The house is mess and dirty and noisy. Gaba and Pumza having a shrieking fight, little kids crying, bigger ones shouting.

If it ever happens that I get a real job, I’m out of here the minute I’m earning enough to rent a room or maybe share a place. I suppose I should be grateful they let me move in. But they didn’t do it out of family feeling, even if Gaba is my father’s sister and Pumza his aunt or something – he isn’t around to tell me the exact relationship. Gone since I was so small that I don’t even remember him.

Their own sons and daughters are always dumping their kids on them, and I’m useful for shovelling food into mouths, changing nappies, wiping noses. It has become a house of women; the only boys are toddlers, the older ones gone on to the streets for all anyone knows, rather than stick around.

I sometimes sleep over at Moya’s, but right now she’s away on a field trip, part of her college course. Anyway, as long as I stay here, I might be able to keep some of the kids safe from the sort of thing that happened to me – mainly by scaring them stupid.

Two of the littlest ones are asleep on my mattress. I fish out my key to the padlock on the battered tin trunk where I keep most of my things, like clothes and my pens and paper.

I change my shoes. My bosses at the burger joint said my boots were antisocial. I feel vulnerable, going out in my Tomy takkies, so thin and soft, no hurting power, but at least I can run fast in them.

Running is for losers, but then I am a loser, except when I get angry enough to want to be a winner.

I don’t know which is worst, the place I stay, or the place I work. They wouldn’t accept my boots, but they’ve had to accept that I don’t do smiling at the customers. Why should I? I’m not serving them, just cleaning up after them.

Compared to home and work, my next lesson with Sello starts to feel like a holiday.

“You’re really motivated,” he says when we’re back in the Community Centre kitchen, and I’ve asked him a whole lot of questions.

“I told you about the crap job I’ve got for now,” I remind him.

But do I deserve anything better?

Maybe he sees something in my face, because he says, “What’s wrong?”

I shake my head. “Nothing.”

It’s not one of my days for seeing Mama Thlapi, so when we leave I see different things going on in the hall, like some gogos listening to a Bible reading in our usual corner, and people doing aerobics in the middle.

“Want something?” Sello asks, pausing outside the car park, which is nearly empty on a weekday afternoon. There’s a man selling cans of soft drinks from a cool box.

“No,” I say with my voice harsh, because the idea of us getting drinks together is just too … too normal. And nice.

He shrugs and keeps walking along beside me.

“What is it with you, Nomi?” he asks. “It’s like you’ve built a wall around yourself and you’re not letting anyone in.”

“Clever you for noticing,” I mock.

Except that sometimes I think it’s not a wall, only a circle of thorny branches – people often call me prickly – and it might scare people off, but if they set fire to it, burned it down, there I’d be, in the middle of a ring of ash. Exposed, for everyone to see.

“Why?” Sello wants to know.

I twitch a shoulder. “Don’t like people. They don’t like me.”

“You come across like you don’t want them to.”

“I don’t care if they do or not,” I say. “I think I prefer it if they don’t.”

“It’s not working, Nomi.” I’m not looking at him, but I can hear he’s smiling. “I like you.”

Hearing him say that makes me go all wobbly inside, like there’s jelly in my stomach – even though I know he only thinks he likes me, and he’ll stop if ever he learns the truth.

“Talk like that, and you can forget about walking with me … and don’t touch me!” I exclaim and flinch away as I feel his hand on my bare upper arm. “No-one touches me.”

“You’re overreacting again.” He’s frowning. “What are you scared of? Me? Nomi, have you … heard something about me? Something to make you afraid?”

It’s the first time I’ve heard him look and sound concerned. Here I’ve been worrying off and on about what he might know about me, and never thinking that he might have things to hide.

“No. Why?”

“Just, I have a … a history. But I’m not the same person I was before.”

Fine for him to say. Anyone can see how together he is, all new and whole, however he used to be, not damaged like I am, with my own disgusting history.

We’re on the road to the station, no little gang of school boys up ahead today.

Something worse.

Leleka Ndlaphu and his gang. It’s just two of the old members who haven’t moved on, but there are a whole lot of new ones, mostly from other parts of Soweto, the talk goes. Dudes he met at the college he’s attending.

“If they say one word, make one move … in this case, I definitely won’t be overreacting,” I tell Sello, and it sounds like I’m spitting out razors.

“Who are they?” he asks. “The one in the orange shirt looks familiar.”

“Don’t know him. Their leader is the one with the bottle of whatever. He went to the same school I dropped out of. Richer than most people around here. His father bought him this fly-ass car, and then bought him out of trouble when he was caught drag-racing.” I need to pull in a breath to say the next bit. “People have started calling them the Spoilers.”

It’s a clever name. It’s what they do. Spoil people. Girls. I was one of the first.

‘Spoiled’. The word Gaba used – or was it Pumza? – when I found my way back to the house and told what had happened.

And the other words…

No need for Sello to know.

Leleka and the others watch us as we pass them, but they don’t say anything. I’m impressed that Sello doesn’t seem unnerved or even tense, with the whole gang of them staring. He just ignores them.

I’m the provocative one. I have to be, or Leleka will have won – the person I hate most. I meet his eyes boldly, challenging him, to let him know that they might have ‘spoiled’ me, but they didn’t destroy me.

He looks back at me, and mouths a word, taunting me. I don’t lip-read, but one of his crew mutters it aloud at my back after we’re past.

“Slut!”

“People will say you’re a slut.” That was Gaba or Pumza saying it, afterwards.

I can’t tell if Sello has heard. He’s walking along frowning, like he’s trying to work out some puzzle.

“Nomi?” he questions me after some time. “Things you’ve said? About those boys the other day and knowing what they can do? And now this lot, these Spoilers, saying you wouldn’t be overreacting … Nomi, did they do something to you? Hurt you?”

***

Tell us: Do you think Nomi will tell him the truth? Earlier, Sello hinted at something in his past. Are we ever truly free of the past?