A friend once told me, at some point in everyone’s life, you have to know what type of human being you’re/ You’re either “A nice person trying to be an asshole” or “An asshole trying to be nice”. This decision will go a long way in forming your future personality
Sometime during the school year in 1997, I was in JSS 2 or JSS 3, I was seriously trying to find that out. I was the conformer for every rule in school. Seriously an uninteresting kid, just there nothing to separate me from a crowd asides maybe my oversized school uniform that my mum organized for me.
Nigerian mums right? She was in no mood to be buying new uniforms every school year. So, she had the tailor beside her shop sow like 3 sizes over my regular size for me. We didn’t buy the uniform from the school as well, overpriced shit. Who needs overpriced school uniform those thieving bastards are selling when you can easily get the material at crowd market at either Iyana Ipaja, Agege or “e-worse-pass-as-e-bad”, go to Eko Idumota, if no one around the second tier markets sells it.
I didn’t talk much in class as well, I was just existing. I barely got into noise maker list because I hate the whole flogging thing moreover my crush, Joy would then see me cry, back then when I was “chesting” cain, I was mainly doing it so I don’t have to cry in front of Joy, that is something I would never recover from. So, it’s a two-pronged approach, which includes, one, try as best as possible to not to get “cained”, and if that fails, summon the spirits of all your village people to chest the flogging.
Joy was pretty, and always donning a super clean uniform, we spoke once in a while but then and even till now, I’m a shy person so the majority of our conversations where I freely expressed myself were solely in my dreams, the ones in real life had my heart doing palpitations, ordinary to borrow note from her. I would begin to stammer despite the fact she was cool, and she would stare me in the eyes, very unsettling for sure.
Joy wasn’t the only person I was crushing on, my next door neighbor Funke was also someone that I really liked as well but that had so many complications with it, her brother was my friend (Remeber the bro code of not dating your friend’s sister?] and a really good one too.
Unlike my own small nuclear family, theirs was like a football team, there was like ten to twelve of those motherfuckers. For some weird reason, I let it slip to my friend that I liked his sister and he laughed at me so hard, I managed to keep it together by laughing as hard as he laughed when he told him, the humiliation for a shy and timid person like me didn’t end there.
The next time, I went to their flat, with the battalion all at home on that unfortunate day, they all laughed at me, I laughed with them but I was weeping inside of me with all this embarrassment that was running down on me. Eventually, Funke and I would find some common ground later.
All of my crushing on Joy was all in my mind, because of my best friend in class, Ola who was quite the opposite of me in every sense of the word. He was from a well to do background than I was, so every term, he had new uniforms that fitted him, but that’s not even a thing.
Let’s not lie, even as kids, we all knew Ola was a fine boy, we were young but dude was good looking. Like I said, I’m boring so how did I get a best friend? Easy.
Growing up, I was very much a church boy, Dad was an elder in the church, mum was a deaconess, and the rest of us kids were in the choir. So, we were the ideal Christian value family. I like music and could play a couple of musical instruments.
During free periods, or even boring classes, I would excuse myself to go use the bathroom, then go to the music room, where senior students were having their classes, playing music, then we would go and watch them play music. He could play the piano while I was fairly good with the drums. So, we would jam a bit when it was our turn for music practicals. We essentially became friends because of musical interest and then things grew from there.
We were also part of the school band, so we had a mutual interest that we would talk about in class, and that’s how we became friends, I really liked him because he was cool, he invited me to his house a couple of times, I met his parents, there was this time when he invited me to his birthday party.
I told my mum about it but knew she wouldn’t be home when I was going there so I wore my Christmas cloth there. When you’re a kid and come from a family where your Christmas clothes were bought several months in advance to that season of the year, you know not to fuck with that arrangement, but here I was, trying to impress Ola, to be able to look the part of other people at the part. So, I rocked the outfit to this party. All already went well at the party but the colossal disaster happened on my way home.
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