Second Place: Teacher's Pet

Teacher's Pet

by Thomas

Second Place

Everybody hated Colin O’Dowd. 

He was a snake, a stool pigeon, a rat.  

We didn’t have much to amuse ourselves at Bede Middle, but one thing we did like was making soggy moggys– wetting toilet paper and throwing it at the ceiling. 

Stevie Allen had it down to a fine art. He said some of his pieces had been on the ceiling since the first term. I liked to imagine that in 3000 years, some archaeologists excavating our school would look up at Stevie Allen’s TP stalagtites and say, ‘What art these ancients created.’ 

Well, who came waddling in this day? Colin O’Dowd. 

And then he ran as fast as his little legs would carry him, shouting, ‘Mr Driscoll!’ 

The name Driscoll chilled me more than a cross-country run in December. 

He appeared from nowhere and, with one slicing word, halted us as we tried to leg it. 

Driscoll wore a black suit complete with waistcoat, like an undertaker, and slapped down his black hair in a centre parting with so much wax it could have been plastic. 

‘What is the purpose of this idiocy!’ 

He took each of us in with his kestrel eye. 

‘Soggy moggys,’ Stevie Allen answered. 

Stevie Allen was never smart enough to know the difference between a regular question and a rhetorical. 

‘You seem very proud of your work, Mr Allen, a scholar even, well, after school tonight, each of you can give me a 1000-word essay on the aesthetic considerations of your little art project.’ 

‘But they’re just… soggy moggys.’ 

‘Good, you have a title.’ Driscoll turned his attention to me. ’And you, Mr Elliot. How disappointing. I had such high hopes for you this academic year.’

After school, Driscoll handed us four pages of lined paper and told us to begin. 

At about hour 2, Colin O’Dowd came in trailing Mr Kay. 

Colin stayed behind willingly after school, and that was shocking to me. In the winter, you could go home and watch cartoons. Hey Arnold, Recess, Rugrats. In summer, there were always enough kids to get a game of SPOT or Headers and Volleys. 

But then I guess that’s what happens if other kids don’t like you. And God, did we have a reason not to like him. 

As we sat there staring down the barrel of 1000 words, he handed Mr Driscoll a bright, red, shining apple. 

‘Thank you, Colin.’ 

‘Same time tomorrow, Sir.’ 

You might be thinking a kid gives a teacher an apple in the morning, but Colin went one better and gave one as he arrived and one before he left. 

Mr Kay, the design and tech teacher, patted Colin. He almost purred like an overfed house cat.

The teachers all felt sorry for Colin because he had a disability. Not a real one, regardless he still played up to it. 

It happened at the start of year 5 during one of the only times Colin ever came outside. 

Our playground was cement and split by two walls. There wasn’t enough space to start a proper game of footie, so it always devolved into British Bulldog. 50 kids on one side and one bulldog or chaser. You’d run to the other side, and whoever the bulldog touched became a catcher too. It was a melee. 

The one time Colin played, he got a right clattering. 

I saw him go down, but I didn’t stick around to find out what happened next because the scatter response kicked in. 

Anyway, he was off school for a month, and when he came back, he had one blue iris and one brown iris– heterochromia, I think it's called. 

When Colin got to Driscoll's door, he pressed his face against the glass and stuck his tongue out. Stevie Allen objected and got an extra 250 words added to his essay. 

It was weird. Even the other teachers seemed scared of Driscoll. Mr Kay wasn’t a very confident bloke to begin with and shouldn’t have been a middle school teacher in Northumberland. 

We called him pillar head. He was as bald as an egg, and one day Stevie was soldering bits of metal to a Cartman key ring, and Mr Kay jumped up and shouted. 

Unfortunately, Mr Kay’s head was under a pillar drill and he bored a hole right in the top of his baldy bonce. 

‘Yes, hello, Mr Driscoll.’ Kay started up. ‘I was wondering what time you’ll be leaving this evening so I can lock up.’ 

Driscoll barely looked up from a tome of a ledger he was annotating with a black fountain pen. 

‘When their work is completed, Kevin.’ 

Mr Kay fidgeted. The rumour was old pillarhead belonged to a kind of religious cult. 

‘Is there anything else?’ Driscoll continued. 

Mr Kay lowered his voice. ‘It’s just.’ He was about to call Mr Driscoll by his first name, but didn’t dare. ‘It’s just that it's past 5 o'clock, and well, it isn’t actually legal to keep them more than 90 minutes.’ 

Driscoll fixed him with the creepy peepers, and Kay flinched.

Maybe he saw the Devil– the bloke he spent so long hearing about. 

‘They will remain under my care until the work is done. Now if you’d leave us to get on…’

Driscoll’s room, as you might expect, was not nicely decorated. The other classrooms had posters and paintings the kids had made, but Driscoll called it ‘derivative, ’ so our classroom was adorned with a guy called Goya.

Behind me was a picture of a goat sitting upright and a bunch of ladies around it. There was another called ‘two old ones eating soup.’ And it was exactly as it said on the tin. 

The currency of the classroom was the merit chart, which hung beside ‘the Drowning Dog.’ All our names were on a big list, and beside it were smiley faces. Well, not exactly smiley but not miserable either. 

Of course, Colin was way ahead of everyone, and one of the perks was that he got to pick the name of the new class hamster after the Christmas term. 

