Bill Watkins

Nothing about Bill's build says first grader. An early bloomer, he towers over his classmates with a muscular frame that rivals some adults, making him easy to mistake for a grown man. Rectangular glasses with reflective lenses conceal his blue eyes, and his short brown hair parts to one side beneath thick eyebrows.

He dresses in Eden Academy's standard boys' uniform: a black button-up shirt and black shorts worn with white crew socks and black shoes.

Discipline defines Bill. Devoted to the father he longs to make proud, he treats even a dodgeball game as a campaign deserving rigorous physical and mental preparation. The confidence this builds is real but brittle; when a carefully calculated plan collapses, the serious soldier facade cracks and the six-year-old underneath shows through, as when he broke down in tears after his throws repeatedly failed to tag Anya Forger.

Away from competition he is relaxed, kind, and well liked, greeting students from rival halls in friendship and easing up on his strength against girls out of chivalry, at least until victory is on the line. His courage runs deep: he urged Cecile Hall's students to flee Donna Schlag's inspection, steadied his terrified classmates during the Red Circus bus hijacking even after being threatened himself, and later grappled with the rugby advisor Mr. Armstrong so his friends could keep investigating the plot against Henry Henderson, a teacher whose conduct during the hijacking earned Bill's lasting respect.

Bill is the son of Major Wesley Watkins of Ostania's national army, a man he adores and calls "Daddy" despite his usual gravity, and he attends Eden Academy in Wald Hall, Class 4. He debuts at the interclass dodgeball match, where calculated multi-target throws and a secret curving technique, the Homing Slider Shot, power Wald Hall to victory, though Anya's mind reading lets her slip every ball he aims her way and leaves him thoroughly bewildered.

He keeps crossing paths with Cecile Hall afterward, challenging Damian Desmond to friendly competition on a museum field trip and reassuring him after the hijackers use the boy as their messenger. His Eden record gleams: a Stella Star for calming classmates during the bus hijacking, a second for posting his grade's second-best Mathematics score on the term finals, and a third for helping expose Murdoch Swan's illegal admissions scheme while defending Henderson's name. His gifts extend past raw strength, which is itself enough to wreck military training targets and bend a lamppost; he performs rapid, complex calculations, converts them into strategy, and was the one who spotted freshly printed paper stacked inside the supposedly abandoned old schoolhouse, tying it to the forged flyers behind the frame-up. His father's expectations can weigh heavily, as at the Winter Sheep Festival, when Wesley declared that losing a ring toss would mean withdrawing from Eden.