I dreaded what the disco meant; the end of the year, going back home to my mother, to my friends and the stories they had told about me and Mr. B.

“No,” Mpho said, pulling my head in the opposite direction. “You have to come, we are all going.” She turned to Tshiamo. “Right?”

I looked at Tshiamo in the mirror. She shrugged, her left thumb stuck in her mouth, her book open on her chest. Right then, before I could say anything, the bell rang for supper. Tshiamo scrambled up, grabbing at her towel with her right hand, keeping her pickled finger away from the towel.

“Fish and chips,” she said, as if she needed to tell us. The smell of oil tented the school. Slaughter was almost empty which meant people were already queuing outside the dining hall. Mpho wiped her hands on the towel draped over my shoulders.

“I will find you there,” I said. I sat looking at myself in the mirror even after they had left. My hair was sticking up towards the ceiling. The metal teeth of the Afro-picker poked my scalp. Its small black fist peeked above my hair. I looked like a creature from outer space. I tried to imagine myself in Serowe, waking up in my own bed, the world returned to its ordinariness. Down the corridor, someone warbled My Heart Will Go On at the top of her voice. 

Throughout the year, we had spent afternoons in the room I shared with Mpho, dancing and moon walking, shrieking to the latest hits when Mpho bought the CDs. Other times, quieter times, in low and reverent voices, we ushered each other into the lives we led outside the boarding house. Mpho just knew that her father was cheating on her mother, Tshiamo had wet her bed until she was ten and, sometimes, she worried that the stress of tests and exams would return her to this humiliation. Me, I told them that I was saddened by my body and the weight it was gaining. I wasn’t though. Not really. I hoarded my real secrets, like treasure for some unknown future use. Some were small, like the fact that I hadn’t been to Serowe all year; that my parents had been sending me to my aunt’s in Molepolole over school holidays. Some I recognised as minor transgressions against Mpho and Tshiamo, dark thoughts fuelled by a competitive streak, which burrowed inside me sometimes, dark and diligent as bugs, even though, from the outside, the three of us seemed good friends. I still wished, in vain, to be better than Mpho at everything: athletics, Biology, English Literature, French, Geography, History, music classes, netball, school plays, the school variety show. Yet I helped her study and at night I stayed up with her beyond curfew, and in the dark, we judged the merits of the boys she was interested in, as if we were gods weighing up the sins of hapless mortals. 

At night, before lights out, Tshiamo gathered with the other church-going girls to read the Bible and pray. I thought her attempts to pray herself into God’s good graces, just in case the world really did end, were obvious and futile. As if praying could stem the passage of time, as if it could stop the world from falling apart if that was its destiny. But sometimes I joined her and the girls in the downstairs sitting area for prayers. Night after night, I sat in that circle of bowed heads, my contempt rearing its antennae, and for that contempt I felt guilt.

There were bigger matters I kept from my friends: the names that littered my past. Orange, Slut, Vaseline, and the stories that had given birth to these names, improbable stories about me and Mr. B. I also saw no reason to let the two know about my mother’s schemes for my redemption. I stayed up nights wondering if Mpho and Tshiamo could tell I carried these secrets, worrying about the kinds of things they kept from me.

A week before the disco, Mpho and I took a Broadhurst Route 5 up to the FET circle. At the circle, we got off to walk to the new mall. Our umbrella was useless against the heat. Even as dark rain clouds gathered, the sun shone fiercely through the clouds. The heat from the soil throbbed through my thin flip-flops, and I felt like it would singe the eyelashes off my face and the hairs from my arms. Sweat, sweat everywhere. Between my breasts, sealing my T-shirt to my back; sweat in the crooks of my arms.