I say.
“No, seriously. Hey, have you heard? Kiran was meant to come back today, but he hasn’t pitched.”
I hadn’t heard. Two weeks after our Easter break, Kiran took a month off school after his dad, an ENT with a practice in East London, was reported missing in the dailies. This was the week after I’d asked him to lend me his MiniDisc recorder and he’d agreed, telling me he’d do it if I let him neck me at the fields outside Hudson Park.
I’d agreed to let him think I would.
It’s not that he’s the worst looking guy here. He’s tall, with thick curls and faint sideburns, but he also thinks leaving his school shirt untucked undermines the staff. I could do without that. Last year, he’d spent most of our prep squinting at me. That’s when I’d come up with the idea to record the machine with the MD.
Hence us having to make out.
I turn back to my desk. “Maybe I’m still the new girl.”
Lerato laughs and I take a moment to look at her. Her face is long and faultless.
For something else to do, I open and close the pencil case my dad gave me. At the front of the class, Mr Costello tells us to settle down. He’s chewing on his lip—a habit I hate, since it keeps the skin chapped.
Not that he’s awful. Mr Costello’s middle-aged, soft around the middle, and more bearable than most of them, here. His shoulders are often hunched, shortening his neck, and he’s always blinking behind thick, tinted glasses. Today, he’s holding a stack of tests close to his chest; if our class average drops below 60, he likes to make us all do the test over. It’s only fair, he explains, and I guess I’ve never minded him for that.
I like fairness.
Most times, Part and I meet at the intersection of Queens and Joubert Roads, then head down to the park—just the two of us, if Litha’s at hockey. We’re all at different schools.
This town, once a mission station, was named after a monarch whose general turned natives into settlers—offering the Mfengu British citizenship in exchange for each other’s blood. It spreads under us like a green tomb, its rolling hills dipping into spaces abandoned to waste. The grass is always warm, as if a giant had curled itself around the borders of Buffalo City and lain down to die, before evaporating into the atmosphere. Part and I often take shelter in the shade of a stone alcove under an elm.
Part likes to argue with me over whose life we’d grade worse, hers or mine. It’s my job to tell Part to be fairer to her mom— to remind her that her mother has a vascular disease, and she should stop picking a fight with her every day of the week. Litha tells her that too.
Not that he doesn’t have ideas of his own. For example, he says even adoption isn’t a merciful act; it’s a lucky draw. It gets to the point where you’re afraid of your parents and they don’t remember your name. He’s lost faith in parenting, he says; these days, he loses himself in internet fantasies where the way to kill a monster is to give it a tonic of health or a life potion. He tells me to imagine a re-routed reality where life is not only the mirror of death, but also its catalyst.
I tell him I’m not sure. Most of the time we agree, though. It’s been that way for two years now. Litha and I are Xhosa, while Part’s grandparents are from Madeira. The three of us met one afternoon at the Master Math office on Alexandra Road, down the road from Grey Hospital and De Vos Malan High School. We were looking for tutor jobs—a week of free lessons was being provided by the state to primary students from Ginsberg and Dimbaza—and we’d settled into the waiting room, where the air conditioning spat flakes of rust over the linoleum and potted plants. It made me shiver when it almost got in my hair. I didn’t like that. I yawned. I was tired, having skipped my last three meals. Part leaned back on the bench and made it creak. Next, two red-haired women greeted us, offered us a jug of water, and told us none of us had the job. I wasn’t surprised; I’d suspected there’d be a school background check.
Outside, Litha told me and Part he worked at the Mr Movie up the road. He invited us over and took us back to the storeroom, where he showed us an old tape of Debbie Does Dallas for an hour. It had laugh tracks dubbed over the dialogue, which Litha thought we’d find hilarious, and we did. I mean, I still do.
Mr Costello reaches our desk and drops our tests in front of us.
Lerato pulls at mine. “I knew it.”
I take the test back from her. My mark’s more or less what I expected.
“With grades like that, I don’t understand why you stopped being a monitor,” Lerato says.
“It wasn’t comfortable. Mr de Silva saw the report card I came in with from East London, and thought it was a Rorschach test and not just marks.” The two of us learned about the inkblot test in English last week. “Like it meant I’d naturally be good at following orders.”
Lerato shifts on her seat, grinning, before closing her test. “To be honest, it isn’t that bad. There’s the tuck shop thing, for one.” I know. Monitors like her get free apple pies.
“I don’t care about King Pie,” I say.
“Even apple King Pie?”
“Even apple King Pie.”
Lerato smiles, shaking her head, even though it’s true.
Toward the end of my last year of junior high—not long after I came here—I got my student monitor badge taken away from me. I got summoned to the principal’s office, where I watched our headmaster, Mr de Silva, sweating under his collar, while through the window mounds of rain clouds massed over the field the school rented for track. He was on the phone, looking down at his blotter, and I remembered how we hadn’t had any sports, that year. I looked at the mist on the windowpane behind Mr de Silva’s head.
He dropped the receiver and sighed, looking at his hands. “You fraternize too much,” he said. “You were trusted with leadership and discipline.”
I nodded, but I didn’t face him.
The world outside felt muted. Two old men pushed a wheelbarrow to a landfill across the field, thin curtains of smoke rising from a smoldering garbage fire before them, and I didn’t answer him, but walked to his desk when he told me to. He removed the pin from my school uniform and turned it over in his palm.
“You can go,” he told me, and I left.
Before class ends, an alarm goes off for a fire drill. We file out into Huberta Square. I’m surprised they’re still following regulations, even for safety; for the longest time, we’ve been told the school is just hanging on, on the verge of going broke. Joining the crowd at the back, I reach into my bag and feel for Kiran’s MD. I can’t see him anywhere.
Lerato sidles up to me. “Here’s to another waste of time.”
I nod and rub my hands together, feeling the onset of winter. The mist hangs low over the grounds, raking goosebumps from our skin. We get told to arrange ourselves in straight lines, slicing the courtyard into four perfect squares.
I never used to believe enough when Mom was still around.
I remember that.
The first time I told Part about the abduction,
