Level Two. A Bit OTT.

Level Two – A Bit OTT.

By Michelle Lloyd.

It was early on in class one morning when R V noticed that New One had been excused from lessons.  New One, Little Herbert and R V were known for being in their group of three and so the absence of their trio was felt in the class.  R V looked at Little Herbert, Little Herbert shot R V a look.  Each was asking the other why New One had disappeared.  While the answer to that was not known by them, one thing was for sure and that was that they were going to find out.

Lunch time seemed an age away, neither Little Herbert or R V could wait to find New One and ask him what had happened.  Had he been ill?  Was there some secret school meeting that they did not know about?  Basically they needed to know what had taken him out of class early and they needed to know as soon as they could.

Everywhere they looked and nowhere could New One be found.  It was almost at the end of lunch before New One was seen walking around the corner of the building and almost as one R V and Little Herbert launched their questions at him.

New One, it turned out, had been chosen to work on an assembly for the school.  Students from each class had been chosen to put on a show for the rest of the school and New One had, that morning, found out that he would be representing their class.  Happy were both R V and Little Herbert for him but they had to admit that New One’s absence from class and from being with them would be hard.  It was difficult to explain but they each liked having the reassurance of the other and without one nothing seemed to be as it should.  There was nothing they could do about it though and as New One made his way back into the school, both Little Herbert and R V looked at each other because maybe, just maybe, there was something they could do…

It was seen as funny by some, it was seen as extreme by others but the antics of the two Little Herbert and R V was not seen as anything other than sensible by them.  They were not at all aware of the hilarity that their false attempts at illness caused, the extreme scenes caused by their excuses was nothing but their means of getting out of class and able to watch what New One was getting up to somewhere else.  R V developed an extreme coughing fit in his class that got him no more than a stern look from their teacher and then after New One left on another occasion, Little Herbert all of a sudden simply HAD to see the school nurse who was conveniently located next to the room in which he knew New One would be rehearsing.

Several attempts were tried, tested and failed.  The trouble was that neither were all that good at pretending and obvious were they in their over the top shows of false alarms.  In the end the teacher called both Little Herbert and R V out of class and far from getting to their much longed after aim, were told that instead of behaving in what were incredibly Over The Top ways, they should simply ask for whatever it was and inform her of just what it was that they were so keen to do?  It was explained to them that at least by doing that and telling their teacher then maybe something could be done about it and much quicker could their problem be resolved.

It was important to know what the problem was, Little Herbert and R V, found out.  Finally they told all and by doing so their teacher could see that separating New One, Little Herbert and R V would be no easy task.  Telling their teacher meant that she could go into the head and ask what could be done about it.  Instead of having to lose out on having New One with them, permission was granted, for each class to put on an assembly of their own.  No longer did the preparation mean that the class had to be split and the assemblies turned into something that everyone could get involved in.  New One found that even though in his two allies of Little Herbert and R V he had incredibly OTT commitment, he knew that they had learnt that maybe talking it out was better as it got them to their aim in a much more efficient and less embarrassing way.