The classroom smelled like plastic and lemon-scented cleaner, with just a hint of old books and damp coats. Percy stood by the door for a moment too long, clutching his lunch bag with both hands. He wasn't sure where to go. Children swirled around him like midges in summer—buzzing, laughing, shouting across tables as if they'd known one another forever.
"Name?" asked a woman from behind a desk, not unkindly but distracted, her eyes scanning a clipboard.
"Percy," he said, voice small. "Percy Vale."
She made a tick with her pen and pointed toward the far side of the room. "You're in Foxes. Hang your coat over there, then find a seat anywhere."
He hesitated. "Foxes?"
She smiled. "We name our groups after animals. There's Badgers, Owls, Hares... and Foxes. You'll like it."
Percy nodded stiffly, eyes flicking toward the coat hooks.
He didn't like it.
He missed the smell of straw and fresh air. He missed the low hum of cows and the comforting creak of the farmhouse stairs. Most of all, he missed Snow. She would have made sense of this place—stood beside him like always, nose twitching at the chaos, eyes steady and calm.
Instead, he hung his coat on a peg labelled Foxes, found an empty chair by the window, and sat.
The rest of that first day passed in a kind of blur. Names, instructions, crayons, songs he didn't know. The teachers moved like birds, flitting between tables, chirping praise and reminders. Percy barely spoke. His eyes drifted to the window every chance he got.
Outside, a small patch of grass hosted a set of monkey bars and a wobbling roundabout. Beyond that, a hedge. Beyond that, he imagined—home.
He didn't make friends that day. He didn't make any the next day either.
It wasn't that the other children were cruel. They were just... loud. Fast. Unpredictable. They flung paint like it was war, screamed during playtime, and jabbered in packs that left no space for quiet boys with mud still under their fingernails.
At lunch, Percy sat at the end of a long table and picked at his sandwich. A girl with missing front teeth asked if his freckles were "dirt or real." A boy named Alfie tried to trade a chocolate bar for Percy's cheese and pickle.
Percy shook his head and looked at the playground.
That night, Snow jumped into his lap as soon as he walked in the door, tail a blur, paws muddy. Percy wrapped his arms around her neck and buried his face in her fur. She smelt like hay and wet leaves. He didn't say a word. He didn't need to.
"Hard day?" his grandmother asked from the kitchen, rolling dough into careful circles.
Percy gave a small nod.
"Want to help me with these?" she said, holding up a floury hand. "We'll have meat pies tonight. But only if the edges are crimped just right."
Percy pulled up a chair.
Weeks passed, and Percy settled into a quiet kind of invisibility. He wasn't the worst at spelling or the loudest on the playground. He didn't cry or cause trouble. But he wasn't quite there, either. His teachers would often glance his way and frown slightly, as if trying to place what felt odd about him.
"Doesn't speak up," Miss Hammond once murmured to a colleague just outside the cloakroom. "Stares out the window a lot. Sweet boy, but somewhere else in his head half the time."
Percy was somewhere else most of the time—in memory, in imagination, in the long fields just past the school hedge. The lessons moved too fast or too slow. The letters on the board danced if he stared too long, and numbers refused to line up in his head no matter how often the teacher underlined them.
But the classroom did have one small comfort: Isla.
She was the kind of girl most people overlooked. Quiet, with pale skin and long hair she often chewed when nervous. She didn't raise her hand much either, but she did draw the most astonishing things in the margins of her workbook—birds with outstretched wings, foxes mid-leap, branches twisted with impossible detail.
The first time Percy sat beside her, she didn't say a word. But she did slide a folded paper toward him—a little sketch of a sheep balancing on a stack of hay bales.
Percy blinked, then smiled.
He answered the next day with a rough pencil drawing of Snow curled beneath the old apple tree.
No words were needed. They simply began sitting together when they could. Quietly. Side by side. Trading small art. Isla never asked too many questions, and Percy liked that.
One Thursday, the school had a "Nature Discovery Day" in the playing field.
