How to Tame Your School's Kingpin Chapter 1

After my parents transferred for work, I found myself enrolled in a complete dump of a high school.

To give you an idea of how utterly bottom-tier it was: out of the ten classes in our grade, exactly one of them actually studied.

The good news was that I had been placed into this sole honors class.

The bad news was that even this class, so the rumors went, was notorious for bullying.

My best friend back home had warned me that a bookish nerd like me would be the prime target for anyone looking to terrorize the halls. If I wanted to make it through without getting my life ruined, I had to master one basic rule of survival:

Look like someone you don't want to mess with.

"Do I look unapproachable enough yet?" I asked, puffing out my cheeks and trying my absolute best to pull off a menacing glare.

My friend had given a weary, helpless sigh.

"Oh, sweetie," she had said. "You just look like a very angry hamster that's about to aggressively waddle away."

I had been at this school for a full week now.

Miraculously, no one had actually bullied me yet. But people kept giving me these strange, lingering looks—a mix of bewilderment and faint pity. And absolutely no one spoke to me.

I couldn't tell if this was the ominous calm before the storm, and the anxiety was slowly eating me alive.

After turning it over in my mind a hundred times, I finally hit upon a brilliant strategy.

Since I was the softest pushover in the room, why not find someone even softer and pick on them first?

After a careful scan of the classroom and a lot of internal debate, my eyes finally landed on the guy who spent his entire day face down on the desk beside me.