musing for fun – caeblogs

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“’It’s only a pencil case’.  Can you believe that’s what she said? ‘It’s only a pencil case’.” Nnenna’s voice when she mimicked Senior Ruth was perfect and even a little comical but I knew it was probably not wise to laugh. I bit the inside of my lip to stop myself from sniggering, after all it really was only a pencil case. The indifferent reception she had received when she brought her case to our prep prefect for the week had echoed our feelings.

“It will turn up,” Ifeatu said thoughtfully “I don’t know anyone else who has a bright green and yellow stripped pencil case like that.” She looked at us for assurance and we all nodded.

“Yes, it really stands out. In short if the person who stole it thinks of bringing it out at all, someone will catch them,” I said.

“Yeah, like they would bring it out. It’s gone forever. My Auntie Imelda gave me that pencil case when I was coming here. If I have lost it, she’ll think I am careless and never give me anything again.”

No one wanted to break it to her that she was actually quite careless because this time she really had been robbed, that is if you over looked the fact that she hadn’t locked her padlock.

“Don’t worry Nnenna, we will pray for God to show us where it is. Or at least for God to touch the heart of the person who took it so they will return it.”

Maybe she was too deflated to argue; Nnenna just nodded at Onyinye and carried on looking sad. I had never seen her look so dejected. The pencil case really must have meant a lot to her, more than any of us had imagined. We were standing at the main tap area waiting to wash our dinner plates. I had not gone back to dorm till late after afternoon prep because of this matter. Everyone’s locker in my class had been searched. Despite not caring about the loss of the pencil case Senior Ruth had at least tried to conduct an investigation of sorts to pacify Nnenna. She had come to the conclusion that if anyone in our class had taken it they had stashed it away in dorm or somewhere else. No use being a thief if you were going to be a stupid thief. It was quite obvious that our lockers would be the first place anyone would check.

By the time I got to dorm I had missed Funke and our water fetching session. She must have seen the commotion going on inside my class when she came to get me after prep. I had wanted to explain what happened to Nnenna but it had to wait till after night prep.

“Tapped? Her pencil case? The green and yellow stripped one?” Funke asked when I told her about the missing item before music practise.

“You know what her pencil case looks like?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yeah, I thought it was pretty ugly. I saw it when I was waiting for you the other day in your class. I wonder why anyone would want to steal it.”

I had wondered the same thing myself before but hadn’t mustered the courage to say it out loud. Good to know I wasn’t the only one who felt that way about it. Ugly or not, the pencil case had enticed someone enough to tap it. Now we had to help Nnenna find it or face the rest of the term listening to her complaining about it.

“I’ll keep an eye out for it,” Funke offered. The choral practise had not begun because the house prefects had decided to start with the soloists today for a change. Funke was trying hard not to pay any attention to Chiamaka’s singing but I could tell she wasn’t disappointed when Chiamaka sang her solo in the wrong key and with the most grating tone we had heard come out of her mouth so far. Her sore throat was getting worse by the day because she wasn’t giving her voice a proper rest. Despite strict instructions not to attempt singing outside of practise, Funke and I had heard her trying to sing on the corridor in dorm many times. She wanted to sing at the competition even more than Funke but her determination was harming her cause.

“Funke, come here,” Senior Rebecca called and Funke scuttled off to the front of the class, abandoning our quiet time passing game of ‘name, animal, place, thing’.

I couldn’t hear what they told her and Funke’s face wasn’t giving anything away but Chiamaka’s did. It was only when Funke walked over to take Chiamaka’s place that I saw the flicker of a smile on her face. Maybe it was because we had just heard Chiamaka murder the song or maybe it was because Funke had been practising like her life depended on it for the last few days, either way when Funke sang that night everyone kept quiet and listened. Eleven days to go and you could see the dilemma written all over the house prefects faces. Chiamaka was their prime choice but at the moment she sounded even worse than Ndidi and there was nothing they could do about it except pray hard. Would they take the role away from her and hand it to Funke on such short notice or at least give her the benefit of the doubt till next week?

“Thank you Funke,” Senior Oluchi said at the end of the song. “Chiamaka did you hear that? That’s the way I want you to sing it next week and better, eh? Me, I don’t have time to waste waiting for you to get better. If you don’t take care of yourself Funke will sing it. You can see for yourself that she can sing it well.”

Chiamaka looked close to tears and when she shot Funke a glance you could see the anger seething towards her. She knew this wasn’t anyone’s fault, not even entirely hers. She hadn’t asked for the sore throat but she hadn’t exactly been the model patient with it.

“Yes Senior,” she muttered in her barely audible rasping voice, still glaring at Funke.

Funke did an amazing job of keeping a blank expression on her face as she walked back to sit beside me. But when she sat down she was barely able to contain herself.

