The rest of the week passed more or less like my first day. Some of the teachers gave us quizzes to find out where we stood. At break time if DJ and Gbabladza did not come for me I remained in the classroom and played my videos of Daddy.

At break time in my second week a girl walked up to me. “Would you like to join the school choir? We meet once a week, on Fridays, during extracurricular period.”

“I can’t sing.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I thought I couldn’t sing either till I joined.”

“I really can’t sing. I go off key and . . .”

She was grinning. “Oh, you’re one of those people?”

“Uh huh,” I grinned back.

“Aren’t you going for break?”

I shook my head.

“Then go and ‘throw me’. I want a bofrot.”

I got up and followed her out of the door. I had noticed her the previous week only because Sefakor had called her ‘Alligator’. Sefakor Deku was the girl who kept calling me Dr Blight. Her sidekicks were Maureen Owusu and Nadya

Frimpong.

“I’m Allison Gator, by the way.”

“Hi,” I said.

Allison was a talker. One of those people who could talk for hours and hours without getting tired. All I had to do was keep saying ‘Mmm hmm‘’ or ‘Oh’ even when I wasn’t paying attention.

“What did you sign up for? For extracurricular activity I mean,” she asked.

“Ceramics.”

“Ceramics? Why do you want to get dirty?”

“I saw some nice pots on the way here. I’d like to learn how to make some.”

“Last year I was on the editorial board. This year I’m in the choir.”

At the snack square I bought a bag of plantain chips and a sachet of Tampico.

“What’s with the plantain chips? It’s the only thing you buy when you come here.”

I shrugged. “I like chips.”

Allison bought two bofrots and a bottle of Sprite. We sat down on one of the benches under a gmelina tree.

“Hey, Alligator, when is the next issue of the Sogasco Filla coming out?”

Sefakor yelled from the opposite side of the snack square.

Allison pretended not to have heard. “I don’t think I’ve hated anyone more in my entire life,” she said under her breath. When Sefakor spotted the captain of the boys’ football team, she and her sidekicks went to flirt with him and his teammates.

“Sometimes I wish I could just strangle her.”

I followed Allison’s gaze to where Sefakor stood with her hand around the Captain’s waist. He appeared very engrossed in something she was saying or maybe he was just ogling her bust.

“Last year, a group of us approached the school administration and told them we wanted to start a campus magazine. They thought it was a great idea and we started work on it. Sefakor’s mother has a printing press in town. We met her and she agreed to print the first issue for us for free. A day to publication, Sefakor came to me and said she wanted to be the feature for the personality profile. We had already interviewed Fafali Dose who was the female sports prefect last year. She had even played for the Black Princesses, the national under seventeen female football team. I told Sefakor it would be impossible to change the story. Mrs Deku called Mari Jata the next day and told her she couldn’t print the magazine for us anymore because of ‘conflict of interest’ issues.

“What conflict of interest issues?”

“Ask again! We had worked so hard to put that edition together. After that

Sefakor started calling me Alligator. You know, ‘Ally’ from Allison and ‘Gator’.

She knows the right pronunciation of Gator but she prefers to anglicise it. She calls

Komi Mensah ‘vampire’ because of his teeth. In his case, I hate to admit it but, she’s on point,” she said.

Allison was still talking, “She has a nickname for almost everyone. In class she behaves like an angel so all the teachers like her. On top of all that her father is an MP and an old boy. Her parents donated the water reservoir and built a teacher’s bungalow for the school. She’s untouchable and she knows it.”

I looked over to where Komi Mensah sat by himself eating roasted ripe plantain and groundnuts. He was an outcast, a loner. Though he was in our midst he might as well have been invisible. No one ever noticed him except to tease him about his teeth. He had very prominent canines, but what was worse was that they were not in the same row as his other teeth. They had erupted higher up from his gums and they were the first things you noticed when he spoke, which wasn’t often. To be honest they did give him a creepy look.

“I don’t even know why she’s in school. I wish she’d just drop out or something.

She’s always telling people she’s going to stand for Miss Malaika as soon as she turns 18. Last year she won the Miss SHS competition and she was the second runner up in the Mama Hogbe competition.”

“What’s Mama Hogbe?”

“Miss Hogbetsotso.”