“Herh! Kodzo!”
”You dey chop under school roof?!” the dorm monitor bellowed.
‘School roof’… How did these stupid terms creep into Motown?
There is an actual rule that you can’t eat in any space that has a roof (school roof) apart from the dining halls and chop box rooms. Like… why? Is eating out in the open a skill every student needs to learn?
“Go carry your scrubbing brush. You go scrub the dorm right now!”
“Kodzo! Kodzo! You’ll be late!” A new voice. Distant, like an echo.
Suddenly, everything faded into blackness.
Ugghh! I opened my eyes. It was mommy.
I let out a sigh.
Reopening day. No wonder I was dreaming about scrubbing dorms.
I rolled over and planted my face in my pillow. It was still harmattan: the weather was deliciously cold, and nowhere was safe but my bed.
“Mmm mmm mmm-mmm mmmm.” The pillow muffled my words.
I tried again. “I don’t want to go.”
It turns out this was one of those days where you just don’t mess with mommy.
“I don’t have time for this”. And with that, she grabbed my leg and dragged me out of bed.
I never looked forward to school. At all.
It gave me this queasy, uneasy, bugs-in-my-tummy feeling, complete with a loss of appetite. The ‘ampedu’ in me was not interested in studying. Then there was the countless rules that rivaled the Old Testament. For example, I had to cut my hair.
Now, long before rasta men started taking Motown to court, students already hated compulsory haircuts. But it couldn’t be helped. The rule was the rule.
If you made the mistake of not cutting your hair before arriving in school, there’s a barber on the West called Apaa Dede. Every student who gets to Motown with bushy hair is sent to him before being allowed into their house.
If Apaa Dede touches your head, your life will never be the same. Nobody ever went to him and came back with a straight hairline.
My actual barber was a friendly guys, but not that day. That day, he was the enemy.
“Lower?” He asked.
“Lower”, I confirmed, watching my nice vacation afro disappear in my reflection in the mirror.
Better here than at the hands of Apaa Dede.
I shifted my mind to a more comforting thought. Akua.
The boy in the mirror smiled back at me at the thought. A very foolish smile.
Young love, eh?
The Arrival
The second term of form 1 is arguably more of a headache than the first: there is no grace period; you cannot use “I did not know” as an excuse, and your course syllabus begins to get tougher. In fact, it’s worse if you enjoyed your Christmas break: you’ll literally feel like you’re being moved into a concentration camp.
Not fun, chale. Not fun.
I was going to be showering with cold water during the harmattan for the first time in my life. I was not excited.
Some people felt they needed a few more days at home. That, my friends, was a silly decision. You see, we had been warned at closing assembly the previous term by one of the assistant headmistresses, “Any student who fails to report on the first day of school will undergo two weeks of internal suspension.”
This internal suspension, inte (pronounced in-teh) as we called it, was not a joke. All defaulters were prevented from attending class for two whole weeks within which they did nothing but weed.
Oh, I’m sorry, not just weed, some were made to chop down actual trees and break ant-hills.
It didn’t matter whether you were a day late or a month late, every latecomer would weed for two weeks.
If you absolutely had to come to school late, you had two options:
- Get a doctor’s report saying you reported late for health reasons. Or…
- Go BIG — come to school like three weeks late. I mean, what’s the point of being punished for two weeks for a two-day crime?
The return to Aggrey House was a bitter experience.
Once I saw the dead lawns my mind was flooded with memories of carrying gallons of water morning and evening.
You wanted to shower? Gallon.
You wanted to wash? Gallon.
You wanted to poop? You guessed it. Gallon.
My dad parked in front of the house as usual. This time, there were no form 2 students to carry our things. You had to go grab a couple of your friends to help you.
Of course, Smizzle and Eben were there to collect their house development funds, which, surprise surprise, did not seem to be leading to any development.
