Samantha was fully aware, as was every student from the babies to the seniors, as she sat down on the concrete in the staff car park to eat her lunch that it was off limits, but she didn’t care. The fact that she was sitting in Headmaster Fourmile’s space also didn’t bother her. Her only concern was her pets, and the spot in which she sat was the perfect place for her to watch over them. The immediate proximity of the car park to the classroom had not gone unnoticed by another interested party.
Veronica Walsh had known Vincent Baxter since kindergarten. If she had an equal, he would have been it, were it not for the one area in which she bested him – stealth. The boy had such an appetite for trouble, and such an insatiable thirst for fame that, if the headmaster’s office were a posh restaurant, the house special would have been named after him. His second love was soccer. Veronica was quite the sportsman herself, but on this lovely sunny afternoon, it wasn’t her own fancy footwork that was required.
‘Bet you can’t kick the ball through the window and hit that jar.’
Vincent Baxter gawped at her. ‘Are you mad? I’ll get suspended!’
‘Chicken!’
Were this accusation made without any witnesses present, Vincent would have ignored it. He certainly wouldn’t have done what he really wanted to do, which was to push Veronica over into the dirt. For all his sins, Vincent Baxter didn’t hurt girls; even those who so richly deserved it. But in the playground, all that stood between the kids who had their faces rubbed in the dirt and the kids holding a fistful of their hair was reputation. He had to do something.
For the first time in his life, Vincent Baxter was afraid of being caught. This wasn’t like putting a spider in some kids school bag or making a first grader eat worms – what he was about to do was beyond all that. He was about to break a school rule! He approached the car park like a tightrope walker treading on cotton string, and swallowed what felt like a pad lock before he set the ball down on the tarmac. He sized up the kick, envisioning the spectacle that was yet to come. It wasn’t until he scraped the ground with the toe of his shoe that Samantha noticed he was there, and by then it was too late. The ball hurtled through the air and into the glass, hit the jar and sent its inhabitants off to an unknown fate.
Veronica went back to her friends, more than satisfied with the carnage she had created. She had no reason not to be; none of her friends would ever tell on her, and no teacher in their right mind would take Vincent Baxter’s word over hers. The reluctant patsy didn’t stick around to bask in his triumph, but it didn’t help him avoid capture for long. When the headmaster looked through the window and saw the soccer ball on the shelf – the soccer ball emblazoned with its owner’s initials – he gave chase, finally cornering the culprit a half hour later as he hid behind a shrub in the farthest end of the school grounds commonly known as Frog’s Hollow. Veronica smiled as Vincent was marched past her and twenty or so gaping fellow students into the headmaster’s office.
As luck would have it, Headmaster Fourmile was himself an avid soccer fan, and he accepted the boy’s tearful excuse that he had been attempting a trick kick and failed. Vincent was given a week’s lunchtime detention, along with the added bonus of a much-needed boost to his schoolyard standing. The reason he had lived to bully another day was because he was smart, not lucky, and it was with this assertion in mind that he returned to class that day with a well-earned smile on his face.
‘What are you smiling about?’
Vincent looked his inquisitor dead in the eye. Just because he didn’t hit girls didn’t mean he was afraid of them.
‘I’m not suspended…and I’m still the best kick in school.’
Veronica wasn’t letting this dent in her unblemished record go unanswered. She picked up a shard of glass that for some reason the school cleaner had missed and tore a hole in the shoulder of the expensive, lace-collared dress her mother had bought specifically for school photo day. Vincent was still staring at her disbelievingly when their teacher arrived.
‘Miss Smart!’ Veronica ran into her arms. ‘Miss Smart! He ripped my dress! He tried to grab me and ripped my dress!’
Miss Smart took the boy by the ear and dragged him off to the headmaster’s office, giving the rest of her class firm instructions to find something quiet and constructive to do until she got back. Veronica took her doll out from her school bag and began combing its hair until something occurred to her. She reached down and let a ladybird, the sole-survivor of the great soccer ball massacre, crawl onto her finger. Then she clapped. She looked over at Samantha, and chirruped a sweet little ditty that was all too familiar.
‘Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home…’
Samantha seethed.
Veronica wiped away a tear and grinned.
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