Around the start of the school year, my international boarding school holds a Food Fair where we all showcase local foods from home. As the best baker in school, I am slated to bake four or five big pandan cakes for the Food Fair.

Of the many kitchens available to students, there are only two in the whole school which I would consider adequately stocked: [Kitchen #1] and [Kitchen #2]. With the Food Fair only a few days away, [Kitchen #1] is fully booked, but that isn’t much of an issue. I prefer baking in [Kitchen #2], anyway.

But there is a small snag in the plan: [Kitchen #2] is inside the largest dorm, which is a boys’ dorm, and the only person willing to assist me in the baking process is a girl.

The school has a zero-tolerance policy for people entering the opposite gender dorm. I believe the punishments include suspension and expulsion.

Luckily, I am able to argue my case, and given that I am known to be a well-behaved lad, the school gives me special permission to bring [Assistant] into the boy’s dorm. The Vice Principal himself tells me that it is the first time in school history that a female student will legally enter a boy’s dorm.

[Assistant] and I enter the dorm — every single boy in the vicinity looking completely flummoxed — and begin the baking process. I turn on the oven to preheat while we mix the batter.

Assistant: *Giggling* “Look at all their faces. They can’t believe that you actually brought me in here.”

Me: *Laughs* “Yeah, I mean, we boys have smuggled girls in before, but you’re the very first— Wait, do you smell smoke?”

We both look down and realise that the oven is on fire, and we jump back in fright.

Assistant & Me: “Aaahhhh!”

Assistant: “It’s on fire! What do we do?”

I promptly hit the fire alarm, and a teacher is able to quickly come in with a fire extinguisher and put out the flames.

Me: “Oh, dear. Um, sir, I hope I’m not in any trouble.”

He waves a hand dismissively.

Teacher: “It’s all right. The oven was old, anyway. Just use the second oven only.” *Walks away*

Me: “This was not how I expected today to go.”

We both continue baking and manage to produce the cakes as promised. Within three days, the entire school has heard about our little incident.

On Monday, my entire class corners me and demands answers.

Me: “Yes, it’s true. We set the oven on fire.”

Male Classmate #1: “I don’t care about the oven. Nobody cares about the oven! That’s not important!”

Female Classmate #1: “Yeah! We all need to know one thing.”

Male Classmate #2: “How in the world did you legally bring a girl into [Boy’s Dorm]?! What magics did you use?”

Me: “That’s what you’re concerned about? We burned an oven!”

Female Classmate #2: “Who cares about the fire? How did you get permission to bring a girl into the dorm?”

Me: “But the fire…”

Later…

Assistant: “My entire class cornered me during first period, and you will not believe what they asked me.”

Me: “Let me guess: they didn’t ask you anything about the fire. Instead, they all asked how you legally entered [Boy’s Dorm]? And how to do it themselves?”

Assistant: “Yup. Nobody cared about the fire. Nobody at all!”

I’m a new boarding school student, and the prefects are showing us underclassmen around town. We’ve been to the highlights, like the church, main shopping street, nice restaurants, and such.

Prefect #1: “And if you go up that hill, you’ll come to [Restaurant]. Best Italian food I’ve ever had in my life.”

Prefect #2: “Agreed. Everything there is good. Good food, good wine…”

Me: “Wine?”

Prefect #2: “We’re past eighteen, love. Legal to drink. Anyway, like I was saying, really fine place. Affordable, too.”

Prefect #1: “Yup. Just don’t try the Giga Pizza Challenge. You’ll lose. Both in terms of dignity and in terms of cash.”

Schoolmate: “Huh, I can take it. How bad can it be?”

Prefect #1: “My girlfriend said that when she was in your shoes last year. She couldn’t finish even a quarter of it. And even after [Prefect #2], [Upperclassmen], and I joined in to help her, we could barely finish a third of the thing.”

Prefect #2: “Yup. The four of us spent the rest of the week eating the leftovers. It. Was. Not. Fun.”

Schoolmate: “Well, you four are girls. Step aside and let a real man show you how it’s done.”

Prefect #1: “I don’t mind, but you have to promise that you’ll pay for the thing.”

And with that, our lunch destination is decided. As promised, [Schoolmate] orders the Giga Pizza Challenge. It is apparently free if someone can eat the whole thing by themselves in half an hour.

Prefect #1: “Nobody order anything else. We won’t be needing the extra food.”

Prefect #2: “Ah, but we’ll be having a bottle of the house red. This is gonna be good.”

Schoolmate: “Watch and learn, ladies. Watch and learn.”

And then the Giga Pizza comes out, and [Schoolmate] actually looks visibly concerned at the size of the thing. It’s the largest pizza I’ve ever seen. It is like five feet in diameter. It’s so large that its eight slices had to be baked individually in the pizza oven before being put together into a larger whole. And the sheer number of toppings is mind-boggling. It is almost three-dimensional with how many there are.

To his credit, [Schoolmate] puts up a valiant fight. He makes it more than a third of the way through before throwing in the towel.

Prefect #1: “Hey, he did better than the four of us combined.”

Prefect #2: “Still lost, though. Ah, well.”

She then informs the waiter of [Schoolmate]’s surrender, allowing us all to stop spectating and start eating the Giga Pizza.

Including the prefects, there are a dozen or so of us there, and we can’t even finish the d*** thing. [Schoolmate] has to return to the dorms with two massive slices of the Giga Pizza and an empty wallet.

I later become a prefect myself, and the next year…

Me: “Up that hill is the best Italian restaurant that I’ve ever been to. Just don’t try the Giga Pizza Challenge. You’ll lose.”

Underclassman: “I can take it. How bad can really it be?”

