Fiction

The Hunt

The predator must choose wisely

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Hawkish eyes circle the desks, pausing on potential prey. His torso stills as his bulbous head angles, a jutted chin his only guide. Briefly, he lands on the eager redhead, her pen thrumming a war song against gridded pages. She is a fight he’s unlikely to win — the predator must choose wisely.

He soars toward the back of the room, greedily inspecting the runts, each silently begging to disappear into the rivers of words carved on their desks. They are easy pickings, ready to roll over before the fight has begun. Their predictability bores him.

Decidedly, he flies to the middle, finding a garden variety of twitchy-eyed in-betweeners and somewhat-achievers. They stare at the sweat stains pooling beneath his flapping armpits, unable (or unwilling) to meet his glare. This is where he’ll hunt, he concludes, hungrily searching for his target.

There sits a bug-eyed boy, his apprehensive irises skittering up to the board and back to his page, trying to decipher the predator’s next move. Next door resides an oblivious blonde, innately intelligent but too distracted by the shaggy-haired wannabe two rows back to offer the predator any real thrill.

Finally, he spots her: the pensive, curly-haired girl near the window. She sits lopsided, her left…