“Your father is not here yet,” she said. “He’s probably…I don’t know where he is. I just arrived myself, and I just put the meat on the stove. I wish I could rest my feet a little, but there is so much to do. Oh, I am so lonely for you here, Sadi.”  

My heart stirred with hope. 

“The first thing, when you come home,” she said, “you have to get measured for your tunic, your baptism robe. Then you will see, everything will be different.”

“Ok, Mama,” I said. I wanted to believe that being baptised could restore me in her eyes, but sometimes I felt like my mother had given up on this world entirely, that she was preparing to rise up to another world, into another life altogether.

That night, I watched Tshiamo and Mpho get ready for the disco. Mpho glimmered in a red mini-dress and gold hoop earrings; Tshiamo was fresh in blue denim dungarees and a white tee. They slathered on foundation, lipstick, mascara. I watched them smack their lips together and spritz ‘Exclamation!’ on to their necks and wrists. 

Again they begged me to come, but I shut the door after them and crawled into bed. I wished that I was anywhere else in the world. I willed myself to disappear into the darkness behind my closed eyes, but the low murmur of music coming from the hall kept me awake. Footsteps stomped in and out of the house, girls all giddy and running up and down the stairs, shrieking “My Heart Will go On” at the top of their voices.

Finally, the house was silent.

Upstairs, in the common room, I watched TV by myself. An advertisement warned viewers about the Y2K bug, which, the TV said, would return the world to a foolish time. Power plants spluttering into darkness, aeroplanes swooping from the sky and crashing into homes and schools and churches; traffic lights would blink into death, sending cars screeching and slamming into one another. I wondered how easily this millennium would give way to the next. Perhaps the old millennium had hardened into a husk that would peel away and reveal the new one. Perhaps there would be a crack, a loosening, like when we were young, and our teeth shook in their gums and fell out. When we threw them up to the roof and asked the mmankgodi to bring us new ones.

I imagined the earth in an endless sunlit freefall, as if in a nightmare, nobody sure of quite where we would fall. Or perhaps rising into the sky, our clothes flapping in the wind. Maybe the bug would return us to a past, my old friends and I all back together again, practicing dance moves behind a classroom. I wondered where I would be as the new millennium revealed itself. Perhaps at Metsimasweu, with dozens of girls like me, all wearing white robes, fanned around a bend in the river. Perhaps I would have waded in by then, the cold water lapping away at my disgrace. , I would be submerged, the pastor’s hand pressing my head under, warping, then revealing, the vivid sounds of the world. Once, twice, three times.

Maybe the millennium would slip into the new like night into day, with no announcement or ceremony, requiring no more preparation than being alive.

Outside, the music suffused the dark air. I tiptoed past Uncle, who slept with his head against the wall, his blanket draped over him even in the heat. I walked toward the hall. A kissing couple on a bench outside the Bursar’s office disentangled and waited for me to shuffle past. I could feel the music humming in my chest. I was going to wade in amongst those ecstatic bodies and find Mpho and Tshiamo. We were going to dance with each other, just like any girls anywhere else in the world. We would move, our bodies oblivious of the real world and what of it awaited us. I was going to close my eyes and move with the night, full of grace, expanding and swelling around me, swallowing me whole.