It wasn't much—some laminated animal fact sheets, a scavenger hunt, and a quiz about plant types. Most children tore through it like a race, barely reading.
Percy, however, wandered slowly through the grass, crouching often, fingers brushing leaves and pebbles.
"Found a red one!" shouted Alfie from the hedgerow, waving a maple leaf in triumph.
Miss Hammond blew a whistle. "One more minute! Foxes, let's finish strong!"
Percy stood up holding a handful of clovers, two snail shells, and a feather he couldn't identify. His cheeks were flushed, hair tousled.
The class lined up to compare findings. When it was Percy's turn, he quietly laid his treasures on the table.
The feather was from a kestrel, the teaching assistant said, impressed. "Where did you find this?"
"In the fence post, near the north corner," Percy murmured.
A few classmates glanced over. One or two raised their eyebrows. Isla gave him a quick smile.
For the first time in weeks, Percy felt the warmth of being seen—not stared at, not corrected, but understood.
Later that evening, he sat at the kitchen table with Snow beneath his feet and a plate of buttery beans on toast in front of him.
"I won a sticker today," he told his mum.
She looked up from drying dishes, surprised. "Oh?"
"For nature stuff. I found things no one else did."
His father chuckled from the other side of the table. "Told you that brain of yours works different. Doesn't mean it doesn't work better."
Percy beamed and slipped the sticker—shaped like a hedgehog—into Snow's collar.
Although, not every day was a triumph, of course.
Percy struggled to keep up with the reading schedule. One day, he accidentally left his workbook blank. When asked about it, he stammered, unable to explain why the words had blurred on the page.
Miss Hammond's lips thinned. "Percy, I know you understand this. You need to try."
He wanted to shout that he was trying. That it wasn't that simple. But the words stuck, like wet soil.
At home, his grandmother found him sitting on the back step with his knees pulled up to his chest. Snow was pressed tightly against his side.
"Bad day?" she asked, wiping her hands on her apron and settling beside him.
Percy nodded.
"I used to skip my sums too, you know," she said, squinting out at the pasture. "Didn't understand what numbers had to do with cows or flour. Your great-grandad said I had my head in the clouds. But clouds bring rain, and rain brings wheat. Sometimes, your way of thinking just takes longer to show its worth."
Percy leaned into her warmth, feeling a little less like the world was leaving him behind.
By the end of his first year, Percy still wasn't top of the class—or even middle. But he had one friend, a reputation for knowing the names of every bird in the trees behind the school, and a small collection of merit stickers, mostly won on muddy field trips or plant identification days.
Snow continued to greet him at the door each afternoon, tail thudding against the floor, eyes bright. On weekends, they were inseparable. Percy would walk the edge of the property, Snow at his heels, Isla's drawings folded in his pocket, his grandmother's stories echoing in his mind.
And when the next school term came, Percy didn't cry. He didn't even ask if he could stay home.
He just patted Snow gently on the head, slung his bag over his shoulder, and whispered, "You'll be here when I get back."
And she was.
Percy never quite blended in at school, but by his third year, he'd found a kind of rhythm—like walking with one boot slightly heavier than the other. He wasn't loud or fast. He didn't put up his hand unless directly asked. But he had stopped crying at drop-off, which his mum counted as progress.
Mrs. Eddington, his new teacher, had a voice that rattled the windows when she got cross and a laugh that made Percy smile without meaning to. She wasn't unkind, but she didn't quite know what to do with him either.
"He's… dreamy," she told Elise at parents' evening, her smile tight. "Smart, but hard to pin down. Always staring out the window. He knows the parts of a flower better than anyone in the class, but ask him to spell 'petal' and he writes 'peetle'."
Elise sighed, brushing hay off her coat. "He's like his dad. Talks to the trees more than people."
Mrs. Eddington blinked. "Well, that's… poetic."
