Nishiboy Explained

I had the reputation of being a grumpy kid back in high school. I would lash out at people at the slightest provocation. And it did not take much to provoke me. I had a lot of angst, even for a teenager. I particularly had trouble with authority: teachers, dorm managers, CAT officers and even our CAT commandant. I just did not deal well with being told what to do.

My biggest fight was probably with my third year biology teacher. We were in our bio lab for an exercise in taking blood pressure. The activity was done by pair and each pair was supposed to bring a sphygmomanometer and a stethoscope.

The activity had been announced a few days before. My partner’s mom was a nurse and they had those devices at home. He said that his mother never used them so he volunteered to bring them. Everything was fine, but of course, the unexpected just had to happen, like it so often did in high school. His mom suddenly had to use them on the day of the exercise. We weren’t worried, though. Those were not easy things to acquire, after all, so we figured that we could easily reason with our teacher.

But we were mistaken.

“I assigned that to you last week. I gave you enough time to prepare,” she said. “There is no reason why you could not bring your materials to class today.”

She was smiling as she said that.

“Ma’am, I prepared them last night but my mom had to use them this morning,” my partner explained yet again. We had been explaining for several minutes already and the conversation was already going in circles.

“Well you can’t proceed with the exercise without the materials now, can you?”

Duh, what do you take us for? Idiots?

“We’ll borrow from the pair next to us,” I answered. “I already talked to them and they agreed.”

“Well that would be unfair to them,” she said, shaking her head. “You can proceed but you will receive deductions just to make things fair.”

Now let me make this clear: I was not a grade-conscious student in high school. I actually did not really care about grades so that compromise would have sounded good any other day. But her refusal to see things my way and her smug smile pissed me off. I saw it as a challenge and I accepted with fangs bared.

I turned to my partner and heatedly said, “You should have told me this morning that you would not be able to bring the materials. Then I could have gone out early and stolen some.”

I stormed back to our area. For added affect, I kept myself form turning around to see how she reacted. The pair seated next to us told me that they were almost done but I didn’t answer.

“What, did she expect us all to have those things?” I heard an exasperated voice behind me. I turned around; it was one of my classmates who were also unable to bring the devices.

Aha! An opening!

“Well, it’s our fault that those expensive things that are absolutely useless to us are out of our reach,” I said loudly. “It’s perfectly reasonable that we get deductions!”

“Very impolite,” I heard our teacher’s voice. Apparently, she was on her way to talk to me and had heard what I said. She went at the front and called everyone’s attention.

“This exercise was announced during our last meeting. That means everyone had enough time to prepare. If you think I’m being unreasonable, by all means you can go ahead and take it up to the admin,” she said. She was trying to sound calm but her voice was shaking. Her smile was also starting to falter.

“If they decide that I am indeed being unreasonable, then I would gladly leave the school,” she went on as her voice started to break.  “I tried my best to be a good teacher and I’m not afraid to leave the school if...”

She was unable to finish her sentence because she had full on started crying. A couple of my classmates rushed to her while the rest looked at me. I rolled my eyes and left the room. I looked at my watch, it was already recess time. I suddenly craved for chicharon so I decided to head straight to the canteen.

Apparently, her crying did not end in the lab. She decided to continue it at the faculty room lounge. Yes, the lounge. I don’t know, maybe her cubicle was crowded or something. In a totally unexpected turn of events, a student saw her. It was one of my friends from the fourth year. Concerned, he sat down beside her and asked, “Ma’am, what happened?”

“That Nishiboy! That Nishiboy! He’s such a bad boy!” she wailed, her face buried in her hands. Then she sat up, shifted sideways and, and in true chikadora fashion, told my friend everything that happened.

“Nishi” is the first half of my surname. Yeah, I didn’t know how to slip that explanation in, so there. Since then, my friends called me Nishiboy whenever I got grumpy.


Um, I just want to say that I’m no longer the pure evil kid that I was back then. I had since grown wings and half of a halo. The wings are starting to grow feathers too. Now if I could just do something about these fangs...


Image taken here.