“Now, let’s see what we have here.”

Is there any feeling more horrifying than having to sit still while your teacher reads a message on your phone? Isn’t it the absolute worst?

Okay, I’ve changed my mind. There is a worse feeling. It’s when your teacher starts scrolling through your phone. And there’s nothing you can do. You just have to sit there and take it.

Lael and I manage to restrain ourselves from grabbing our phones away from her. We turn purple in the face and make squeaky little noises of horror instead.

Ms Waise gives us a squinty-eyed stare. “I think you had both better come and see me in my classroom on Friday afternoon.”

“Okay, Ms Waise.”

“Sure, Ms Waise.”

“And now…”

She holds up our phones as though she is thinking about what to do with them. Like, is she going to take them over to her desk and browse through our messages in peace? Or is she going to put them into the phone bucket, which means we’ll only get them back at the end of the day? Or is she going to…

Give them back to us! Yes.

“Here you go. Put them away now and don’t let me see them again until the end of the lesson.”

We breathe sighs of relief. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel completely at ease unless my phone is right in my pocket where it belongs.

“Well, that was stressful,” says Lael, as the bell goes for the end of the lesson and we troop off to break.
“Tell me about it. At least she gave us our phones back.”

“And a detention.” Lael is determined to look on the gloomy side.

“True. But we can always use it to catch up on homework.”

Normally, on days when I don’t have extra-murals, I go straight home to chill.

But today, instead of stretching out on my bed scrolling through celebrities’ Instagram stories, I am sitting in the Grade Ten dormitory at Sisulu House trying not to bite my nails from tension. Just as the last bell of the day rang, I got a message from Nosipho addressed to our whole friend group on WhatsApp.

Nosipho: You guys. I’ve been called into a meeting with the Dean, the headmaster, and Mrs Oosthuizen. I think this is it. They’re going to tell me I have to leave. I’m trying to stay positive, but it’s so hard. 🙁

We have congregated in the dorm, waiting for Nosipho to come back from her meeting, so we can give her mor-al support. It’s a bad sign that Mrs Oosthuizen is attend-ing the meeting. She’s the one who wanted Nosipho to leave. She is a dinosaur from another age who should not be the head of any department, but especially not of Life Orientation.

Her attitudes are from the 1960s. I could imagine her fitting in all too well with the people who made poor Amelia’s life a misery. It’s not right that she still has the power to decide what happens to someone like Nosipho.

“What are we going to do if Nos comes back in here and says she’s been kicked out?” asks Yasmin. “I mean, literally – what are we going to say to her?”

“We’re going to talk about the next step,” says Lael. “We’re going to decide what we’ll do next. There is no way we are taking that lying down.”

“But what can we do?” I feel hopeless. “It’s like we’ve used up all our options already. There’s nothing left for us to do.”

“We can leave the school in protest!” says Lael, walk-ing around in circles. “We can all give notice and leave. They won’t like that. That would cost them money in school fees.”

I snort. “Brentwood has a waiting list of more than two hundred students. If we all left, they could replace us tomorrow. They wouldn’t even notice we were gone. And then we’d have to go to some other ratchet school that would probably be worse.”

Amira wrings her hands. “How can they do this to her? How? Don’t they see that they are sabotaging her future? Have they got no feelings? Don’t they care about their students at all?”

“We should march,” says Lael feverishly. “We should organise a mass protest action to disrupt activities and…”

“Now you sound like my mom.”

Yasmin writes down ideas on an exam pad. “We could start another social media campaign. Maybe get a teen-mom organisation on board.”

“We will never surrender!” Now Lael is channelling some dead guy from history. “We will fight them on the beaches and on the … uh…”

“I’m staying.”

“Huh?”

We were so worked up, none of us noticed Nosipho walk in.

“What did you say?”

“I said, I’m staying. They said I can stay until I’ve fin-ished Matric.”

We stare at her with our mouths hanging open. It’s like we can’t process the news after all our doom and gloom.

Nosipho looks puzzled. “Did you guys hear what I said? I’m not being kicked out of school. I’m staying. And it’s all thanks to you.”

Lael gives a high-pitched scream. I start ululating. And then the whole room descends into chaos as we cry, scream and hug each other at the same time.

***

To: Trinity Luhabe trinityluhabe@gmail.com
From: Genealogy in Action FindPeople@GenealogyInAction.co.za
Re: Finding your person

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***

To: Trinity Luhabe trinityluhabe@gmail.com
From: Obert Nzingane – Proprietor onzingane@nzinganeinvesti-gations.co.za
Re: Your investigation

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Kind regards,

Obert Nzingane
Proprietor

***