“I can’t believe this, I may really get to do this,” she whispered, struggling to keep the excitement out of her voice. “Isn’t it evil that I really, really want this and the only way I can get it is if Chiamaka gets worse?”

I nodded. It was the truth after all. “As long as you are not praying for her to get worse then it’s not a bad thing. Maybe there could be another way for you to sing without her getting worse.”

“How? If she falls and breaks her leg? Oh my goodness, how evil do I sound now? This competition is turning me into something else.”

There wasn’t much alarm in her voice so I guessed she was not exactly shocked by her behaviour or thoughts. Maybe this had even happened before. Not in the same context obviously but maybe she had wanted something so badly before that she had wished harm on others just to get it. I thought of her parents divorce and her father’s new life and wondered for the first time if she was still praying for him to come back to them.

I didn’t get much thinking time after that. Senior Oluchi called the choral group and we began our much improved singing for the night. After that evening the next couple of days flew past quickly. Saturday inspection always took out such a huge chunk of Friday evening and Saturday morning that the weekend only ever felt like one day. Add constant rehearsals to that and that one day felt like it had evaporated into thin air. Surprisingly Funke did not go on about her chances of taking Chiamaka’s place after that Thursday. I think she may have realised that voicing her enthusiasm over someone else’s pain sounded incredibly selfish. If Chiamaka had been well, joking about her falling ill may have been passable but doing so now would simply expose a side of her Funke wouldn’t want anyone to see.

Nothing exciting happened in class either. Nnenna was still sulking over her loss and getting even more short-tempered by the day. She had no music rehearsals to occupy her mind so all her time was unfortunately dedicated to solving the mysterious case of the missing pencil case. Ifeatu had joined a fellowship and some other church society after midterm, on Onyinye’s prompt, so apart from offering a shoulder to cry on every now and then (and none of us did much crying these days), she spent a lot of her time getting to know her new church friends. Onyinye evidently was one of those new church friends; it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out what she did in her spare time between that Thursday and Monday.

The monotony of it all was boring me half to death. I needed something to break the strange atmosphere that was building around us. Which is why when Funke ran up to my class during short break, slightly out of breath because she had been running from the Integrated Science lab, I was praying that the ecstatic look on her face would yield something exciting for me too. She half leaned, half sat on my desk and beamed at me.

“What? What is it? What happened?”

I tried to push all thoughts of a hospitalised Chiamaka to the back of my head but it was a huge struggle. Read more

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

They say time flies when you’re having fun, if so I must have been having a whale of a time. The midterm break whizzed past in unbelievable speed. One minute I was sat in Daddy’s car heading for Owerri, the next I was sat in the same position but headed in the opposite direction. The break had been worth it, I felt like I could last at least another three weeks behind the school gates without feeling the urge to scream out in frustration.

The only time that I had felt bothered had been when Funke came to my mind. Last Saturday I had no time to think about the consequences of my oversleeping, getting to the stadium in time had been my top priority, everything else faded into the background. Then when I got home the excitement of just being in my room and the joy of tormenting Obioma and seeing Emeka, who was also home for midterm break, had taken over the rest of the weekend. In fact the simple fact that I was outside the school gates was enough to push thoughts of Funke, Nnenna and Ifeatu with all of their mini drama to the back of my mind. I didn’t have too many female friends outside the school, I had never really hit it off with other girls in my primary school because I spent too much time with my brothers. The only girls I got along with were Nkechi Ezeani and Ogbonne Onwumere, both of them had gone off to boarding schools too and unfortunately our midterm breaks did not fall into the same week.

The plan last week had been for Funke to wake me up before she left dorm so we could say our farewells properly. I would have followed her to the stadium for an emotional goodbye and perhaps a final tug at her conscience to return after the break. I had decided not to bring up the issue after that day we had nearly fought over it because it had upset the both of us too much and I had never liked being the source of misery for anyone. I didn’t feel there was any point in annoying either of us if it wasn’t necessary. And then of course in that all important time of necessity I had to mumble a goodbye to her and nod off again. What kind of effort was that? If possible I had succeeded in making her feel less wanted around here. Only God knew the kind of thought process that went on in Funke’s mind, I may not have read anything into it but chances were that she had.

Despite the occasional daily flashbacks and sighs of regret, I managed to enjoy my week immensely. Thankfully there were no tears when I left that time; all of us knew it would be silly really. Christmas was only a few weeks away.

“Make sure you study hard for your tests oh,” Mummy said as I got back into the station wagon for my return journey. “And drink plenty of water, get enough sleep.”

“Bia, bia, bia nuru onu m, nwanne m,” Obioma sang playfully in the background. I had done nothing but practise the choral songs on him for hours for the last three days. I think he now knew the songs better that I did.

