His marks were very good (partly by the fact that he bribed a "brilliant but unattractive" girl with some kisses), the girls liked him because of his looks and his charms and the teachers liked him because he was polite and attentive. Also the boys liked and accepted him because of the carefully adjusted amount of dislike to teachers and girls he showed.
When Bud left high school, he was graduated with honours in mathematics and science and the third highest average. In the school yearbook he was named "The Most Popular", "The Best Dancer" and "The Most Likely to Succeed". He was also president of his senior class.
It really seems like Bud was a model student. Intelligent, polite, attentive, charming, good-looking But I do wonder how much of all these magnificent results that was honestly deserved. I can not deny that he seems to be very intelligent, but I still get the feeling that Bud Corliss is sort of a lucky dog that knows how to use his talents in the least strenuous way. I do not get a picture of a hard-working, ambitious student. If anything, he's a quite lazy young man who does not care that much about his education. Luckily, (or perhaps unluckily) his abilities just are there, ready for him to use. He does not have to study especially hard to learn something - and after all, there's cheating as well. This is, as we know, a phenomenon that Bud isn't unfamiliar to. .
Well, well. Bud was drafted two weeks after his high school termination. He ended up in the infantry, where he felt degraded and found himself surrounded by "coarse, comic-book-reading idiots". But he had no choice. He deserted his plans to read the copy of "Anna Karenina" he had brought and started to read comics too, but "only because it was impossible to concentrate". I can understand that, but I don't think that is the whole truth. Bullying exist also in the Army, and a novel-reading, lofty swot (that's probably how others would have seen him) would not have been left in peace very long.
