The Flop at Prep

The evening prep bell rang across the Crestview campus at precisely 7:00 PM, a sharp, metallic toll that signaled the transition from free time to mandatory study. High schoolers trickled into the senior block, uniform shirts slightly rumpled from the afternoon, carrying stacks of textbooks, legal pads, and colorful pencil cases.

The SS3 classroom was sprawling and air-conditioned, lined with large whiteboards, glass display cabinets, and individual wooden desks arranged in neat, orderly rows. At the front of the room sat Mr. Danjuma, the resident prep supervisor for the evening. He was a middle-aged history teacher with thick reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, a man whose formidable reputation for dishing out detention was second only to his capacity for falling fast asleep fifteen minutes into any silence.

Zainab sat three rows from the front, right beside the window. Her desk was immaculate: a black notebook opened to a fresh page, a high-precision gel pen poised in her hand, and her laptop resting closed at the corner. Across the aisle, Simi was pretending to study her Economics textbook, though her phone was propped carefully behind the cover, screen glowing as she monitored the newly launched Telegram channel for The Crestview Heatmap.

The subscriber counter was already ticking up. Word among the SS3 girls traveled faster than light over the school Wi-Fi. What had started as an inside joke between roommates was now an exclusive, secret spectator sport. The caption pinned to the top of the chat read simply: Project Lawson: Tracking the fall of Crestview’s top player. Live ratings drop after every move.

"He’s coming," Simi whispered under her breath, not moving her lips, her eyes darting toward the open classroom doorway. "Check eleven o'clock."

Zainab didn't turn her head. She picked up a yellow highlighter, uncapped it with a soft pop, and uncannily maintained her cool. "Let him come," she murmured softly. "I hope he brought his best material."

Tari Lawson strolled into the classroom like a man stepping onto a runway rather than entering a standard high school study hall. He had switched out of his ruined Off-Whites into a pair of immaculate, pitch-black loafers that clicked softly against the polished floor tiles. His uniform blazer was slung casually over one shoulder, held by a single finger, and his top button was carelessly undone.

Behind him trailed Koa, who gave Zainab a wide, conspiratorial wink as he took a seat near the back. Koa pulled out his phone, ready to log the play for posterity.

Tari didn't go to his usual seat in the back row with the rest of the basketball team. Instead, he made a slow, deliberate detour down the aisle toward Zainab's desk. The ambient noise in the classroom—the rustle of turning pages, the quiet scraping of chairs, the low whispers—gradually died down. Everyone in the room knew about the cafeteria showdown from earlier in the afternoon. Nobody wanted to miss the rematch.

Tari stopped right beside Zainab’s desk. He leaned against the edge of the adjacent empty table, crossing his arms and casting a long, shadow over her notebook. He smelled of high-end vetiver and citrus cologne, a scent that practically screamed wealth.

Zainab kept writing. She highlighted a heading in her notebook: Data Structures & Algorithms: Module 4. She didn't look up. She didn't acknowledge his existence by even a fraction of a millimeter.

Tari cleared his throat softly, a deep, resonant sound designed to pull attention. "Zainab."

Silence. The gel pen kept moving across the paper, leaving behind precise, elegant cursive strokes.

"Zainab," Tari repeated, stepping slightly closer, his voice dropping into that smooth, low register that had earned him a reputation across three different private schools in the Lekki-Ikoyi axis. "I know you hear me."

Zainab finally stopped writing. She didn't look startled or flustered; she looked mildly annoyed, like a busy executive whose meeting had been interrupted by an unscheduled door-to-door salesman. She capped her highlighter, laid it down parallel to her pen, and slowly lifted her eyes to meet his.

"Can I help you, Lawson?" she asked, her voice flat, clear, and perfectly modulated to carry across the quiet room. "Prep started three minutes ago. Mr. Danjuma is right there."

At the front of the room, Mr. Danjuma shifted in his chair, snored softly, and let his head slide another inch toward his chest.

Tari didn't flinch. A small, supremely confident smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. He reached into his blazer pocket with a slow, theatrical flourish and pulled out a small, sleek box wrapped in dark blue foil with a golden ribbon. It was an imported box of Swiss hazelnut pralines—the kind you couldn't buy in any supermarket in Lagos, the kind that required a driver to go straight to the luxury boutiques in Victoria Island.

He placed the box gently on the edge of her open notebook, right beside her gel pen.

"Consider it a peace offering," Tari said, leaning down slightly so his face was level with hers. "For earlier. I realized we got off on the wrong foot. I’m a gentleman, Zainab. I don't like leaving bad impressions with beautiful girls."

A collective, quiet ooooh rippled through the back rows of the classroom. A few junior prefects turned around to stare. Koa was sitting near the back, silently mouthing the word Smooth to the ceiling.

Simi held her breath, watching Zainab out of the corner of her eye. This was classic Tari Lawson execution: high-value gift, effortless charisma, soft-spoken flattery. It had a hundred percent success rate in the history of Crestview International.

Zainab looked down at the dark blue box sitting on her notebook. Then she looked back up at Tari’s dimpled, expectant smile.

"Swiss chocolates," she said neutrally.

"Hazelnut," Tari corrected softly, his tone laced with absolute certainty. "Direct from Zurich. My dad’s assistant brought them in this morning."

