Allison and I became friends after that. In the mornings she reserved a seat for me at morning assembly then we walked to our classroom together. We paired up also for all our laboratory sessions. Sefakor started calling us ‘Dr Blight and her pet alligator’. We ignored her but that just made her enjoy tormenting us more. In my third week in school all that changed. Sefakor and her friends found a new person to torment. In the middle of a particularly boring chemistry lecture on redox equations, a boy walked in. A hush descended on the class when he entered. Even the teacher looked surprised to see him. It took me a moment to place him. Like Gbabladza, I never forget a face but unlike Gbabladza I knew where I had met him before. It was the tall boy who had been weeding the plot by our bungalow the day Mama and I had arrived. He had a note in his hand which he gave to the chemistry teacher. The teacher read the note twice before he pointed at the empty seat in front of the class. The boy went over and sat down. As he was getting out his notebook, Sefakor coughed and said, ‘murderer’. The boy, caught off guard, fumbled with his book and dropped it. I expected the teacher to say something. He didn’t. He just went back to teaching. I stopped paying attention to what he was saying. What did Sefakor mean by calling him a murderer? Had he really killed someone? If so why wasn’t he in prison?

*****

At break, the boy was the first out of the classroom. Sefakor, Nadya and Maureen were too busy talking amongst themselves to bother teasing me, Allison or Komi.

The snack square was all abuzz with talk of the new boy. Gbabladza and DJ Samsizzle walked straight to us when we arrived at the snack square. They had already bought a bag of plantain chips and a sachet of Tampico for me. For Allison they had bought a meat pie and a bottle of Coke.

“Is it true?” Gbabladza asked before we could even sit down.

“Is Jamal Abdullah really back?” DJ asked.

“We heard he was in your class,” Gbabladza said.

“Uh huh. I couldn’t believe it myself. I thought he was a ghost or something,”

Allison said.

“Do you guys know him?” I asked.

“Do we know him?” Gbabladza repeated like it was a stupid question.

“He dropped out of school after Form One. If he had stayed, he would have finished school last year. Everyone in the town knows about him,” DJ said.

“This is the filla,” Allison said, getting into her gossipy mode. “He impregnated a girl and then they both dropped out of school. The girl had the baby, but he went to work at one of the spas. Early this year the police found the girl’s dead body floating in the river. She was pregnant and had tried to have an abortion by taking some herbal concoction. They picked him up for questioning but they let him go afterwards. The fishy thing is his co-workers say they don’t know where he went during his break on the day the girl died. He insists he was asleep in one of the storerooms.”

“Why did they let him go?” I asked.

“They said something, something, insufficient evidence,” Gbabladza said, “but everyone knows it was his baby.”

“You think he gave her the concoction to drink?” I asked. All three of them looked at me like I had left my brains at home that morning.

“But who else would have given it to her to drink? He was already struggling to take care of the first baby. Do you think he wanted a second one?” Allison asked.

“Everyone knows he killed her,” DJ said. ―You should have seen Lebene. She was beautiful. As for that one deɛ, charley, don’t go there . . .”

“It’s true and she wasn’t too known about her beauty like Sefakor. She was free with everyone. Even her juniors,” Allison said.

“But what if . . .” I began saying.

“Look, who else could it have been? A leopard can’t change its spots you know?” Gbabladza said. “Besides you weren’t here. We knew what he was like when he first moved here. He used to smoke and drink and he belonged to a gang in town.”

“Why would he come back if he knows what everyone thinks about him?”

DJ shrugged. He was eyeing the rest of my plantain chips. “Some people have no shame.”

I drank the rest of my Tampico. Was there really a murderer in our midst?

“Are you going to eat that?” DJ asked.

I gave him the rest of the plantain chips and he wolfed them down.

With the arrival of Jamal Abdullah things got better for me and Komi Mensah.

All attention shifted from us to Jamal Abdullah. If the unsought for attention bothered him, he hid it well. He arrived for class exactly on time each day. I never saw him at the snack square. In class he only spoke when a question was directed at him. I never saw him speak to another student. He didn’t contribute to discussions, didn’t partake in group work and didn’t have a lab partner. If he recognized me, he didn’t show that either.

Jamal Abdullah was in my class for exactly one week. The next thing we knew he had been transferred to the visual arts class. I don’t know if he couldn’t handle the pressure from Sefakor and her cronies or if he really didn’t want to study science.

“Good riddance,” Sefakor said dramatically that day when he didn’t show up. “I mean can you imagine having to breathe the same air with a murderer?” Maureen and Nadya nodded their heads sympathetically.

“I swear sometimes I felt he was planning something diabolical. He just sat there not talking to anyone from morning till afternoon. It was so creepy.”

“Very creepy,” Maureen agreed.

“And where does he disappear to at break time? I never see him at the snack square and he wasn’t at the library or computer labs either because I checked every single day, the whole of last week,” she said.

“Faakor!” Nadya said, her eyes lighting up as she thought of something. “Maybe he goes to smoke wee!”

Sefakor slapped her forehead. “Of course! Why didn‘t I think of that? He goes to get high at break time. I mean where else would he disappear too?” Sefakor said.

With the exit of Jamal Abdullah from our class, Sefakor’s attention turned to me, Allison and Komi Mensah once again.