ASKING FOR A FRIEND
Though a brainy student, I wasn't typically a sharp guy back in school days. With my good-boyhood and honest-to-heaven transparency, it took me a while to realize book intelligence isn't quite the same as street-smartness. And oh the many sufferings this brought me.
"Hey, B,” I heard someone whisper from the back of the line on the assembly ground. We just sang the national anthem and now the press club was on the podium in front, broadcasting the news. The members of staff stood behind facing the students.
"Yes, Senior Steve,” I said, when I saw who it was. Steve was my pseudo school father, and a slick bastard. Gambler, womanizer and a low-key rule breaker (smuggled contraband into school, cooked in the hostel, went to town without permission from his guardian, etc) his selection as a school prefect shocked us. His academic brilliance was a perfect mask for his rascally tendencies, though. At least it fooled the teachers who chose him.
"You know Miss Lizzy?” he asked, rhetorically.
Miss Lizzy was a corp member posted to my school, Government College. Head to sole, she did too much just to be remarkable: Awkward-colored hair extensions reaching down past her negligible waist, eyelashes like whips, claw-sized, bright-looking nails, noisy stilettos every day of the week, to keep the list short. Plus this failed attempt at a foreign accent that only gave away her localness. As expected, she wasn't in many other teachers' good books, most of them married women who didn't dress up much. Their taunts and gossips about her appearance wouldn't be so bad if her own self-esteem weren't so fragile.
The principal, Mr. S. S Bala, is this square-shouldered midget with a bushy mustache and few miraculous strands of hair on his head. Someone once said it's all the hair on his head that got transplanted to the top of his upper lip. I had to agree especially when I remembered the concept of deforestation-afforestation the man taught us in Agricultural Science. Anyway, we hardly called him Mr. Bala. The man loved his initials to bits. His face would light up like a toddler offered a favorite candy whenever he heard us call him, Mr. S. S. Only us knew the S. S., referring to his head, was short for Sahel Savanna.
Word on the streets—of our hostel—is that S.S. was getting some. Reportedly bereaved of his young wife six years earlier, who's to blame the man? Not that Lizzy wasn't a willing giver herself. Besides the open, leery looks she tosses the male teachers, a couple truants from my hostel who liked to invade S. S.'s orchard confirmed they always saw her, on Saturdays, from the top of their cashew tree hideout, waltzing to the bald man's lodge during our afternoon prep and only to leave near nightfall, sweaty and shifty-eyed, a button or two undone, her hair an untangled mess. Not blind themselves to the helmsman's escapades, the male teachers now knew to give a wide berth to Miss Lizzy and the females, to tone down the backbiting.
Anyway, let me not meander any further into gist that's not related to this…
"Yes, I do,” I answered Senior Steve.
"Good. Go give this to her.” I looked up from the folded piece of paper and saw her up ahead, her colorful accessories making the rainbow look like monochrome. Beside her was, yes, S.S.
(As I write this, I shake my head for those who run errands for someone else without doing anything to find out what the content of the message is—not even by a sneak peek even if warned not to. You say? Oh, it's the sender of the message we must dread, not the receiver, right? Okay. We'll see.)
So, obedient idiot that I've always been, and naive to a tee, that was how I carried the note from him, stepped out of the line and approached the row of academic staff in front of a student population of about one thousand five hundred to deliver a note I would realize—three wondrous slaps from S.S. later—read:
NICE ASS TODAY, MISS. BUT IS IT REALLY YOURS?
I even added verbally, as Senior Steve specifically told me to, “I'm only asking for a friend.”
Of course, you know he would gladly admit to sending me, right? Or that I would not even need to have to muster the nerve to rat him out?
Don't even ask me for how long I was suspended from school that session. Just know it's longer than Miss Lizzy's hair extension.