you think?”
    It was strange; she almost sounded anxious, as if she was afraid I wouldn’t like her present. I turned it over in my hands carefully. On the front of the book, the title read
The Observer Book of Fossils
—and then, in smaller writing, “In Colour.” But what was most exciting of all was that, below the title, was a photograph of the shell I had given Sophie, almost exactly as it had been when I saw it poking out of the quarry wall.
    “Wow!” I said.
    “You like it? It’s called an ammonite, that shell you found. You can find out all the names of the shells in the quarry, if you want.”
    “It’s brilliant.”
    “I’ve written your name in it. See? At the front.”
    The end of term came in a flurry of rolled-up paintings and bags and boxes of books, emptied desks and lost Wellingtons. Mrs. Jeffries’s cheery classroom was a chaotic jumble for two days, until it gradually resolved into an ordered sterility as more and more of the year’s work was taken home to be stuck on fridge doors and bedroom walls. There was one brief eruption