“Asi m gi bia,” I sang back.

“Bia nwanne m.” Then he laughed in his silly little boy way and hugged me goodbye. This time he hadn’t pretended he wouldn’t miss me. I was glad there were no tears too. The two extremes were more difficult to deal with.

“Oya get in, we will be late. It is already two o’clock.” Daddy hurried me into the car and we set off on the journey back to Enugu.

I felt a little silly when that same sense of dread that had worked my stomach into a knot last time took over again as we approached the school gates. Surely that was a feeling of apprehension you only got when the unknown was looming before you. This was no longer an unknown so why did I still feel so sick at the thought of re-entering those gates? I had nothing to fear that I knew I couldn’t handle. Except maybe the loss of Funke and the fact that Senior Mary may still be her same old mean self to me now that the favour had been begged and received. What if she decided to make my life a living hell just to show me that riding in a car with Daddy and I had not suddenly made us friends. Or so that I wouldn’t go mouthing off that her aunty lived in a cramped two bedroom flat with three of her children and she must have spent her midterm break camping out on the uncomfortable sofa in their even smaller living room. Not that I had seen the inside of her aunt’s flat or anything like that, all this information came across from her conversation with Daddy and partly from my deductions when we saw the block of flats her aunty lived in.

“Buchi,” a refreshed looking Ifeatu complete with newly shaved head and extra wattage smile ran towards me and gave me a hug as I tried to haul my suitcase, backpack and carton box of provisions down to dorm. Daddy had left, unable to help me with carrying my luggage this time because the school prefects at the gate said he couldn’t. I guess our new-girl status had run its course. “Let me help you. Give me the carton.”

I gladly handed her the carton box and we began our walk towards Dragon House. Ifeatu looked like she had gone away for longer than a week, she couldn’t stop smiling and I could have sworn she had put on a little weight. I wondered if I looked half as radiant as she did.

“I’ve been so bored, I came back since twelve. People only started arriving at around two,” Ifeatu chatted on. That explained her smiles; she was relieved to see a friend. I would have asked why she came back so early but I remembered she had more than enough siblings at home to force her parents to want to send her back to school as early as possible.

“Have the Lagos girls come back?” I asked knowing that she understood what I meant. I didn’t want to ask specifically is she had seen Funke.

“No, someone said their buses usually come in at five.”

We didn’t mention the others for the next hour or so. Instead we chatted about home and all the television programmes we had watched in that short time. I unpacked my clothes and provisions with Ifeatu helping out when I asked. Senior Jane hadn’t arrived yet and neither had Senior Mary.

At about a quarter to five, Senior Jane walked in with Senior Mary following shortly after. Then half an hour later a group of Lagos girls burst into dorm and it finally felt like I had returned to school.

“All these girls making so much noise,” Senior Mary hissed loudly from her corner. So far she had completely ignored me while I helped Senior Jane unpack. That was fine by me, in fact if she could ignore me for the rest of the year I would see that as the perfect reward for services rendered.

“Can you go and check if Funke has come back?” I asked Ifeatu who was now lying on my freshly made bed watching Senior Jane and I stash things away. There was never much to do on the day people came back from home except unpack and gossip. Seeing as she wasn’t doing either, I thought I should put her to good use. After all she was the one who had declared boredom.

Ifeatu jumped off the bunk and went to check. She was back in under a minute shaking her head. Maybe Funke was still dragging her luggage down from the stadium. Maybe we should go and help her, I thought. Or maybe she had decided not to come back and I was just deluding myself. Maybe I should just focus on helping Senior Jane finish unpacking for now. Ifeatu didn’t care enough to go looking for Funke and I didn’t think she wanted to go looking for Nnenna either because it may have come across as clingy. She had certainly learnt her lesson after our big blow up.

Ifeatu went to check again after five minutes, then ten minutes and then even I had the chance to go and check but still no Funke. It was half past five and the girls pouring in from the stadium had reduced to a trickle again. Great. So this was it? This was how that friendship was going to end? I really shouldn’t have overslept. Then as if as an answer to my unspoken questions, the door was once again crowded by a batch of noisy girls, this group was less than the first but they were all Lagos girls I recognised.

“Hmm, that’s how our bus broke down near Onitsha,” one girl was saying to her non-Lagosian friend who was helping her carry her bags. “Thank God there was a mechanic nearby or we would have been there for more than an hour. What would we have done if we had to stay there all night?”

Her friend shrugged as if she didn’t really care but the Lagos girl carried on telling her tale as they walked past my room. That was when I saw her. Funke poked her head through my room door and I heard a shriek of excitement escape from lips. I ran straight for the door and threw my arms around her nearly knocking her over. Ifeatu was right behind me but she was a bit more composed than I was and simply gave Funke a civilised hug. Read more