It was an ordinary Tuesday morning. The sun shone through the cracks in the blinds. A light layer of frost covered the front yard. I regrettably got out of bed to eat breakfast. I got on the bus before arriving at the bane of my existence, school. I walked into my first class, math. Yuck! Students were piling into every classroom until the bell rang, and like magic, everyone disappeared into their rooms.
“Good morning. How is everyone today?” Ms. Reed asked the class. “Remember, the math final is on Friday.” Many students groaned. “But you are all going to fail!” she cackled. “You were such a bad class that by October, I started teaching you wrong things. Y does not equal BM plus X. Now you are all going to fail this test and class.” Some students started crying or whining. Others were pulling out their phones and notes to fact check. But some of the lazy students (like me) just relaxed and started to talk to each other.
“You can’t do this to us. I need to get into AP Applied Physics with calculus and quadratics next year,” Jane, the extreme overachiever, complained.
“You are too smart and cocky. Your ego is even higher than your IQ level. By failing this test, you will have to graduate with everyone else instead of at fifteen. No more pre-accepted into Harvard and Oxford for you! Mwuahaha. Now you will be at everyone else’s level. Your GPA might even lower to a 3.9.”
“No!” Jane screamed, as if the sky were falling down. “I will report you or kill you.”
“Why are you doing this to us?” Will asked.
“Because you are all horrible students.” Ms. Reed connected her computer to the projector and opened up the digital grade book. She opened up Jane’s grades and started lowering it point by point. 100% became 99% and so on. Jane was screaming and crying like this was torture.
Jane suddenly leaped onto Ms. Reed, scratching her with her nails. Some kids pulled Jane off of the teacher, but Jane was still fighting back. She grabbed one of her always sharp pencils and tried to stab Ms. Reed.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Jane screamed, punctuating every word with a stab. “I hate you!” she screamed.
“You should only be hating each other. You all did this to yourselves,” Ms. Reed said.
“But I’m blaming you!” Jane screeched, pulling Ms. Reed out of her chair and pushing her to the ground.
“If you want someone to blame, look behind you.” Ms. Reed looked at me. “You are the reason why everyone will fail because you are the worst student of them all.”
Jane tackled me, holding the pencil inches from my eye.
“You are the reason I’m not going to Harvard. DIE!” She started jabbing me with the pencil. She grabbed the ginormous book she had to prepare for her college-level botany. She started to whack me with it.
“I will smash your nonexistent brains!” she screamed, raining strikes on my head.
It took five people to lift her up and throw her out of the classroom. Jane clawed at the door, kicking and screaming.
“YOU WILL FAIL!” she screamed.
Ms. Reed cackled. “You all will fail,” she said. We watched as she lowered all of our grades. We heard Jane wail from the hallway.
“FBI. Do not move,” a woman on a megaphone said. FBI agents broke down the door and streamed in through the windows. “You are under arrest for emotional torture.” Ms. Reed was put in handcuffs.
“Wait!” she said. “I only tortured the brown-noser.”
“GPA?” an agent asked.
“4.9,” Jane said.
“That’s impossible.”
“That’s what I thought,” Ms. Reed said.
“What classes are you taking?” the agent asked Jane.
“All APs, and I’m auditing courses at Harvard, Yale, and Oxford,” Jane answered proudly.
“You are free to go, Miss. Sorry for the trouble.” They took the handcuffs off, and all the agents cleared out.
“Good luck,” Ms. Reed said. She cackled like a witch.