A girl watches a ginger-haired boy who lives across from her, and the repeated line "There's a ginger haired boy that lives across my street" turns into a kind of refrain. At first she is drawn to him. She envies his joyful eyes and thinks he looks wonderful, while feeling unhappy with her own looks. Then she senses sadness in him and wishes she were brave enough to speak. When she finally does, the picture changes: he seems hollow, frightened, and he looks scared too.
After that, the tense shifts. People stop talking about him, she wishes for one last glimpse, and soon he "lived" across the street. She misses him deeply. The poem doesn't say outright what happened, which leaves a quiet, uneasy gap. The final note, left on her doorstep, suggests he was afraid to let her see him. The mood moves from shy admiration to unease and then to grief and regret, with a lingering sense of a connection that came too late.