Previously on Chopbox Life:
There really was nothing to say. My face felt hot. My eyes stung. Somehow, and I don’t know how, the tears never came. My mind flew in a thousand different directions, and I lost track of time.
I don’t know how long it was, but after some time, I felt her soft hands open mine, and she stuck a folded piece of paper into my palm—her last note to me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. I- I didn’t know how.”
She continued, “I’ve had a little more time to process it, so I wrote some of my thoughts. You can read it in your own time.”
I watched for what felt like an eternity as the young lady walked down the aisle of the dining hall to the door all the way at the far end. Each step so graceful.
When she got to the door she turned around one more time and waved at me with that same sweet, sad smile. Then just like that, she stepped out of the door and was gone… along with a piece of my heart.
The Note
(You’ll have to forgive the excessive shorthand.)
Hey Kodzo,
Ummm… where do I start?
I think “sorry” is the best place 2 begin. So yeah, I’m sorry. Like really really sorry.
I don’t even noe what 2 say. I wanted 2 tell u, but it neva felt lyk de ryt tym. It always felt lyk I was going 2 spoil de mood, so I just kept quiet de whole tym.I hope u can 4give me.
Take care, ok?
xoxo
AkuaAqua
Spoil the mood? Spoil the mood??? Liwin said it best, “Painsssss, Painsssss, P-E-Double-T-E, Painssss!”
Once you get past the childish shorthand, the message produced the same effect as a sledgehammer to the heart! The “xoxo” at the end koraa was annoying me.
I mean, what do you do when your almost-girlfriend ditches you and leaves the country? No, seriously, what do you do? Tell meeeee. 
That vacation was a bag of mixed feelings; I would be walking about, feeling okay, living my best life, then I would see something that reminded me of her (like dimples 
) and then I would shout “Heeeerh!”. It was rough, chale, it was rough.
Nice girl that she was, she tried to check on me in those first few weeks through Facebook. It just made things worse. It was like I was not allowed to eat, but waakye was checking whether I was hungry. Messed up, right?!
So I asked her to stop. On the night she finally left the country I was not even aware. There was no point fighting, and so like Elsa I let it go.
New Year, New Me?
Eventually, the two months of vacation rolled by, and with the first week of September came a new term, and my eventual return to the boarding house. This time, however, I was going to be in form 2! I was going to be someone’s senior! I was finally going to… hol’ up. There was a problem:
You see, back in 2010, under the administration of His Excellency Agya Atta, there was a change in policy from the then-recently-ended Kuffuor administration regarding education. President Kuffuor had switched high school from a 3-year program to a 4-year program, and Agya Atta had switched it back to three years. So now, those previously in form 3 were in form 4, and many schools in Ghana did not yet have the capacity to accommodate a fourth year group, so the new form 1’s, the people supposed to be enrolled to assume all the suffering of the then-current form 2’s, aka ‘us’, would not be entering the boarding houses until November! November la!
Let me be calming down. In simple English, we were not anyone’s seniors in any practical terms. We were still going to do donkey work for another two months while the new first-year students attended school as day students until Motown bought enough beds. Herh!
So we arrived on campus, and nothing had changed. Nothing. Oh wait, that wicked assistant house prefect had written the SAT’s and left the country to attend university abroad. Good riddance.
Since nothing had really changed, I can spare you the boredom of the details of our return. The usual stuff still held, bad haircuts, and latecomers being subjected to internal suspension… you know, the usual.
The next morning held some surprises for us in the Aggrey chapel though…
New Teachers
It was like the school had gone on a hiring spree. A host of new teachers was introduced the next morning at our first assembly. So many names, so many subjects, and an absolute lack of interest on our part as students. Okay that’s not entirely true, the girls began to swoon over two new male teachers.
The first was a chemistry teacher coming in to do his national service. I hereby christen him “Macho-Hydroxide”. He was very young and kept really fit. I actually saw Macho-Hydroxide working out in the school gym once, and the guy was ripped. If teachers were allowed to take off their shirts in class, it’s safe to assume that no girl in Motown would have passed chemistry ever again.
The second… hmmmm, you won’t believe this… the second new teacher the girls were losing their marbles over was the new catholic chaplain! Yup, those dirty little girls were developing the hots for Rev. Father G, a catholic priest! Shift, Mother Mary, the SHS slay queens want your son in their very irreligious daydreams.
Fascinating? Cringe-worthy? I don’t know. I just found it hilarious. You should have heard them giving him fans when he was introduced. Chairman couldn’t stop blushing la.
Imagine how awkward confession would be. Especially since there were no confession booths in Motown, so the catholics had their confessions face-to-face with the priest.
Random catholic girl:
Father, forgive me for I have sinned. I have been having inappropriate thoughts about a man of God.
Rev. Father G:
A few more people are noteworthy: Unstoppable, Geographer, Young Money, and Gomzeh, to name a few. I don’t know if I’ll have time to uncover the origin stories of all these names. Some certainly will come up naturally, but on that day, and in that moment, they were not memorable people.
Unstoppable and Geographer, were assigned to science 4, so I can talk a little bit more about them today, but first I need to talk about Rev B’s upgrade.
Rev B was a Methodist reverend minister, and greatly feared on the campus. “Rev B is coming”, was not what you wanted to hear when you were doing the wrong thing.
