“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Allison asked. We were on our way to our respective extracurricular classes. I’d been following her to her choir rehearsals for three weeks because the ceramics class didn’t have a teacher. The teacher who usually taught the class had gone on maternity leave and the substitute teacher had not reported. That morning at assembly, the girls’ prefect had announced that those who had signed up for ceramics were to go to the ceramics studio in the visual arts department.

“I don’t know yet,” I said, kicking a pebble.

“I want to be a journalist. You know, the pen is mightier than the sword kind of thing.”

“Cool,” I said.

“There are so many things I could be writing about even now, but what’s the point if there’s no school magazine? Administration said they don’t have money for printing it.” She adjusted the strap of her school bag and continued walking.

“You can still write,” I said.

“How will people read it?”

“Notice boards. You can paste your articles on the SRC notice board. Or you could start a blog on the internet. I have a friend who writes a food and fashion blog.”

“Food and fashion? How are those even related?”

I shook my head, “To Sofi, everything is related to food. She writes about new foods she tries and about outfits that catch her attention.”

She looked at me for a moment. I could see the wheels in her head turning.

Suddenly her face broke into a huge grin. “You’re right, I could still write. I like the blog thing. Hey, maybe I’ll join the computer people today and ask them about it. See you later, okay?”

“Okay,” I said as she changed directions and practically ran to the computer laboratory. She hadn’t gone far when she turned and called, “If it works out, I’ll dedicate my first article to you, okay?”

“Okay,” I called back. I went to the girls’ washroom to change out of my uniform into my games outfit. Some other girls were also there changing. Just as I was coming out of the last cubicle, Sefakor and her girls walked in and started undressing.

“Hey, see it’s Dr Blight. She’s going to play with mud.” Sefakor, Maureen and Nadya were in the traditional dance class. Sefakor had told the entire class she was going to dance the atsiagbekor during the talent section of the Miss Malaika beauty pageant. I ignored them and walked out of the washroom.

The ceramics class was empty but I could see someone had gone to great lengths to make it look ‘homey’. There was a radio in the room (clearly the teacher had not read the rule book). It was tuned in to Joy FM, my favourite radio station. Doreen

Andoh was just wrapping up her show, ‘Lunch Time Rhythms’. There was a plant growing in a plastic bucket in one corner of the room. I thought that was weird. If they were teaching ceramics, couldn’t they at least make a proper flower pot? Pots and other clay objects in various stages of completion lined a shelf on one wall. A stack of old newspapers occupied another shelf. Dried splotches of clay mixture lined the walls and floors. There was another bucket which had a lot of odds and ends—wires, rags, bits of foam, seeds, broken calabashes and gourds, springs and broken clay objects. There were many poster papers on the walls. Most of them were quotes.

Others were organograms on how to make things. I moved around the class reading the quotes:

It is better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly. Robert Schuller

Art is a long process which dates from the hidden past, runs through our own modern times and passes into the future.

Asihene Does the clay say to the potter, “What are you making” Isaiah 45:9 You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. Eleanor Roosevelt

Your life is a piece of clay. Don’t let anyone else mould it for you. Unknown

But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. Jeremiah 18:4

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter. Martin Luther King Jnr

The same sun that melts the wax hardens the clay. African proverb

Ceramics to me is a game without rules. It is an endless journey of building and playing. Robert Moore

“Hey, where is everyone?” Gbagbladza asked walking into the class. He threw his bag onto one of the seats and came to stand by my side.

“I don’t know. I just got here.”

He stood really close to me. “I like this one about doing the thing you fear most.”

“They’re all really good,” I said. “I thought you were taking the web designing programme with DJ.”

“I uh . . . I changed my mind,” he said. He stepped closer to me. He smelled good. He must have doused himself in aftershave after he changed out of his uniform.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Go ahead,” I said while hoping he wasn’t going to ask about the accident.

“Well, I . . .”

Just then someone entered the room. She was in a white T-shirt and faded jeans. Hadn’t seen her before. I took her to be another new girl like me. She probably hadn’t been supplied her games outfit yet. Her hair was cut short like mine but she wore long dangling cowrie earrings and her fingernails were painted a bright yellow. She must not have read the rule book.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Gbabladza and I said back.

“You must be new,” Gbabladza walked up to her and draped his arm over her neck. “Do you know who is taking us for this class?”

The girl smiled and gently peeled Gbagbladza’s arm from her shoulder. “Yes, I am new and I’ll be taking you through the ceramics class. I’m Miss Lartey.”

Gbabladza dropped his hand and began stammering, “I’m sor . . . so . . . sorry,

Miss, Madam, I didn’t know . . .”

Miss Lartey smiled. “It’s okay.” She looked at me. “Please call the others.

They’re outside by the kiln.”

Jamal Abdullah appeared at the door just as I was about to step out. We did that awkward moving in tandem thing. First we went right together and then we went left together. “Sorry,” we both said at the same time. I remained where I was to allow him to pass but he didn’t enter the class. I looked up at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Ladies first,” he said.

I walked past him to the kiln where I met five other students—two seniors and three juniors. Did Jamal Abdullah think being courteous to me was going to make me forget he was a murderer? When I got back to the pottery studio, Miss Lartey had written her full name on the blackboard: Naa Larteley Lartey. She said we could call her either Naa Lartey or Miss Lartey. I knew for sure she hadn’t read the rule book.

“This is the ceramics class,” Miss Lartey said when we were all seated. Duh. Of course it was the ceramics class. What else could it be with a potter’s wheel and clay pots on the shelves? Miss Lartey told us a little about herself. She was a volunteer teacher. She was pursuing an undergraduate programme in industrial arts. She had taken a year off her studies to teach before going back for her final year.

