We all have different kind of friends. We have best friends who we share everything with and we have friends who are just there for other purposes in our lives. Like any other teenager, Zethu loved her friends and would do anything for them. It was as if she was under a spell.

Zethu had three friends that she loved dearly: Lelo, Musa and Olu. Musa was her best friend she told her all her secrets, there is not anything she did not know about Zethu. However, Zethu knew nothing about Musa, she never shared her deepest secrets with Zethu. Zethu did not mind at all because she felt free when she was with Musa.

She would drop everything she was doing in the house if one of her friends called or arrived; this did not sit well with her mother. She would leave the whole day without even doing house chores. She would come home from school, drop her bag and not even change her uniform, especially on Fridays, and off she went. It was so sad to watch her prioritising friendship over her schooling and chores.

Zethu and Musa were both doing grade 10 and her other two friends were in a lower grade, it was obvious that their schooling was not the same. Her mother would shout at her she would ignore her, in her eyes she thought that she did nothing wrong. She would talk about her mother to Musa.

“Don’t listen to her. Your mother is just being dramatic, all mothers always are dramatic,” Musa would say.

Zethu would then go home and respond to her mother, she would say, “It’s my life, don’t worry about me.”

Her mother decided to let her do whatever she wanted to. She was tired of always shouting at Zethu, the best way to learn about life is to learn the hard way.

The time came for final exams, Zethu had previously failed her exams. She lied about not receiving her report card to her mother. When Zethu’s mother asked Musa about the reports, she would tell the truth that Zethu had burnt them. Zethu’s mother knew this secret, but she did not tell Zethu, because of all the stories she would tell her.

She wrote her final exams and decided not to go fetch the results on the last day of school. When the school gates opened the next year, her mother went to school, without Zethu’s knowledge and found out that she had failed. When Zethu came back from school that first day, she went to her mother and apologized for not listening to her all this time. Unfortunately, it was too late because she failed herself and her mother. She felt so sad and disappointed in herself.

The fact that she was going to repeat a class for the first time in her life did not sit well with her at all but it was too late. She was so furious that Musa passed and left her there alone.

“How did you pass? We were both always on the street together?” she asked.

“I had time to play and time to study, unlike you,” Musa said.

It was very sad that Musa did not warn her so-called best friend earlier, but life had to go on. Zethu picked herself up and learned from all the mistakes she had made. Her mother was happy that Zethu would learn from her mistake and never repeat them again, but she was also sad that she had to learn the hard way.

Sometimes, as young people, we think our parents don’t love us when they correct us. We want them to leave us alone, because they made the same mistakes we did. We don’t see or understand that their correction is actually their way of protecting us so that we do not make the same mistakes they made. It becomes very sad when we don’t listen to them and end up needing their help to deal with the consequences.

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