"I see," Zainab said. She reached out, picked up the box by its golden ribbon, and held it up between two fingers.

Tari’s smirk widened. He shifted his weight, preparing to deliver his follow-up line—an invitation to sit together at the library during tomorrow's lunch break.

Before he could open his mouth, Zainab turned in her chair, looking past Tari toward the second row, where a small, quiet SS3 boy named Tobi was staring intently at his Further Mathematics textbook. Tobi was on a partial academic scholarship, notoriously hardworking, and currently looked like he hadn't slept in three days.

"Tobi," Zainab called out softly.

The boy blinked, looking up in surprise. "Ah... yes, Zainab?"

"Have you eaten tonight?" she asked kindly.

"No oh," Tobi admitted, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. "The queue for fish in the refectory was too long, so I just drank water and came for prep."

"Here," Zainab said, extending her hand across the aisle and offering the pristine blue box of Swiss chocolates. "Take these. Glucose is good for brain function when you're solving calculus."

Tobi’s eyes went wide as saucers. He looked from the luxury box to Zainab, then to Tari, whose face had suddenly frozen in mid-smirk. "Wait... are you serious? These look expensive oh!"

"Very serious. Enjoy them," Zainab smiled warmly—a genuine, radiant smile that Tari hadn't seen all day—and placed the box squarely on Tobi’s desk.

Tobi grabbed the box like it was a gold bar, looking like he had just won the lottery. "Omo! Zainab, thank you! God bless you!"

The classroom went dead, suffocatingly quiet.

Tari stood anchored to the floor beside her desk, his outstretched hand suspended briefly in mid-air before he slowly dropped it back to his side. The dimples vanished from his cheeks. The cool, unshakeable playboy posture cracked, revealing a flash of absolute, stunned disbelief.

She hadn't just rejected the gift; she had re-gifted it to a Further Mathematics student in front of twenty-eight witnesses.

Zainab turned back to her desk, uncapped her highlighter, and picked up her gel pen. She looked up at Tari, who was still staring at her as if she had just spoken to him in ancient Latin.

"Is there anything else, Lawson?" she asked mildly. "Or can I get back to my module? Some of us actually care about our WASSCE grades."

Tari opened his mouth, closed it, and cleared his throat. For the first time in his eighteen years of life, his mind was a complete, echoing void. He had no line. He had no comeback. He had zero defense against a girl who looked at a five-star Swiss chocolate box and treated it like a piece of scratch paper.

"No," Tari managed to say, his voice lacking its usual velvet finish. "No, that's... that's fine."

"Great. Have a productive prep," Zainab said sweetly, returning her attention to her paper.

Tari turned on his heel and walked back down the aisle. He didn't strut this time. He moved with the quick, rigid steps of a man trying to escape a crime scene. As he sat down at his desk in the back row, Koa covered his face with both hands, his shoulders shaking in violent, silent hysterics.

Underneath her desk, Simi’s phone buzzed with a quiet notification. She opened the Telegram app under her textbook and watched as Zainab’s hands stealthily tapped away under the rim of her table, operating her phone by muscle memory alone.

A new post went live on The Crestview Heatmap.

[THE CRESTVIEW HEATMAP - ENTRY #01]

 * Target: Tari "The Prince" Lawson

 * Tactic: Imported Swiss Chocolates + Generic Smooth Talk

 * Execution: Arrogant entry, low effort, zero personalization. Did not even check if target had food allergies.

 * Result: Re-gifted to Tobi for Further Maths support.

 * RATING: 3 / 10. (Three points awarded strictly for the quality of the chocolate, which Tobi reports is excellent.)

 * Note: If you're going to bribe an Abuja girl, Lawson, try harder. We have chocolates in the North too.

Simi let out a wheezing snort that nearly woke up Mr. Danjuma. Within sixty seconds, the view count on the post hit forty-five. Across the classroom, phones began to vibrate subtly inside pockets and blazer linings as the SS3 girls read the review.

Small, suppressed giggles erupted from various corners of the room. Girls were hiding their faces behind dictionaries and literature novels, their eyes darting between their screens and the back row where Tari sat.

Tari pulled out his own phone, curious about the sudden shift in the room's atmosphere. A text message from Koa popped up at the top of his screen, containing a single forward link to a Telegram channel.

Tari tapped the link. The dark-mode dashboard opened instantly, displaying the clean, professional header of The Crestview Heatmap, complete with a live digital counter and the blistering 3/10 review staring him right in the face.

Tari read the entry once. Then he read it twice.

Slowly, he turned his head and looked across the room.

At her desk by the window, Zainab was calmly writing in her notebook, her posture perfect, her face a picture of serene innocence. She didn't look back at him. She didn't need to.

Tari leaned back in his chair, running a hand over his face. The sting of defeat was sharp, but as he stared at the glowing phone screen in his palm, a slow, real smile—not the fake, practiced charm he used on everyone else, but a genuine, dangerous grin—began to spread across his face.

She wasn't just resisting him; she was running an entire digital smear campaign in real-time. She was smart, ruthless, and entirely unimpressed by his money.

"Okay, Zainab," Tari whispered to himself under his breath, leaning his elbows on his desk and locking his eyes on the back of her head. "No p. The game just got interesting."