NEED TO KNOW

• Arkansas second-grade teacher Lexi McClelland adopted her former student Mary after learning the girl needed a new home following a string of foster placements

• Mary, a creative and bright child, had formed a special bond with McClelland at school

• Their relationship has since been likened to Matilda and Miss Honey from the 1988 Roald Dahl classic, a comparison that has left them feeling “honored”

When second-grade teacher Lexi McClelland and 7-year-old Mary met in 2020, the young student made quite the first impression: Mary entered McClelland’s book-lined classroom at Elm Tree Elementary in Bentonville, Ark., while singing her own name to the tune of John Cena’s WWE theme.

“This girl is going to be hilarious,” McClelland, 30, remembers. She soon learned that Mary, then in her fourth foster home, was also a bright and creative “readaholic” — a “dream” in the classroom.

Less than two years later she and Mary went from teacher and student to mother and daughter, an adoption saga straight out of the pages of a kids’ book. “Looking back,” McClelland says in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, “it was meant to be.”

Their community has compared the pair to bookish prodigy Matilda Wormwood and her kindhearted kindred spirit Miss Honey from the 1988 Roald Dahl classic Matilda, characters whom McClelland and Mary adore.

“It made me feel honored,” McClelland says. “The only thing I can do is give all the credit to God, because He was with me throughout.”

Mary’s early life was marked by instability, having entered the foster care system because of parental neglect and substance abuse, McClelland tells PEOPLE.

Her first memories of McClelland in class are a “blur,” Mary says now, but she recalls an almost instant feeling of trust. “It doesn’t really matter how old you are. You can still feel loved by someone that you just met,” she says.

Each of her homes was “very different” from the next, she says, going from a “very country” family to the city, surrounded by “a lot of people.”

Foster care also meant switching schools, which is how Mary showed up in McClelland’s classroom. There they quickly connected as Mary stood out in ways both usual and unique — even dreaming up a trolley that would hang from the ceiling and bring books to and from other students’ desks.

McClelland knew about Mary’s situation and yearned to do more for her. She often spoke about it with her husband, Max, a 32-year-old businessman.

“If she’s available, she is coming to our house. It’s not even a subject of discussion,” McClelland would say.

McClelland contented herself with news that Mary was set to be adopted by another family until she heard at the end of summer 2021 that those plans had fallen through and Mary would need a new home.

As Mary’s then-former teacher, McClelland was eligible to take her in through a “kinship placement” while she sought proper foster care licensing, and she quickly leaped at the opportunity.

In September 2021 Mary arrived at her doorstep and fit right in. “I’m moving in with the teacher? That’s cool,” Mary thought.

“As soon as I walked in,” she says, “I was like … ‘Let’s have some fun.’ ”

Just a few months later, on Christmas Eve 2021, McClelland and her husband asked Mary to join their family in a special note written in the back of a book about a bunny that finds its forever home.

It took a few moments for Mary to grasp the question, but eventually it clicked. “She had to take a moment to [be] like, ‘Is this real?’ ” McClelland says.

In April 2022 McClelland and her husband officially adopted Mary in an emotional courthouse ceremony. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the room,” Max tells PEOPLE.

The four years since have seen the family form new memories (Mary is an especially big fan of Harry Potter, and they took a surprise trip to Universal Studios for her 11th birthday) and expand.

Last year McClelland gave birth to son Murphy, now 7 months. Though McClelland sometimes “grieves” not getting to be there for Mary from the very start, missing out on baby photos and the like, it’s all “worked out perfectly” in the end, she says.

Mary, who will turn 13 in June and start eighth grade in the fall, sometimes watches her parents with her little brother and thinks about her own experience as their first child well past the newborn stage. “[They] were probably confused and like, ‘What do we do?’ ” she says.

Then she answers her own question: “We learned from each other.”