Today is the first day of 2nd grade for John’s school. He walks into class and instantly looks around the room for familiar faces. He seems some people from last year, but nobody he really knows. Even worse, he doesn’t see his best friend Paul. That made the first hours miserable since he just counted down the time until lunch. Thankfully, the teacher had one of those clocks with the numbers on it and not the circle ones.

The room was actually bigger than John remembered, seeing as he spent most of his summer in his room playing video games. He looked around the busy cafeteria for Paul and he almost gave up for a second, until he saw a boy as short as him with a bright red shirt and dark brown hair. It's actually pretty funny that they are such good friends since they look so similar. People often confuse them for being brothers, but John has never understood why. They have the same dark brown hair and eyes but John is definitely taller and more energetic. He nearly yelled Paul's name, but then realized that he should use his inside voice, besides, it was so loud that he probably wouldn’t have even been heard. John walked over to Paul and they instantly started doing their secret handshake and then high fived.

They started walking over to get their food while talking about what teacher they had and that’s when John realized that he would only get to see Paul at lunch because on top of having different teachers they had a different recess time. “What was even the point of going to school?” he thought.

After lunch John started to realize how much he missed summer and how boring school was without Paul. That’s when he had a master plan to get out of school, he’s gonna pretend to be sick. He realized that now is the perfect time because he just ate and could blame it on the food. He raised his hand suddenly, and put his other hand over his puffed out cheeks. The teacher looked too shocked to question him and sent him to the nurse right away. “Hah, that was easy.” he thought. Once he got there, the nurse had already called his parents because the teacher sent a message of what happened to the nurse.

His parents showed up shortly after he got there and instantly knew that he was bluffing and he got into a bit of trouble. He insisted that he was actually sick and even pretended to throw up. Finally, his parents sort of believed him and told him he had to stay in his bed the rest of the day. He didn’t want to, but he decided that it was the only way he could get away with that. He ended up just falling asleep after dinner and woke up extra early because he went to bed so soon. When he woke up that morning he realized that he could keep this going at least one more day so he pretended to throw up in the toilet when his mom came to wake him up. She offered to help him but he said he was gonna take a shower and his mom hesitated to leave him by himself but when he insisted she decided to let him take a shower. After she left for work he decided to get some video games in before his dad woke up.

The day passed by beautifully, his dad didn’t bother him too much so he got a lot of time playing video games, he almost forgot that he had school today. It wasn’t until Paul was walking down the block to go home and decided to stop and ask where John was that John even remembered school was a thing. As much as he thought Paul was a cool guy and wanted to hang out with him, he wanted to play video games more. He almost thought about going to school tomorrow but he figured that his family would think it was weird if he was magically better after a day. He decided to play it out a few more days by repeating the same cycle.

Paul stopped by everyday. It finally got to the point where John was starting to just chat with him every now and then because he felt bad. He was learning new things every time he talked to Paul since Paul would only talk about what he learned. John found himself lost every time Paul mentioned what was happened in class. Paul would mention the projects he had which sounded more fun than like work. John started to realize that school can be fun even without his best friend in his class. John decided that tomorrow he would go to school.