Remembering Todd: A Valentine’s Story

Todd was 13 and hadn’t turned into a sullen teenager yet. He had golden retriever energy— happy, drooly, tail-waggy. 

I was his English teacher. 

He was taller than the other boys and had a soft belly and no muscles. His hair looked cut at home, and his clothes didn’t fit. His pants were short where they needed to be long, and his shirts were long where they needed to be short. Todd tripped over his feet. 

Every morning, as I stood hall duty, he would come up and hug me and tell me I was pretty.

Todd was in foster care. Todd needed a lot of attention.

The other kids laughed at him.

On Valentine’s Day, I arrived to find one of those chocolate roses on my desk. You know, the kind with green wire stems, and the foil-covered chocolate rose that you see for sale in every drugstore across America for Valentine’s Day.

I had no idea who had put it there, so I set it aside, wrote my bell ringer on the board, and prepared for another trying day teaching Junior High English.

The assistant principal appeared at my door in the middle of the third period, beckoning me out into the hall. He asked me if I had received a chocolate rose. If I did, I needed to surrender it to him immediately, and he needed to take Todd to the office.  

Todd, he informed me, had stolen money from his foster mother’s purse to buy all his favorite teachers chocolate roses for Valentine’s Day. The assistant principal was going around the school collecting the evidence.

Todd left my room crying. The assistant principal steered him brusquely down the hallway to the office. 

My classroom window faced the front of the school, and an hour later, I saw a police car pull up. Two officers with Todd in between them ushered Todd into the patrol car’s back seat and left.

Instead of seeing the stolen money and the chocolate roses as something to be dealt with in-house, the assistant principal called the police. 

 Todd never came back to school. The last time I saw him, he was hunched over in the back of a police car, crying.

I didn’t return to that school when my year-long contract ended.     

Every Valentine’s Day, I think of Todd and wonder where he is and how he ended up. Every Valentine’s Day,  I wish I could send him a chocolate rose.