My eeevil side emerges

I teach in an afterschool program three days a week. Attendance is sporadic. Today I had only two kids: a seventh-grade girl whom I highly suspect is a high-functioning autistic, and a ninth-grade boy who is hands-down the best artist in the district ( I'm grooming him for an art scholarship). Although he's obnoxious in the way only a fourteen-year-old boy can be, he's a skate-punk and he completely has my back. He'll go off on other kids who cross the line with me.

So the day was pretty laid-back; he's been out for weeks with a skating injury, so I assigned him a Vanitas drawing and we discussed his options for it as he drew some pretty decent oil-pastel skulls. In the course of conversation he brought up a student who is arguably the worst kid at the elementary school--one of maybe three kids out of the two thousand or so I've taught whom I truly believe is hopeless, a criminal; I'd had him in class just hours before and he was so rude to me, so obnoxious, that I had to modify the day's art/opera lesson because we simply ran out of time because of him. Evidently this selfsame brat liked to pick fights with older kids and had recently accosted my afterschool kid and his friend. (What kind of IDIOT picks a fight with TWO older, bigger kids on their own turf?) Well, the dummy started shoving my young artist around, and he got sick of it and gave him a good shove back and made him cry. To top it off, his friend picked a juicy booger from his nose and wiped it on the would-be bully's bike.

I turned my head and grinned 'til it hurt.