I shared a room with Mpho and had met her first, when she sat on her bed, hemmed in by packs of sanitary pads, toothpaste and roll-on deodorant, all still in their plastic packaging. Her posters – Michael Jackson, and Aaliyah, – were already stuck to the wall, so she sat cross-legged, tapping at her braids as she watched her mother fold her clothes into the drawers built into the bed frame. She was much thinner and darker than her mother. At my own mother’s prompting, I bent my knee and extended my hand in greeting to the older woman and she said to her daughter, “See how respectful she is?” 

“Me too,” Mpho had said, leaning over and rifling her fingers through her suitcases, as though she was bored: “I am respectful.” I had watched her in silence, and wanted my hair to pour over my shoulder the way her braids did. Her mother laughed, and I saw that the mischief in both their faces came from their slight overbites. 

When they left the room, my mother had handed me a P100 note. I put it under my pillow, but my mother took it and hid it in my underwear bag. My face burned, watching her dig into my panties. After, she sat next to me on my bed and took my hand in hers.

“Sadi,” she said. 

She cradled my face in her hands. “Botlhogile,” she called me by my grandmother’s name. “Remember whose name you carry.”

I knew she was referring to the stories about me and Mr. B. I wondered if she could feel the heat of shame burning my face. Her voice, when she reiterated how I should conduct myself so far from home, was just as solemn as when she bent her head to pray. When she was done, she smiled and opened her arms for a hug. I wanted to win her back, but I still felt uncomfortable in her arms; in the same inexplicable way as when a couple on TV caught the two of us off-guard with their moaning kisses and neither of us had escaped to the kitchen in time.

Outside, a girl ran past my new room, singing “My Heart Will Go On” at the top of her voice.

“Let me go,” Mama said.

I had watched her leave and heard the door clicking into place as she closed it behind her. I lay back on the bed. Out there, somewhere, my mother was walking away into Gaborone, leaving me, here, in the city, so far from Serowe, from Papa and her, from the friends I had known all my life, from the past year and all its shames. 

Our school was in the centre of the city, sequestered behind high security walls and tall trees. Three security guards manned the school gate and noted all the boarders’ departures and arrivals. The girls’ boarding house was a red-bricked double-story, shrouded from view by the canopy of morula, sycamore and knob-thorn trees in front of it. Girls from years past, whose initials were still etched into our study desks and whose faces smiled at us from the walls, had christened it “Slaughter House”, a prison within which time obeyed its own rules. Depending on the hour, our night guard, who we all called Uncle, could be seen sitting near the door, his head leaned against the saddle of his bicycle, which was always propped against the wall. During the day, winter or summer, Uncle’s black-and-grey blanket was folded into his chair. Sometimes Slaughter was riotous with the sound of girls singing and laughing and ooohing at the TV. Other times, Slaughter was quiet, with only the bells that governed our lives lifting the heavy silence within its walls.