Jack's Been Bad

• Isaac Lynch, Grade 5
• Short Story
• 2022

Hey! I'm Jack and I just moved to this boring town on the border of NSW. I'm just an ordinary 11
year old kid and today’s my first day at Maclean Public School. I was super nervous, but during
the first activity I sat next to Noah and he didn’t seem so bad.
During the first break, Noah Invited me to sit with him and just like that I had already made a
friend. We had a lot of fun playing truth or dare at the back of the oval. At lunch, he introduced
me to the rest of his friends, Kobe, Ben, Finn, and George. We all had a great time playing
knock and run on the staffroom door, making sure to run away before the teachers spotted us!
At first, I didn’t participate because I thought I was going to get in trouble but the boys told me
they had never been caught before, and if I followed them, I’d never get caught either. When I
got home I didn’t say a word in case I got Noah and friends busted.
The next day at school my new friends taught me how to play video games in class instead of
writing on the computer. My favourite video game to play is paper.io. I also learnt what else they
like to do at lunch like painting windows with mud and throwing toilet paper on the roof of the
toilet block. They even taught him how to sneak a calculator into a math test and showed me
how to steal the answers from the teacher's desk. There were a couple of close calls, but they
never did get caught doing any of those things.
But one day everything changed. We got caught. You should have seen our faces. They were
pure horror. Turns out that throwing mud at the walls of the teacher's staff room while there was
a meeting going on inside was a bad idea. Who would've thought? One of the teachers heard
the mud hitting the wall and decided to see what the racket was. When the teacher looked out of
the window, she couldn’t have been happier. The teachers had known it was them causing
mischief the entire time, but with no proof, they couldn’t punish them.
We all got suspended for two long weeks. I felt so guilty. I realized that I shouldn't have followed
them just because they were the first friends I had made. When I got back to school I started
hanging out with a different group of friends and they actually behaved. We played tips and
handball, which I surprisingly enjoyed. And I made sure never to talk nor play with Noah and his
friends ever again.