At home, Percy was steady, useful. He carried water buckets down to the pigs without complaint, brushed the horses under supervision, and could tell the difference between a poorly ewe and a stubborn one better than his older cousin, who still ran squeamish at the sight of an afterbirth.
Snow was never far. Now two years old, the collie had grown sleek and whip-smart, often understanding Percy better than most people. She herded the chickens on instinct and slept beside Percy's bed at night, ears twitching at the slightest creak. Percy had taught her a handful of commands that weren't strictly necessary, like "hide" and "spin," which made her a favourite at the village fête.
When school grew too noisy or the numbers too slippery on the page, Percy would think about Snow bounding across the east pasture, or the smell of damp straw in the lambing shed, or the way his gran hummed old Welsh songs while stirring jam on the stove.
Spring that year was slow in coming. February dragged its feet in thick frost, the kind that turned the hedgerows into skeletons and made the cows' breath bloom like smoke. But when the thaw came, it did so in a rush. Wood anemones blanketed the ground beneath the hawthorn, and primroses winked yellow from shaded ditches. Percy spotted the first bee of the season near the old willow and made a note in his nature book with careful block letters.
Back at school, Mrs. Eddington handed out times tables tests that made Percy's stomach twist. He tried his best, but by the time he reached question seven, the numbers flipped like minnows. When he handed the sheet in mostly blank, her face was a blend of frustration and pity.
"Percy, we've been over this. You know these, don't you?"
He shrugged, voice quiet. "I do. Just… not when it's all written out like that."
She sighed. "You'll need to practice more."
That afternoon, he trudged home past the edge of the school field, where the dog's mercury and lesser celandines were beginning to stir. He stopped to look. Not because he needed to—but because he wanted to.
Snow met him halfway up the lane, tail wagging, nose to the ground. They ran together the rest of the way, Percy laughing by the time they reached the gate.
At supper, his father listened as Percy recounted the plants he'd spotted on the walk home.
"You've got the eyes for it," Matthew said, buttering a slice of bread thick with damson jam. "That kind of noticing, that's more useful than people think. You don't see it on exams, but it's what makes a proper stockman."
Elise nodded. "Not all knowledge fits in a worksheet."
Summer came with heat that stuck to your skin and made the cows twitchy. The farm moved into haying season, and Percy's mornings started earlier. He helped toss feed to the cattle, filled troughs, and chased Snow off the hay bales more often than he could count.
The fields became gold-bright, dotted with red clover, oxeye daisies, and thickets of meadow vetchling. Percy carried a little sketchbook now, filled with pressed leaves and scrawled names—sometimes misspelled, always earnest.
At school, he presented a "nature diary" to his class for a show-and-tell project. Most kids brought toy tractors, football posters, or glittery rock collections.
Percy stood at the front of the room, awkward but proud, and passed around a dog-eared book of leaves and feathers.
"That one's a blackthorn leaf," he said. "It's spiky on the outside, but it flowers early. And that's a jay feather. Found it near the copse."
Some kids tuned out. But Isla, still quietly present in his life, nodded in approval. And Mrs. Eddington smiled—genuinely this time.
"You've got a naturalist's eye, Percy," she said. "You ever think of becoming a botanist?"
He blinked. He didn't know what a botanist was. But he liked the sound of it.
Autumn brought shorter days and the smell of earth. The farm turned busier as animals were brought in and the final crops gathered. Rosehips shone like garnets along the hedges. The sloes ripened into black, bitter beads. Percy picked a handful and dared George to try one raw.
George spat for a full minute. "Why would anyone eat that?"
"You don't," Percy said. "You turn it into gin. My gran says it burns but feels like firewood in your ribs."
School that term got harder. Longer paragraphs. Tests. More group work. Percy didn't hate it—but he struggled. The words sloshed around, and he hated reading aloud. The other kids were kind most of the time, but some rolled their eyes when Percy hesitated.
He preferred group science lessons, especially anything outdoors. Mrs. Eddington once took the class to the school's garden patch to study pollinators. Percy ended up listing eleven insect species the others missed entirely.