After the sweaty work of lifting chopbox and trunk to their respective locations, I got a small wad of cash from my old man and then watched a little sadly as he drove off.
Another three months of torment, I thought to myself.
Later That Night
DUM! DUM! DUM! DUM! DUM! DUM! The big ol’ school bell rang from the bell tower. it was time to head to the dining hall.
The rule for the first dining of every term is “Eat as little as possible”.
It’s the one time you can waste food and get away with it. Heck, if you eat from the dining hall on the first night, people might think you are homeless.
Most students are wise enough to have their last supper and then some before they come to school. If you know the Bible story, it’s a ‘five wise virgins’ thing. Some would go as far as to pack and store home-chow to be aired throughout the night and eaten the next morning.
If you wanted to go gung-ho, you could skip dining all together and no one would bat an eyelid, but that would mean missing out on vacation gossip. Who had travelled where? Who had been to which party? Who had crashed their parents’ car? You know, important stuff, just not so important that I have to bore you with the details now.
Once dining was over, Obodai and I headed back to my dorm. He had saved some Papye fried rice which we were going to destroy.
The food was so good, we didn’t talk for a while. We just stuffed our faces amidst and let out the occasional sigh of contentment.
So I was very surprised when he broke the silence with “So you call am?”
“Huh?” I replied.
He persited. “You call am?”
“Mmm-mmm. Who?” I asked. I was focused on a piece of chicken wedged in a tricky spot between two bones.
“Akua.”
I stopped chewing. “Ermmm, yes and no.”
Obodai face-palmed, like I was the biggest idiot in the history of idiots. “Explain.”
“Sooooooo”, I began, “you knoooooow, eeeeeerm…”
“Hey, hey! Cut to the chase.” I don’t even know why he was getting so worked up.
“Alright. Sheesh. Relax for me.”
Obodai met me with a blank stare.
I continued. “So I called, okay, I called. You know I don’t have a phone, so I used my mum’s phone when she was not looking.”
“And?” Obodai asked impatiently.
“Well, a macho man picked. I think it was her dad, and-”
“What?!” Obodai cut me off. “How did you know it was her dad, much less a macho man?”
“The voice was husky, okay?” I shot back.
“Husky? That’s all you’ve got? Husky?” Obodai seemed genuinely disappointed in me.
“Yes. Husky.” That really was all I had.
“And then what?” he asked, still shocked at my “ballslessness”, for lack of a more apt adjective.
“And then I said ‘Sorry, wrong number’ and cut the call.”
By this point, even I was embarrassed for me.
“Kodzo, sometimes you make me sick, you know? Please tell me you tried calling again.”
“Ermmm, nope? It’s my mum’s phone la.” That was my best explanation.
“But the vacation lasted a whole month. You couldn’t call on Christmas, or even New Year’s? Did you even leave a text?”
“So that the macho man could identify me and hunt me down for chasing his daughter? No please.”
At this point Obodai was dumbfounded. He had not anticipated having to process this amount of stupidity on the first day of a new term.
“You need help. You know that?” I could see that he meant it.
“No, I need a phone.”
“And that would solve the ‘macho man’ problem?” He actually motioned with his fingers when he said ‘macho man’. “You know what? I’m done with you.”
He got up and walked off, mumbling something about me needing diving intervenion for my love-life.
I was left alone with my thoughts and one last piece of chicken.
He did have a point. Husky didn’t have to mean macho. I mean, I knew girls with husky voices and they didn’t look like they could beat me or anything.
I forced the thought out of my mind to focus on the other matter at hand; the last piece of chicken.
Let tomorrow worry about itself, I reassured myself. The words fo Jesus. If they were good enough for my Lord, they were good enough for me. And then I sank my teeth into the last piece of chicken.
“Herh! Kodzo!”
“Are you eating under school roof?! Go carry your scrubbing brush. You go scrub the dorm right now!”
YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!!
* Special thanks to Julia for her input on the original version of this comeback story.