My world was changing again. I could feel it. It was in Mpho and Tshiamo’s lowered voices, how they fluttered somewhere above my head, beyond the blankets I had entombed myself in the moment we returned to Slaughter. How, when the supper bell rang, they left without saying a word to me. I could feel it in the return of that terrible loneliness, of Mr. B not looking at me in class. Of being severed from my friends. Boys I had never spoken to approached me, giggling, asking if it was true that I had been wearing orange underwear the first time we did it. Asking if it was true that he had had to use a whole jar of Vaseline before It could go in.

Mpho and Tshiamo brought back macaroni-tuna pasta and an apple on a paper plate. They coaxed me to eat, their voices low, as though I were a hospital patient. I sat up and picked at the tuna, feeling as exhausted as if I had been working in the fields the whole day. Not even Mpho’s forced chatter about what Tabona had been wearing could cheer me up.

“So,” Tshiamo said finally, wonder in her voice, “you slept with a teacher?”

“No,” I said. My body had suddenly assumed its exhaustion from the year before: the same breaking into tears at a moment’s notice, the same weakness in my limbs, as though I were recovering from an illness. My chest ached at the memory of my friends no longer talking to me, of my mother not believing me when I told her the truth.

“It was just a story those guys made up about me.”

Mpho and Tshiamo did not respond, so I went on to tell them the story, how my period had come, how I had stayed behind in class and Mr. B helped me, how the story had swelled and engulfed the whole school as the days progressed, growing bigger and more bizarre the longer it went on, until it reached people outside of school. 

Until it reached my mother. 

That is the story I told them.

“I swear,” I said, crossing my fingers, “on my grandmother’s grave.”

I did not tell them that I had often wondered, sitting in his classes, about Mr. B’s life: who cooked for him, who washed his clothes, who discussed the news with him at night? I did not tell them that I felt a thread connecting the two of us, in his deferring to me when nobody put their hands up for answers. How sometimes I did not put my hand up and waited for him, knowing that he would turn around and nod at me. When he did, I would rise above my classmates and speak only to him and he would nod and write what I said on the chalkboard, while I sat down and tried to contain the giddiness in my chest. I did not tell them that on that day my period surprised me, I had waited as my classmates rushed outside. I had attempted to clench my legs together and walk out, but he had called my name. He had reached for his desk drawer and extracted a toilet roll and handed it to me with no ceremony or embarrassment, pointing at the storeroom towards the back of the class. The storeroom was cool.