I kept going to the ceramics studio at break. It was always empty. I was rolling out ropes for a pot one day when the door swung open. Jamal marched straight up to me. He stood right in my face and said through clenched teeth, “Go on, ask me.”

“Ask you what?”

“Ask me if it’s true.”

“Ask you if what is true?”

“Ask me about Lebene’s death. About her baby.”

“It’s not my business.”

He raised his left hand and it came slamming down onto the wall behind me. “Ask me,” he seethed.

“Miss Naa said there’s no past nor future in this room. There’s only the present—the now. Nothing else matters.”

He dragged me out of the room. There was no point in resisting. I suspect he would have carried me out if he had had to.

“Ask me,” he said once we were outside and he had propped me against the wall.

“It wouldn’t change anything.”

“Why? Because you’ve already judged me and decided you know the truth?”

“No. Because the police said you didn’t do it.”

He laughed. There was no gaiety in the laughter. It was dry and bitter.

“The police said there was insufficient evidence to arrest me,” he corrected. He was looking at me with barely concealed rage. His nostrils flared with each breath he took. His breathing was heavy and rugged. “Ask me.”

“I said it doesn’t matter.”

“You haven’t heard my version. I’m not leaving till you ask me.”

His eyes bore deep into me. I relented. I wanted to finish my pot before break was over.

“Did you give her the herbal concoction to drink?”

He looked at me, long and hard.

“No.”

“Did you leave the spa that night?”

“Yes, for about fifteen minutes.” His eyes never left mine.

“Did you meet up with Lebene?”

“Yes.”

I gasped. “Where?”

“By the river.”

I sputtered and nearly choked when I asked, “Why?”

“She asked me to.”

“Why?”

“To tell me she was pregnant. To tell me she didn’t want to keep it.”

“Was it your baby?”

He looked at me again with a look of what? Regret? Hurt? Disappointment?

“You asked me to ask you,” I reminded him.

He sighed and dropped his hand as if regretting his prior insistence that I question him.

“No. I hadn’t slept with her since Soraia. After my parents divorced, my mom moved us to Vume from Takoradi. I was upset about their divorce; I was more upset about moving to a village. I thought it was her fault that my dad had left her. She was always nagging him about where he’d been, who he had been with, that kind of thing. I started running with a group of wild guys; drinking, smoking, staying out late. I knew Lebene from school but we were not close or anything. Then we met at a party, I was drunk . . . I know that’s not an excuse but . . .”

He stopped talking and watched my face intently. Then he looked away. “Two months later she told me she was pregnant. By the time Soraia was born, my mother was sick. She couldn’t work anymore. Then she died. I dropped out of school to work. That’s the story. That’s my story.”

He turned and leaned against the wall so that we were standing side by side. He looked tired.

“That night—at the spa, what did she want?”

“She just wanted to talk. She didn’t know what to do. She said her parents would kill her if they found out.”

“Did she tell you who the father was?”

“No. She only said he was a married businessman. He had children.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police?”

He laughed another dry and bitter laugh.

“Yeah, right! Like they’d have believed me—a school dropout, an ex-wee smoker, a teenage father. Do you think they were seriously going to look for this mysterious businessman because I said so?” He sighed. We stood in silence for a long time.

“Why did you want me to ask you?”

He turned and looked at me. He ran his finger along the scar on the dead part of my face. I didn’t feel anything of course, but that didn’t stop my heart from galloping. He was silent for a long time. “I’m tired of pretending I don’t care what people think. Maybe I really don’t care what people think but I care what you think. That day you came to visit? I guess I had forgotten what it felt like to have a friend.”

He walked away, while I stood by the wall trying to get my breath back.

“Jamal wait!” I called, running after him.

“What?”

“We can still be friends.”

“Your mom said I wasn’t to speak to you.”

“You met my mom?”

“She was at the spa last week. She was kind of under the impression that I tried to rape you or something.”

“My mother she’s just so . . . she tries to control everything and when it doesn’t go according to her plan, she freaks out. Instead of asking why I was upset with you, she just assumed you had tried to force me into something.”

He shrugged.

“She’s not here. She won’t know if we’re friends or not.”

“What if I want to be more than friends?”

I looked away. Was he asking me out?

“Yayra, I’m nineteen. I’m not a child anymore. If this thing with you gets out and some other girl makes up a story about rape, it will be my word against hers and who’s going to believe me? Where will that leave Soraia or Ahmad or my grandmother? I can’t afford to make any more mistakes. Look, I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? For needing a friend? For not being made of stone? Everyone needs a friend, Jamal.”

Just then Komi Mensah passed in front of the ceramics department to the sculpture department. We both looked at him as he passed. Jamal lifted a hand in greeting. Komi ignored him.

“Not everyone,” Jamal said and walked away. This time I didn’t go after him.

*****

I continued going to the ceramics room at break time. Jamal never came by, not even during extracurricular class. Sometimes I saw Komi on his way to the sculpture department. Once after school, when the driver was late, I saw him working on one of the sculptures in the arboretum. Whatever it was he had begun working on still hadn’t taken shape but I noticed the sculpture of the three monkey heads depicting, ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ bore his name. I wondered if any other student had noticed how gifted he was. Anytime I saw him after that I called him by name and waved. He never waved back.

I was working on my pot during break one morning when Jamal came in. He looked worried. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said back.

“May I borrow your phone please? I need to make a call. Soraia got a fever and my grandmother sent her to the hospital this morning. I want to know if she’s okay. Our lights were off the whole of yesterday, I couldn’t charge my phone.”