"Percy," she said afterward, shaking her head with a smile, "you see everything but what's on the board."
He didn't know if that was a compliment. But it felt like one.
By the time winter crept in, Percy had grown taller and thinner, with a habit of tucking his hands into his sleeves. His handwriting was still wobbly, and he still forgot his PE kit sometimes. But he was also the boy who knew when the first frost would hit by the smell of the wind.
Snow remained his anchor. When school left him spinning, he'd lie with her in the old sheep barn, sketching with a stubby pencil while her breathing rose and fell beside him.
She was still wild with energy—chasing crows from the feed bins, barking at the tractor, stealing gloves from the laundry line. She hadn't slowed at all. If anything, she seemed more determined to match Percy's moods. When he was joyful, she sprinted. When he sulked, she leaned into him with her whole weight.
One particularly harsh December, school shut early due to ice. Percy and George spent the morning slipping on frozen puddles and throwing bits of snow at Snow's twitching tail.
Later that night, Percy sat by the window, writing a letter to Gran Nora about the ivy creeping up the cow shed wall. The fire cracked. The whole house smelled of stew and woodsmoke.
He didn't know what the next year would bring. Secondary school loomed like a storm on the hill. But for now, he was ten, warm, full of stew, and safe.
And Snow snored at his feet.
The year Percy turned eleven felt like a slow, restless wind blowing through the village — full of change, some excitement, but mostly uncertainty.
Isla, who'd once been his quiet, steady friend, began drifting away. It wasn't sudden, but over months she slipped deeper into the girls' friend groups — their whispers, their shared secrets, the sudden interest in music and books Percy barely understood. They talked about things Percy didn't know how to join, and soon Isla stopped waiting for him at the school gate. She barely noticed when Snow barked at her boots.
At the same time, Percy's friendship with George, his rough-around-the-edges cousin, grew louder and messier. George was taller now, lean and quick with a grin that sometimes spelled trouble. The two of them hatched a prank war against the teachers that would be remembered for years.
It started small — mud under Miss Potts' classroom door, a bucket of hay dumped on Mr. Hughes's desk while he was on break. The schoolyard became their playground battlefield. Percy's heart would race with excitement, even as a part of him knew they'd get caught.
One frosty morning, they sneakily slipped farmyard muck into the staff room teapot. The explosion of groans when Mr. Hughes took the first sip was worth every risk.
But there was a line. When the prank war escalated and the headteacher threatened detention for the entire class, the thrill faded. Percy, always a step behind George's wild ideas, felt the weight of the trouble they'd caused.
The days grew shorter, the fields browner. The hedgerows bore red hawthorn berries and the last wild cherry leaves fluttered down. At home, the farm slowed. Gran Nora was quieter now, knitting scarves while humming softly.
One afternoon, Isla said goodbye at the school gate. "I'm off to grammar school," she said, her voice distant. "It's a big deal. Maybe I'll see you at the village fête."
Percy nodded, unsure how to respond. The friendship that once grounded him was already a fading shadow.
Schoolwork was harder than ever. The looming SATS tests made his stomach twist like cold rope. Numbers blurred. Reading passages stretched forever. His teachers grew more insistent, but Percy's confidence shrank.
"Percy, you're below average," Mrs. Eddington said gently during one after-school catch-up. "But that's not the whole story. You learn in your own way."
Still, the results came back disappointing. The neat rows of ticks and crosses on his test papers told a story he couldn't rewrite. He was the boy who loved plants and animals, but struggled with words and sums.
That final summer, Percy stood in the fields as the sun poured golden light over the ripening wheat. Snow wagged her tail, watching him with bright eyes. The farm, the seasons, the slow, steady rhythms—they were the parts of life that made sense.
Secondary school was just around the corner — a new challenge, a bigger world. Percy didn't know what he'd find there. But for now, he had his family, his dog, and the earth beneath his feet.
The wind whispered through the trees, carrying the scent of hay and promise.