“And then?” Mpho asked. I sat down between them. “I told you what to say,” Mpho said. She had the top-button of her shirt undone and she blew air down her chest at intervals.

“You wanted me to ask Papa for money for pads. You are crazy!”

“It works,” Mpho said. “Trust me.” 

“Shame,” Tshiamo said, reaching for my hand, “don’t feel bad about not deceiving your parents.” I was comforted by her cool hand inside mine, but beneath that comfort I worried about lying to my parents.

Besides me, Mpho puff-puff-puffed down her chest. “Now,” she said, “What are you going to wear?” I shrugged my shoulders as if I didn’t care that there were only five weeks before the end of term, before the end-of-term disco; as if I didn’t care about a new outfit for the last school disco of this millennium. Mpho poked my stomach and said, “You know I would lend you something, but we don’t wear the same size.”

I was never sure if Mpho, Tshiamo and I would have been friends had we not been at the same boarding school at the same time, or had we not been the only three girl boarders in our form from north of Dibete: Serowe, Pilikwe, Mahalapye. Mpho had more in common with the other girls who had gone to private English-medium primary schools, girls who went on family vacations to Kasane and Cape Town and Maputo. Tshiamo and I were both on partial bursaries; our parents paid only a fraction of the school fees, but she was the kind of girl that I never would have been friends with back home. She was always brandishing her autobook, as if we had not all outgrown those notebooks we used to fill with song lyrics and magazine cut-outs of our favourite musicians.

What had bound us three from the beginning was the different way we spoke: the way we addressed adults in plural and dropped the l’s from certain words. The other Form Ones in the house made us repeat this sentence over and over and over again: Ke bone ntlole a tlola-tlola mo tshimong ya ditloo ka letlatlana, and as if in chorus, we said it the same way every time, “Ke bone ntole a tola-tola mo tshimong ya ditoo ka letatana.”