Chapter 1: my games

I love teasing people; tormenting them and watching them becoming more and more angry and frustrated because they can't catch me. I'm not very big but I'm fast. I don't know of anybody around my age (I've just turned thirteen) who is faster.

I think that mostly, my 'targets' would have been able to beat me up fairly easily - if they could catch me, but they couldn't. Okay, I admit that in the past, I had made a couple of mistakes and ended up being roughed up, but that was some time ago; now I had become too cunning.

My favourite victim was Randolph, the fat rich kid who was a year ahead of me at school. He was only a touch over a year older than me and I never failed to get a rise out of him with a few clever (snide) remarks. He was such a sucker.

When he chased me, I could just lope along at an easy pace while he was puffing and panting behind me and not closing the gap at all. Sometimes he would stop and call out to me, "Lynden why are you so mean to me? I'm not nasty to you."

Of course, this gave me a chance for some more taunts. "Oh, what's wrong with Porky Pig today? Poor old Porky."

And the best bit was when tears started to form in his eyes. Oh, that was such good fun.

I was called down to see the Deputy Principal yet again. When this happened I relied on several basic defences and I certainly wasn't above lying: 'She was calling me names so I called her some back' or 'All I was doing was fooling around and being friendly; it wasn't nasty, he's just being too sensitive' or 'He's trying to get me into trouble by making stuff up' and so forth.

Strangely (or perversely) I had something in my favour. I was very unpopular with the other students (of course) so it wasn't entirely implausible that others were having goes at me or trying to make trouble for me. This didn't entirely save me, but it usually meant that my punishments were a lot less harsh than they might otherwise have been.