I took it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He stepped out of the room and came back in moments later more worried than when he stepped out.

“They’ve admitted her. My grandma says she’ll call back. They’re trying to set a drip on her.” He looked so worried that I knew he had meant it when he had said that even if Soraia’s conception had been a mistake, taking the decision to have her could never have been a mistake.

“She’ll be fine. My mom’s a paediatrician. She’s one of the best there is. She’ll take really good care of her.”

“I . . . I can’t help worrying. I came this morning to ask permission to be absented but Mr Amedoda refused. I couldn’t cut class because he kept coming into my class every two minutes to check to see if I was in. I feel so useless.”

“My mom’s really good. When she was the head of the paediatric department in Korle bu, her department always got the ‘Best Department’ award. She got the ‘Best Paediatrician’ award three times running till she told them to stop giving it to her so someone else could be recognized. She loves children; she hates to see them in pain. Soraia will be fine.”

He sat and watched me mould my pot. “The thing on your stomach, does it hurt?”

“The stoma? No. Most times I don’t even realize it’s there. Does it disgust you?”

“When my mom was sick they had to put a tube through her nose so they could feed her. She even had to wear diapers. Sometimes, when the nurses were overworked, I cleaned and bathed her. Besides, I’ve changed Soraia’s diapers like a zillion times.”

“What happened to your mom?”

“Breast cancer.”

“Sorry.”

He nodded. “What happened to you?”

“Inflammatory bowel disease. It means I had sores in my colon. I got very bad abdominal cramps, very bad pain and severe diarrhoea. I used to go to the toilet like ten, fifteen times a day. More times in the night. The stool was always bloody. It got so bad that I got anaemia and needed blood transfusions on a number of occasions. After my last transfusion my mother put her foot down and I had surgery to remove my colon. I might have surgery to have it reversed later on if I want. My mom says the reversal is my choice.”

“What causes it?”

I shrugged. “It’s an autoimmune thing. My body attacks itself.”

“Must be hard.”

“Not anymore. But the great thing is I don’t have to rush for the toilet even if I get diarrhoea. Remember my friend from the spa? The short one?”

He smiled. “The one who dresses like a rainbow? It’s kind of hard not to notice her.”

I laughed, “Yeah, that’s Sofi for you. That last night . . .”

“The night of your birthday?”

“No, it wasn’t my birthday. My birthday was the Monday of that week.”

“The day I found you—?”

“I have a fully functioning memory, thank you. I know what I was doing when you found me.”

He raised his hands, “Easy, don’t bite.”

“I thought you were going to tease me about crying. I was watching videos of my Dad. It’s why I bring the phone to school. I like to hear his voice when I’m having a really bad day. Anyway, that night at the spa, Sofi ate a bit of my food, Dede’s food and her onion soup. Then she had cake, ice cream and a fruit salad with milk. She was running like a tap the next day. Mama had to give her some Imodium before they went back to Accra.”

“Why did you move here?”

I bit my lip. “We didn‘t have any money for my school fees or the rent. My dad, he was like a ‘Good Samaritan’. My mom says he lent money out to people who never paid back and he made some bad investments. We were broke when he died. Mama heard about the job here and there were great benefits, so we came.”

“You couldn’t have been all that broke. The three of you spent like two thousand cedis at the spa that weekend.”

“Huh?”

“Your bill was almost two thousand cedis. I checked.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I wanted to see what rich, spoilt girls did for fun.”

“You think I’m a ‘rich, spoilt girl’?”

“How many people in this school do you think use iPhones or iPods or MacBook Pros?”

I shrugged. I wouldn’t apologize for that. “Dad was crazy about Apple products. He had to get every new product that came off their assembly line. When he got tired of them he gave them to me, but most times they got lost or stolen. He was always forgetting them when he went out. His carelessness used to drive Mama crazy.”

“I guess I judged you without knowing you.”

“And now what do you think.”

“That you’re just like everyone else; just trying to make some sense out of your life.”

“Trying to make the imperfect perfect,” I said, straightening the wall of my lopsided pot.

“But what if the imperfect is perfect the way it is? What if the imperfect didn’t have to be made perfect?”

“Huh?”

“What if that pot is perfect the way it is with its warped wall? If you fired it the way it is, it would still be able to hold water.

Isn’t that what matters? That it fulfils its function? Why must both walls be symmetrical? Besides your view of perfection may be another person’s imperfection. So perfection, like beauty depends, on the beholder. Logically, that would mean nothing is perfect and, therefore, everything is imperfect.”

“Wow, where did all this philosophy come from all of a sudden?”

“Just think about it for a minute. Who defines what perfect is? I mean why can’t perfect be—having scars on your face, or being overweight, or having prominent teeth?”

My phone rang. He had hit a little too close to home with his last comment. “It’s my grandmother,” he said walking out.

I was staring at my imperfect pot when he walked back into the class. Mr Amedoda was with him. My phone was in Mr Amedoda’s hand.

“I knew you were up to no good. Whose phone is this?”

“I already told you, it’s mine,” Jamal said. His face had settled into an unreadable mask.

“You want me to believe you own a pink phone which has an orange case with yellow butterflies and smileys? What? You think I‘m stupid?”

“It’s mine,” Jamal insisted.

“Young man, don’t add petrol to fire,” Mr Amedoda warned.

“It’s mine,” I said getting up from the desk.

“The headmistress’ office! Now!” Mr Amedoda barked.