She
always walked amongst them, watching quietly, unseen, unnoticed; as if the idea
of her existence was inexistent. She
wanted to be accepted, she wanted someone to call her name, Bisi, to start a
conversation, to talk about her hair and ask if she just had it made. Then that
Thursday after classes, as she pretended to mind her own business, Kate, the
popular girl with the large, round bottom and tissue paper augmented breasts,
turned to her, smiled at her and said hi.
She
paused. She blinked. She said hi twice.
‘I
think you’re cool, come here, walk with us.’ Kate said. The other girls in
Kate’s circle were beaming. Bisi was exhilarated.
‘Thank
you. Thank you.’ She said.
She
became popular, like them, plastic, like them. When Kate told her to skip
classes, to join them in scaling the school fence, to go for a party, to have a
little alcohol at the party, she did. When Joy, another plastic girl, told her
to lock the bathroom door as Ifeoma took her bath, she did, and Ifeoma sat
stuck in the bathroom for hours crying, begging for the door to be opened, the
plastics laughed.
Then
one Wednesday morning during breakfast, at the school dining hall, Ifeoluwa, the
shy girl who had pimples all over her forehead and couldn’t see without her
glasses, spilt orange juice over Kate’s new Neiman
Marcus’ dress with the pink, satin sash and the word ‘excellent’ written on
the chest region. Kate screamed. Ifeoluwa promised that she didn’t mean to, she
didn’t see Kate coming, she wasn’t looking; she was sorry. She said she was
sorry.
Later,
Kate gathered all the plastics, they came up with an ingenious way to make
Ifeoluwa pay for her stupidity; they would take her bag wherein she puts her
notebooks. They would hide the bag where it would be impossible to find. She
would not write for the rest of that day and maybe beyond.
Bisi
was told to steal Ifeoluwa’s bag; she did. She and Joy and Remi hid it
downstairs, next to the flowerbed at the back of the school. During Economics,
Ifeoluwa’s asthma attack began and her inhaler was inside her bag. She searched
frantically for the bag while trying her utmost to breathe in. Some of the
students noticed and told the Economics teacher, ‘sir, something is wrong with
Ife.’
The
teacher figured it was asthma and joined in searching for the bag. ‘Who has
Ife’s bag?’ He asked. The plastics looked at each other, Kate grinned, Joy
grinned, Remi grinned, Bisi wanted to grin, too, she couldn’t. She wanted to
get up, to go get the bag but Kate gave her a look.
Ifeoluwa
was having a seizure now. Bisi ran downstairs next to the flowerbed and
retrieved the bag, but when she got back, everyone was looking worried, the
plastics were looking frightened, the Economics teacher was screaming at
Ifeoluwa to wake up.
same as other kids in the playground. She tried to run, jump, shout
and clap at all the things other kids ran, jumped, shouted and clapped at. What
she didn’t sense was that other kids didn’t make frequent visits to the doctor
as she and mummy did. Stomach aches, frequent fevers, swollen legs, deep sores
on her feet, the list went on and on and quickly thickened the size of her
hospital file and emptied mum’s meager wage. It is only now that she is
beginning to understand the meaning of those words – each piercing mummy’s
heart as she sat wishing the words could mean something else or at least that
dad were alive to share the burden with her – which fell out the doctor’s
mouth. “Mary is has sickle cell anemia,”
he said rather coldly.
