Christina Purity bought a bottle full of curry spice and thyme and stuck it deep into her vagina so she could spice up her sex life. The following week, we all took turns visiting her in the clinic and the mathematics teacher finally got expelled. Purity used to roll with the Geezers, the meanest girls in the dorm. The Geezers were video vixens in teenage bodies. Girls would order all the ass and boobs cream they could find online so they could be offered a spot at the back seat of the class, where the Geezers sat, cuddling their big ass behind the classroom and counting carryovers in their credit loads while lagging behind in class. I used to dream of them whenever I touched myself at night. I didn’t want to be greedy with my imagination so I would picture them one at a time. Today, Shalewa, and tomorrow, Vanessa, I had more to give and enough to go around. Everything stopped the day the hall master caught me in the toilet, at 2AM, moaning and cursing and spanking an invisible bad bitch that my waist was straddling around. I hated my dick the moment the blows landed on my neck. I was asked to put my feet in hot water. My crucifixion was quite different. I picked my own cross in the form of broken branches behind the hostel, I was nailed to the bed with four sturdy hands of senior hall prefects and no Vinegar was given to revive me when I fainted forty-seven spanks after. I was stranded in the afterlife for hours.
My story doesn’t begin like this. Before the era of cum, squad and blood, I used to be a very irrelevant student. Before ladies became the bad bitches of my fantasies, I used to dream about my career. Me, a doctor, coming home from work and telling my wife and children beautiful tales of the dead bodies I guided to heaven. I wanted to be like my dad, a doctor, who was supposed to save lives, but missed the memo when he truanted his way through medical school. He came home every day looking more like a forensic pathologist.
‘Good evening dad. How was your day?’
‘Better than yesterday son. Just three dead today.’
I thought school would be my escape. A new destiny, holding out goodwill and a bright future for me. I used to think of these days picturing all the words that are usually bright and colorful. Shimmering, simmering, glimmering, and of course, fucking. It was the perfect prison break and I would have scoffed at anyone who told me this field of thought was unrealistic. My first day in school, the universe sent me a memo of the future that awaited me. Back at home, bedwetting was not a habit for me. It was a culture. I never had to bother about it because the maids handled it. There was always new bed sheets and fragrance waiting for me whenever I got back from playing in the field with other rich boys who lived, ate, bed-wetted, and had maids that tended to their needs and deeds. I remember when my hall master came in the first day, noticed the bed stain and found me wearing my Kimono and flipflops nonchalantly.
‘Who owns this bed?’
‘Me!’ I was smiling and walking to my lockers to pick up my cereal and have morning refreshment before the day began. I blacked out after the first slap. I was not conscious for the rest but I could tell from through the bandages on my neck, planks on my legs, and ringing in my ears when I woke up that the hall master had taken his time. I heard my cereals were the ones that were offered to the winners in the athletic competition during the interhouse sport later that semester. My roommate, Daniel was vulgar and he used the bible always as a point of context. A lot of things he said have accompanied me through my life and pushed me to laugh when I was supposed to be quiet. Still, when I came crawling from the sick bay, Daniel was the one that nursed me to health. Daniel was the one that told me that the hall master called my father and my mother proper representatives of crap and ordered every other person in the room to call me ‘worse than crap’ because I was worse than crap. Where we didn’t have injection and drip or bandages, we had laughter. And if laughter were words, Daniel was a poet.
‘Deuteronomy is God’s diss track to humanity.’
One day Daniel was performing at the center of the room, the Hall Master was lurking, and immediately the punch line left Daniel’s mouth, the Hall master’s legs covered his eyes. That was the last day I saw him.
I insist that Hall representatives take their jobs the same way an army commandant during a civil war would. Perhaps it’s just the wrong line of job but there was no other explanation for the hall master. He beat students for talking whenever he spoke and he slapped the ones who were too quiet after he spoke.
‘Rude bunch of fuckers!’