“This will mainly be a practical class. We’ll have one theory session but you’ll be required to do further reading on your own. I don’t want us to get bogged down with too much theory when we come here. The minute you step in this class, nothing else exists. Nothing. It’s just you and the clay. There’s no past or future.

It’s the present. Always the present. The first thing you have to understand before we begin working is,” she turned and wrote on the board: RESPECT.

I knew it! She wasn’t even a real teacher yet and she was already behaving like one. I was waiting for her to say how she wouldn’t tolerate lateness and noisemaking or any of the other a hundred and one things that teachers have no tolerance for when she said, “You have to respect the clay.”

Someone behind me snickered. Even I was confused.

“Yes, respect. Clay has a mind of its own. It shows you what to do and what not to do with it.” She walked around the room and passed out fist sized lumps of clay.

“Respect the clay is the only rule in this class. By the end of the term you should have produced something, anything at all. The only thing I require is that the thing you create should be important to you. You will write an essay of between a hundred to two hundred words explaining why your creation is important to you. Is that understood?”

Though we groaned most of us nodded.

“Good. I am here to show you how to work with the clay; how to get it to do what you want but what you will produce is entirely up to you.”

I heard giggling and snickering from the back of the class and turned to look.

One of the senior boys had rolled his clay into an erect penis and had placed it on his crotch. He was moaning ‘Lebene, Lebene’ under his breath. I turned to look at Jamal. He was looking straight ahead, his face expressionless but his jaw hardened and a muscle twitched. By the time Miss Lartey turned to look at what was happening behind her, the boy had rolled the clay back into a lump.

“You must take chances with this lump of clay. You will fail repeatedly but don’t let that stop you.” She tossed her lump up and down. “This lump is asking you to pursue it, to seek it, to discover what it can be. Never give up on it. If you listen hard enough, you will hear the clay tell you what it wants to be. Anytime you make something with this clay, you’re making something unique. Something that has never been made before and will never be made again. No matter how many times you try to reproduce it, you’ll never get the exact, same thing. They’ll always be duplicates of the original, ‘original duplicates’ if you like.”

I looked at Miss Lartey. Did she even know she had used an oxymoron?

‘Original duplicates’ was a great oxymoron. Daddy would have loved it. I remembered what Miss Lartey had said about no past and no future and concentrated on the present—the lump of clay in my hand. I wondered what I would make. What was important to me?

“Don’t let your frustrations or your past failures drive you. In this room, there is no past, no future. There’s only the here and now. Only the present. Only you and this lump. I want you to keep experimenting, keep exploring and keep trying till you get it right.”

I squeezed the lump in my hand until clay slipped out between my fingers. I wondered what my lump was telling me.

“Okay, let’s get the theory session out of the way so we can go right down to working with the clay next week.”

She spent the next thirty minutes giving us a crash course in ceramics. She spoke of how clay was formed from decomposed granite rocks. The granite rocks themselves were formed from the lava of volcanoes and had been exposed to weathering which broke them into smaller pieces. The process took place over millions of years for us to get clay in the form we were holding. She told us how traditional potters scattered over all parts of Ghana had been able to produce perfectly symmetrical pots without using the potter’s wheel. She showed us pictures of women making pots on the ground. She told us of ceramic products and showed us pictures of ceramics produced by other cultures, pointing out the similarities and differences between them.

“If you have time, go to Vume and see how our people make their pots. It’s a similar process that’s used all over the country. I tried to get the school administration to organise an excursion for us but they say they don’t have money.

Find time and go yourselves. You’ll learn a lot from the potters.”

She told us about Michael Cardew, who came to Ghana in 1942 and taught art in

Achimota school. It was he who introduced Ghanaian potters to the potter’s wheel, kilns and glazes. In 1952, the art department was moved from Achimota to Kumasi and formed part of the Kumasi College of Technology. In 1961 it was renamed as the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. She gave us thick hand-outs and a program outline with topics we were supposed to read before we came for the practical class. I tuned her out when she began talking about kilns and glazes. If I’d known she’d be doing so much talking I wouldn’t have come to the class. I would probably have followed Allison to the computer lab. At the end of the class, Miss Lartey told us the ceramics studio would be open throughout the week so we could come in anytime we had a free period to work on our projects.

Gbabladza walked me to the roundabout to wait for the hospital bus. DJ was staying behind to finish something he had begun during the web designing class.

Allison had gone for lunch in the dining room with the other boarders.

“Miss Naa is cool,” he said.

“Yeah, very cool. I just hope she’ll not talk so much next time. What will you make?”

Gbabladza shrugged. “I don’t know. I only joined because DJ said you signed up for ceramics.”

“Oh,” was all I could say.

“Can I ask you what I wanted to ask earlier?”

I nodded.

“So do you like have a boyfriend in Accra?”

“Huh?” Not that I should have been surprised but I was. Gbabladza had started calling me at home and on weekends and sending me funny WhatsApp texts and picture messages. I should have seen it coming.

“Are you going out with anyone?”

It was the first time in the entire week that I had thought of Bobby.

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

We were both quiet for some time.

“Is it serious?”

“Yes,” I lied. Was it still serious if you were on a break? I could see the hospital bus coming towards us. Gbabladza saw it too.

“I just . . . I really like you. If it doesn’t work out with the other guy, let me know, okay?”

I nodded and entered the bus the minute it stopped. I didn’t turn to look at

Gbabladza as the driver drove away. Was he serious? Couldn’t he see my face?