Every kid wants to be thought about as being the best and John was no different. When he tripped up the cleverest boy in the school in the playground. He justified it by telling himself that he should be the cleverest boy in the school. When he hid all the footballs on sports day he told himself that if he didn’t want to play football no one should want to play football. There were other incidents in whereby John put his stamp on things. When he only got a silver star for his spelling test. He went out and bought a pack of gold stars and placed one over the silver star he had received for spelling.
Things didn’t change much when John went to secondary school. The first thing he did was fix the election for the class prefect. He made sure that he won. Though the reality had been John only received one vote, his own. All that had been required of him was to count each slip of paper, which he did and then declared himself the winner. His mother and father were really proud of him and not once did they question how he might have won the election. The real winner ironically was the same boy that John had tripped in the playground five years earlier.
John also knew were all the power lay and that was with the teachers. So every morning he would meet up with his form teacher and ask them what needed to be done. Usually it was simple things. Have the other students sitting at their desks when class began. Keep the room tidy and have all homework open on the desk and ready to be examined and corrected.
That was all the power that John needed. To be able to walk into his class room and dictate, for that is what he done, to the other children about how things should be done. Most of the kids were obedient or obliging to John’s requests. Even when John started to look at their homework and laugh at all the mistakes. Rather than taking it personal the kids just tried harder so that the teacher wouldn’t do the same as John.
The one kid who didn’t do as John said was the same kid he tripped up in primary school. He knew that there was no way that John had won the role as class prefect and he still hadn’t forgotten that John had tripped him because he was jealous of his academic abilities. Rather than opening his homework on his desk for inspection he would put a piece of blank paper on his desk and when John came to his desk. To check that all was in order the kid would write his name on the piece of paper and fold it.
It was his way of telling John that he knew he was a cheat and that time was running out for him. Every school year a new prefect was elected and this time the Eric was letting John know that he knew exactly what John was doing and that it was going to stop.