Those were his favorite words and they were what we called him behind him. He fucked us from dusk to dawn. It was back-to-back semesters of fuckery and he took his time no matter how many we were. One day, we all decided to throw a meeting of intellectuals in the junior class to figure out a way to remedy this dictatorship.
‘We should write a letter to the principal and inform him about this’ one boy who shall not be named and was always pushing his glasses up the bridge of the nose the same way Sisyphus kept pushing the boulder, spoke. His suggestions were avoided throughout the meeting and he was banned from attending all meetings after that. I heard no one even attended his wedding and he was not offered an invitation card to attend our graduation. After we had taken enough turns cursing his mother and announcing his sister’s fate of becoming prostitutes to albinos’ pimps, we offered up better suggestions.
‘We should build a deity and offer his name for sacrifice’, Joseph Barnabas, whose father was an Ifa priest at weekend and worked as a secretary for a catholic church during the week, spoke. He strutted into the middle of the gathering and took a long pause before he spoke. He thought the pause was for dramatic effect, we knew he had a struggle with English and was trying to pick his words or else the meeting would erupt in a civil war because of his grammatical blunder.
‘What will the deity collect in return?’ I decided to save his life.
‘His life.’
‘What are we going to gain from killing him?’
‘Our freedom.’
‘The deity suggestion is too risky, let us just poison him,’ Anderson, whose sister just recently became a stripper spoke. He had an image problem ever since his sister’s sextape spread on social media the same week the school authorities announced that none of our seniors passed WAEC. Every senior in the hall had his sister’s moans on their phone guiding their hands to the toilet seat. It was a consolation for the academic failure.
We offered suggestion that would make Albert Einstein doubt his Nobel laureateship and finally we didn’t settle for one. We had all dispersed before the rude bunch of fucker Icon resumed his shift. Coincidentally, he heard about our meeting and he was too pleased to show how displeased he was with us for trying to relieve him of his duties. Our effort to bargain for a plea worked in futility. The next day we ran like runaways across the narrow fields. And then we rode imaginary Okadas before we were asked to cut a large part of the unused bushes behind the school.
The weekdays were not any fun. We were failing academically and the teachers had run out of classroom ideas to save our grades. They went from despair to anger, and using our parents as icons of dumbness. One of us, Esther, like in the bible, a brave woman, rose up from the ashes of cowardice like an Ajegunle phoenix, and walked right through us until she got to the front of the class. My heart stopped. Finally, a voice for us. Esther walked right to the front of the teacher, who is now nameless because of my poor memory, and whispered straight to her face.
‘Excuse me, I did not hear you!’ The woman’s eyes widened and we leaned our head closer to get a whiff of the cologne of courage that Esther had slapped her face with.
‘I am menstruating ma. I need to use the toilet. Do you have tissues?’
They were many gossips and stories throughout the junior days that made life bearable throughout the flashes of slaps and the nightmares of canes, belts, dodging bullets, dogs and more slaps. I would say we had scars in our minds and heart but there is nothing poetic about being unable to use the toilet because you cannot sit on the toilet seats. We shat in polythene bags and cringed at people who shouted back if a slice of shit fell on their face. If we had scars, that would be poetic. We had huge lumps and swellings on our bodies. We could have cast for chicken pox roles in movies and got the parts without any audition. We looked like the despicable children of Israel when they were touring on their way to the Promised Land. Only, this time, we had no Moses, we had ourselves. Decades later, when we see each other on the streets, we laugh about these moments, and the pain, and the trauma and how life has made us comedians of our tragic days. There is something about living that makes people forget. I do not know whether it is the absence of identical days that makes us forget what trauma once smelt like.
Life got easier after the hall master died. He was poisoned. Ojiefoh, the chapel leader called it ‘God’s great gift to humanity’. He and his fellowship of hypocrites organized a wake ceremony for the dead Idi Amin Hall master the same day they spoke in tongues to celebrate his demise.