Spoiler alert: he couldn’t.

I’m told it’s essentially a school tradition that there’ll be at least one idiot in the new arrivals every year who thinks that he or she can take the Giga Pizza. And just as traditionally, they fail.

I wonder how long it’ll take before people realise that the challenge is futile.

When I was a teenager, I went to a boarding school for “troubled teen girls” for a short period of time. I was physically ill after finally being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, and my missing school was leading my grades to drop to the point where I was on the verge of being kicked out, so they enrolled me for a few trimesters as a way for me to catch up. A lot of the girls were suffering from severe behavioral issues and returning from wilderness camps, so it was a pretty intense group of kids.

Most Internet use was forbidden except in connection with schoolwork, and all of our computers in the computer lab faced inward so the teacher who was running the computer lab could see our screens. There were also very strict blocks that blocked almost everything except for educational websites. They’d never had any issues, until me.

I was annoyed at these restrictions and wanted to talk to my friends via email and post on forums. It was nothing malicious at all; besides my health issues, I was a pretty good kid. Unfortunately for the school, I was the first student that happened to know about using proxy servers to get around these restrictions.

I was constantly alt+tabbing, using tiny windows, and being on the lookout for when the lab monitor looked my way. This went on for months before a couple of students found out and asked me about it. I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to cause trouble, and I knew that everyone suddenly having access would be impossible to hide. Of course, that meant that they went and told the principal about it.

They had no idea how I managed to do it. Even the so-called IT people for the school had no explanation! Frustrated, the principal forbade me from entering the computer lab again until I told them how I managed to get around the restrictions.

Unfortunately for them, I was leaving the school soon after anyway, so it didn’t make a difference. Amusingly, they wound up calling my parents because of the “trouble” I was making and complained that I was being uncooperative.

I don’t remember if anyone else managed to figure out what I was doing, and years later, my mom admitted that she was so proud to find out that the “trouble” I was making was being the first person to outsmart the school just so I could check my email and post on some gaming forums.

My boarding school has been reopened cautiously, but we’re faced with a whole load of safety precautions. The one that grates the most is that we have to take and submit our temperature twice a day, every day — once in the morning, once in the afternoon.

My houseparent gets tired of us forgetting to submit our temperature, so the person who forgets the most temperature checks has to send twice-daily reminders to the dorm WhatsApp group for a week.

I get stuck as the first person. After a few days, I get bored and decide to have some fun.

Me: “Roses are Red,

Violets are Blue,

I’ve submitted my Temperature,

And so should You.”

Houseparent: “As a literature teacher, that is painful to read. If you’re going to do poetry, please at least do a proper job.”

Me: “Challenge accepted.”

The very next day”

Me: “Thermometers between lips,

Wait ‘til beeping ends,

See what it predicts,

And temperature, send.”

Dormmate #1: “Are you really going to say every reminder in rhyme?”

Me: “Now I will.”

This lasts for the rest of my week, my poetry getting more and more elaborate, until it reaches a fourteen-line Shakespearean sonnet.

Me: “It’s the end of the week,

Sunday is nearly gone,

I know we’re all weak,

But turn your thermometers on.

“Place them between your lips,

And wait for the beeping to end,

See what it predicts,

And temperature, send.

“Alas, my time as monitor is out,

My heir’s task is great importance,

You will not be a layabout lout,

Challenge: Beat my performance!

“The victor will gain great glory,

The loser will find his end gory.”

The next victim on reminder duty replies:

Dormmate #2: “Challenge accepted.”

And thus began an informal competition between those of us on reminder duty, with progressively more elaborate and absurd reminders. My heir’s reminders were all memes. His heir rapped all of his. That person’s heir wrote the reminders as lyrics of a song. The next person sang the aforementioned song in a homemade music video. His successor made a jazzy remix of it. I wonder what will be next!

And yes, temperature submissions have significantly improved since we turned the reminders into a game.

This story is part of our Best Of March 2021 roundup!

Read the next Best Of March 2021 roundup story!

Read the Best Of March 2021 roundup!

When I turn eighteen — the UK’s legal drinking age — the very first thing I do is to run to town and start smuggling alcohol into my boarding school’s dorm.

Naturally, being a kid with no knowledge about picking alcohol and on a budget, most of the wines I buy are cheap and foul tasting. Every time I open a bottle I don’t like, I usually dispose of the contents by pouring them into batter and baking cupcakes out of them. By a happy coincidence, a whole lot of my classmates and friends have birthdays around this time, which means no shortage of baking opportunities for me. Amusingly enough, everyone agrees they like my new cupcakes more than the old ones.

But then, one of my friends wants a jelly cake for his birthday instead of a regular cake. That’s nothing I can’t handle, so I make the mixture, pour in my latest batch of horrible wine, and make a big jelly cake out of it.

The very next day, I present it to the birthday boy, who happily blows out the candles, cuts the cake, and takes a bite out of his slice.

Birthday Boy: *Suddenly freezes* “There’s alcohol in this.”

The entire room goes silent, and everyone turns to look at me. I should mention that [Birthday Boy] is a prefect, and there are no less than three other prefects in the party crowd. Also, the staff room is practically across the corridor.

Me: “No, no, no. That’s just Ribena! It’s my secret ingredient. It’s not wine or anything!”

I immediately grabbed my cake and beat a hasty retreat back to my dorm. I then proceeded to eat almost the entire cake by myself in one sitting to dispose of the evidence. It was delicious. And apparently, there was still enough alcohol in the thing that I actually felt tipsy after eating it.

Thankfully, none of them reported me. Nevertheless, I learnt my lesson.

The next time I made a jelly cake, I made sure the alcohol had been fully boiled off before pouring it into a mould.