There were rap songs about her. One song in particular featured the names Jet Li and Bruce Lee in reference to her. I refuse to drop the lyrics here, because even now, more than ten years later, I am still afraid, and nothing you can say will change my mind. 
Anyway, over the course of the vacation, the Methodist church had conferred on Rev B the high title of Very Reverend.
“What’s a ‘Very Reverend’?” you may be asking. Beats me. But I have concluded that such a person should be at least a little more Reverend than a basic Reverend. I have no idea how ‘Reverendness’ is measured, so as you can tell, I will not be able to answer any further questions on this topic. What matters is that she who was once only Rev B, was now Very Rev B, and that was already more Rev B than we could handle.
Ooooh, maybe by now she’s Most Rev B. Now that’s an interesting thought. 
Okay, back to Unstoppable and Geographer.
The Lesser of Two Evils
For context, science 4, my class gave students the option of swapping out biology for geography as an elective. Because we were doing high school for four years instead of three, we were now about to start our electives, I did not care for either biology or geography, but I chose to be in science 4 so that at the very least I would have a choice. The reason I tell you this is because Unstoppable was the new biology teacher for science 4, and Geographer, obviously, was the geography teacher.
This is a good place to mention that Geographer got his name on day 1, and Unstoppable got his name a year later. Geographer wore a t-shirt with the words “Geographer” written on it for his entire first week in Motown. It was like the guy was begging us to give him that name, and we obliged.
Unstoppable came in looking like a nice chill guy; we would know his wild side a year later when he was offered the position of housemaster. As for geographer, he came in as an over-zealous low-enforcer, and rather turned into a nice guy a year later after he was made a housemaster. It was like they were the opposites of each other.
Initially, I decided to do geography—I had heard horror stories about biology—but I changed my mind within ten minutes of encountering Geographer. Here’s how it happened:
In science 4, biology and geography share the same slots on the timetable, so biology students leave at that time to have their lessons in the biology lab. As the biology students were leaving for their first elective biology class, Geographer walked in. The dude was obviously “honam pɛ job”. Apparently, he was looking for ways to prove himself to the administration as a hardworking person so they would accelerate his movement out of Katanga, the rundown male teacher quarters, and move him into one of the bungalows as a housemaster. So he was always looking for work to force students to do, with the hope that some administrators would see all his hard work; and by “his hard work” I mean our hard work.
There were about fifteen of us left in the classroom who had decided to do geography. As soon as geographer entered the class he pointed to three of us at the back and said, “Come out here. Hurry up! Hurry up!”
I thought we were in trouble for something.
We followed him outside to the back of the form 1 block, where there was a pile of dried up branches from some tree pruning that had gone on a few days prior to the reopening of school.
“Gather the branches and put them in the bin”, he commanded gruffly, as if we owed him money and this was payback.
Not a good start for human relations, but it was just a few branches, right?
We gathered the branches and stuffed them in the bin which was propped up against the wall, but the bin was soon full, and there were still some branches on the floor. The branches were a bit prickly, so it wasn’t fun work, but now the bin was full, and we began to dust off our hands to get back into the classroom. We had done our part, hadn’t we? I mean, the people who cut the branches themselves obviously had a reason for not stuffing them into the bins themselves.
“Hey hey, where are you going?” he demanded.
I shot him a look that said, “You can’t possibly be talking to me.” But with my mouth I said, “The bin is full.”
That should have been enough, right? We weren’t about to use classroom time to search for another bin to gather his precious branches. Even Palm Sunday wasn’t this stressful.
He thought about what I’d said for a few seconds, then he said, “Don’t be lazy! Press them down with your hands.”
This time it was Archie, my desk-mate who replied, “But sir, they are prickly.”
“What is prickly? Don’t be lazy!” the man retorted. He stepped forward to demonstrate how to press it down, and just as we expected they pricked him and he gave up the demonstration.
This time, the look I gave him said “Sagurrrr!”
He thought for a few more seconds and then looked at me like he’d just figured out the cure for AIDS. “You, you’re tall. Use your legs.”
Now that was the dumbest thing I’d heard all day, and it was just 8 AM; but I needed to get this guy out of my hair.
The bin was quite tall; about midway up my torso, so there was no way I was going to be able to raise my leg that high. We had to tilt it, and as we tilted it the branches began to fall out. While I pushed down with my sandaled foot, the branches began to scratch my exposed leg. I complained, Geographer called me lazy, and after five minutes of this, we still couldn’t get all the branches into the bin, but he seemed satisfied with the amount we got in.
I won’t lie, midway through that ordeal I thought about taking my foot out of the bin and sticking it up his… well, as you can tell I was not enthused.
As soon as we were done, he asked us to get into the classroom for that first geography lesson. As soon as we entered the classroom I grabbed my newly assigned geography notebook, cancelled the word “Geography” and replaced it with “Biology”.
I walked out of the classroom and headed for the biology lab. I’d had more than enough nonsense in my first ten minutes of meeting this guy. NO WAY I was going to spend the next three years sitting in his class.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I ended up studying biology in Unstoppable’s class instead of geography like I had initially planned. I was one petty little brat.
PS.
I know I still haven’t explained how Unstoppable became Unstoppable. That story will be told another day. But that day is not today.
It sure feels good to be back!