This was a rare kindness from Mr Driscoll, and the rumour was that the headmaster, Mr Butler, had told him he needed to lighten up. 

I didn’t believe this personally because Mr Butler was meant to watch some of Mr Driscoll’s classes, and he never stayed more than 30 seconds as if the place might be haunted. 

Colin decided that the name of the hamster would be Mr Fudge, and that surprised nobody because Colin liked fudge. 

The second day after Christmas break, we were called to a special assembly. 

Blinky Butler, the Headmaster, was traditional. He wore robes and even a cap. We called him Blinky Butler because he had a kind of twitch. His head would go up at one side, and he’d squint like he’d just bitten a lemon. 

He usually lectured us on the value of friendship or why we shouldn’t be led on by the high schoolers who drank white lightning at the old cricket dugouts, but this day, he was serious, and there were a bunch of police officers with him. 

‘Children, something very serious has happened. A boy, a member of our Bede community, Colin O’Dowd, has gone missing.’ 

And that was when I felt the first creeping dread. 

‘He was last seen 2 nights ago, and it is vital if you know anything about this, whether he said anything to you about running away or if he’d been chatting to someone, anything, you must tell us.’ 

And here he pointed at the police officers flanking him. 

After that, school reminded me of the third Harry Potter book – The Prisoner of Azkaban – it was like they’d released the dementors to keep us safe. 

They pulled all of us into the office from our form class and grilled us. 

I was born with a guilty conscience. 

Once, someone stuck a rubber glove over the end of Mrs Ward-Magee’s Rover 75, and the engine backfired. During that special assembly, I wanted to put my hand up and say it was me, even though that week I’d been at Butlins with my dad. 

I’d hear the words Colin and disappearance, and my cheeks would flush red. I wanted to confess to one of those dark sentries patrolling the corridors. 

Days turned into weeks, and Colin never showed up. I knew they’d given up hope of finding him alive because the inspectors left, and at the next assembly, Blinky Butler brought in grief counsellors. 

You didn’t grieve for people still living and breathing. 

The other kids loved it. We’d be labouring away with Madame Smith in French, and then in groups of 5, we’d be taken away for what was nicknamed ‘crysies.’ 

The lady who ran it said it was a safe space to talk about whatever was on our minds, but I noticed she was always making notes. She was probably told to keep an ear out for any late-stage confessions. 

Stevie Allen enjoyed the crysies more than the rest, and he let us know if anyone actually cried, he’d never forget it. 

‘I heard a rumour that Colin was abducted by a gypsy circus,’ Stevie said in our discussion time. 

‘There are many rumours, Steven.’ The grief counsellor replied, ‘And it's important you don’t listen to everything you hear.’ 

But I still couldn’t help but see she was writing notes– Slaters– which was the name of the gypsy fair. 

‘Anyway, things are better around here since that little toad vanished.’ 

Stevie’s sidekick, Peter NobleEddy, smirked, and Stevie was about to continue when the GC cut him off. 

‘Steven, I know you’re struggling with anger at your classmate’s disappearance, and I want you to know I’m here for you.’ 

And Stevie laughed, speculating about how many pieces the butcher had cut Colin into. 

I never liked Colin O’Dowd, but the thought of him quartered made my guts liquid. Often, I’d have to go to the bathroom, where I’d sit on the pot looking up at the soggy moggys above my head and wishing it would all end. 

Colin’s name stayed up on the merit board, and we honoured him by keeping the name Mr Fudge for the class hamster. 

The student of the day got to feed him, and I’d watch him through the bars scurry over to his food dish. Mr Fudge lived up to his name because he rarely used his exercise wheel, but I still was drawn to him, and soon I had almost as many merits as Colin. 

In fact, I was starting to attract unwanted attention from the likes of Stevie Allen. The dreaded word swot was even being thrown about. 

One night, Mr Driscoll asked me to stay behind. 

‘You know, Mr Elliot, I’m very impressed with your performance over the last few months. 

‘Thank you, sir.’ 

‘I can’t help but notice Mr…Fudge often appears lonely. Perhaps it's time we give him a friend. And perhaps it is you who should name him.’ 

My heart leapt. Who knew? Maybe I could even take the hamster home for the summer holidays. 

He retrieved Mr Fudge from the cage and held him in his spindly fingers. 

‘Would you like to play with Mr Fudge now?’ 

This was a great honour because the cage door was never opened, but still I hesitated. 

‘Play with Mr Fudge.’ Driscoll continued, more of an order than a question. 

He handed him to me. I could feel Mr Fudge’s belly rolls between my fingers and his heart beating in a blur. 

And then I looked into his eyes, and it was the scariest thing I ever saw. One iris was blue and the other brown. 

‘And don’t listen to the other children,’ Mr Driscoll said in that drawling way of his. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being the teacher’s pet.’

Winning pieces are published as received.

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Fiction Potluck

January 2026

Second Place Winner:

Thomas

Thomas currently lives in Hanoi, where costs are low and lived experiences are rich. The move has allowed him to devote more time to becoming a full-time writer, with occasional days off for Bia Hoi and rocket-fuel coffee.

His fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and appears in several literary magazines, including Stand and TSS.

Since 2023, he’s run a growing Reddit community (publishing his fiction solely) under the name originalloquat, which has gained 700+ members.