Skliffing his feet through the piles of dry autumn leaves that littered his walk to school, he trudged along the road. He hated Wednesdays. It was the absolute worst day of the week! Even Mondays were better than Wednesdays.
On Mondays, they had a maths test in the morning. He loved maths! Numbers made perfect sense to him. Correct answers flew from his pencil into his jotter.
Tuesdays weren’t so bad. They had PE on Tuesday afternoons. He loved when they did gymnastics. He wasn’t so keen on team games. No one ever wanted him on their team, and he was always among the last to be picked.
The best thing about Thursdays was swimming and diving. He’d begged and pleaded with his mum and dad to be allowed to learn to dive. You had to be a certain height to join the diving club, but he was tall for his age, so he had been allowed to join a year before a lot of others who were his age. His coach said he might even make the team for the next competition at the end of the month.
Fridays were great. They had pizza on Fridays.
Weekends were ok, he supposed. Sometimes his older brother would take him with him when he went out with his mates, and he got to hang about with the kids who rode BMX bikes and did stunts at the skatepark. He’d got his own BMX for his birthday during the summer holidays, but he was still scared to try any tricks…. yet. Maybe next time….
He could see the school gates a few yards ahead of him.
He hated Wednesdays….
It was all because of a hat. He desperately wanted to be allowed to wear the Spelling Wizard hat for the day, but his letters came out in all the wrong places. Why couldn’t letters be smart like numbers and come out of the pencil into the jotter in the right order? Letters were evil but he really really wanted to wear the pointy hat. It reminded him of the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter, and he was sure if he just got the chance to wear it once then his letters would land in the right order on the page. It was usually Jennifer or Christopher who got to wear it. They always got all the words right. Sometimes they had to share the hat. One got to wear it for the morning and the other got to wear it in the afternoon. He wouldn’t mind having to share it.
All term he had tried everything to get full marks. He had even borrowed Jennifer’s pencil to see if that helped. If the letters came out of it in the right order for her then maybe, they might behave for him too. No such luck! He had only scored seven out of fifteen that week.
The bell rang as he entered the gates.
“Spelling jotters out, class,” instructed his teacher as soon as she had called out the register.
Bother Jennifer and Christopher were off ill! Maybe, just maybe, this was his chance to wear the hat.
He took a brand-new pencil out of his pencil case.
Taking extra care to make his writing neat, he wrote down his answers word by word as the teacher read them out to the class from her sheet. Before he handed his jotter in to be marked, he read down the list of words quickly. They looked right…
“Class, complete the sums that are up on the board, please. If you finish before the time is up, take one of the worksheets from the blue tray.”
He finished the twenty sums within minutes and was on his second worksheet from the tray by the time the teacher told them to close their maths jotters.
As she lifted the Spelling Wizard hat, he held his breath.
“We have a new wizard this week,” she announced. “This week’s spelling wizard is Ryan! Well done!”
The class all cheered as she placed the coveted hat on his head. He had finally done it.
Smiling out from under its wide brim, he said, “Thank you,” to the teacher before carefully putting his new pencil back into the pencil case. From now on, it was his “spelling pencil” because the letters knew how to come out of that one in the right order.
Coral McCallum 