The press club published an essay on his death and titled it ‘The chicken has come home to roost’. They were banned shortly after the essay was published, not because they refused to refute the essay but because the school found out that all the members took cocaine and smoked hemp during their work hours.
The ban of the press club hurt the students more than the time the gates of our school chapel was closed with hammer, nail and urine. We used to go to the chapel on Sundays before it was shut down for years. We were flogged from our beds every Sunday morning. During the rainy season, when all the hair on our skin was at attention, Hall prefects would lick their lips and swarm in with belts and kicks. And as flies to wanton boys, they beat us for sport. We cried during the sermon and the ministers always interpreted it for our deep reverence for God’s words and salvation. The next phase was the speaking of tongues and if your lips were not moving, your backs would not be spared.
‘Shedi labalaba Shedi lobolobo.’
It was a symphony. Everything changed when a senior prefect’s dick was found in the minister’s mouth. Since then, every prophecy from our mouth on Sundays was held in our private residence in the hostel.
Rude bunch of fuckers, our Hall Master, died shortly before my first year in senior school and so it made me indifferent. I was almost close to the immunity class and I could not be bullied except by my innocence. Unfortunately, I was getting to see that I would not need a hall master to slap me or break my bones for me to feel embarrassed or ashamed. We were all growing up, and the united front became a divisive stand. The introduction of Squads.
I have mentioned the Geezers and so I will just jump ahead and skip the cultists. I want this story to be funny and I don’t want to tell you the tale of the group of students who were raped, beaten, taken to the bush, initiated, and killed the next day during a cult clash. Oops!
We had the F4. This was a lame attempt by some boys in the science department to recreate the Korean fantasy drama that had girls going to the bathroom, at midnight, whimper and say it was a bat screeching through the broken windows. The Failed 4 turned out to be a group of geeks that used their new fashion as a front to deceive new female students and cure their long curse of virginity. They never broke the curse. People saw beneath their geek jokes and their awkward pronunciation of rap icons.
‘It’s Jay Zee and not Jay Zed.’
And there were the faggots. A band of boys who had been chewing sticks and sitting with their legs wide open since junior school. One day, they decided to be open about their trueselves and what better way to represent your bravery than to take up the name that people use to make fun of their trueselves to prove that they are not too ashamed to deny their trueselves. I still don’t understand this part or maybe perhaps the boy I bribed to tell me about the history behind their name was as ignorant as I was. But the faggots were a closed group and they never let in strangers. One time, I was so bored that I spoke to one of them, Jared, about hanging out with them. He told me I was supposed to pass a test. Something about sucking and penetration. I don’t remember the last thing I said to him, but there were threats of STD’s and a particular verse from the bible that gave a very graphic description of hell.
It was a comedy fest of squads and principles and I was behind the scene as girls gave head and made headlines. Boys fought audibly without screen time and gossip ran the scenes. I felt like a used condom whenever people stood up to meet up with their squad and I always had to sit awkwardly, turning my legs here and there. Fortunately, I bought a phone during the holiday before my penultimate year in school and I faked a lot of phone calls to soften the injury of my loneliness. When I got to my final year in secondary school, we got a new mathematics teacher. He was handsome. We were growing hair on our cheeks and balls and we thought those were the definition of masculinity but this beauty was cleanshaven and he had girls fawning as he walked. The only problem was that he was a horrible teacher and he got all his facts wrong. Often, we had to correct him and when he realized that we probably had more sense than the last students that got him expelled wherever he was coming from, he used another tactic. He spoke more than he taught and this trade, he pursued well. He was an immaculate story teller. Our WAEC dates were getting closer and some of us grew worried because the final dates meant our doom. We were doomed. Some of us took to other tutorials and some of us took to God. Whether it was prayer or coincidence, everything changed when the mathematics teacher told Christina Purity to spice up her sex life. That was the only way we passed, that was how we graduated.
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