“Hey, Shangaan,” I say.

The kid doesn’t answer. He’s looking for an opening, to get away from us. We stand around him, fists and feet ready in case panic sends him darting forward, the way it does some of our victims.

Last year, this one used to protest that he was Tsonga, not Shangaan.

“There’s a difference?” we’d say, faking shock, and he would take us seriously and start trying to explain.

“You see, it’s complicated,” was how he’d begin, but with our taunts rising, he’d give it up.

This year, he’s learnt a few things, but not enough. We still corner him, in the school grounds or corridors, or out in the streets like now.

“Nothing to say?” Mbuyi mocks.

“Nothing to say because he’s a dumb animal,” I tell Mbuyi.

“What sort of animal, hey, Zwelo?” Bullet crows.

“Dog,” Wandile suggests. “Inja.”

“Puppy dog is what it is,” I say, giving the kid a shove so he staggers and nearly falls against Wandile. “Used to be all yap-yap, not so dumb then, but we taught it to shut up, right, dudes?”

The kid just stands there.

“No, can’t be a dog,” I decide. “Chicken maybe, too chicken to open his mouth. Lamthuthu. Battery chicken.”

Just another Friday afternoon in Kabokweni. The heat is heavy between the steep green hills all around, and planes pass overhead, leaving or coming into KMIA, on the other side of the hills. Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport. It sounds glamorous, but there it is, so close to Kabokweni and my boring life. I’ve never been in a plane

After a bit we get the moegoe to say, “I am a Shangaan loser,” by threatening to pick him up and bounce him on to the spikes of a palisade fence.

When he says it, it sounds like he has sand in his throat.

We let him go, and my crew and I go our different ways. My house looks all right from the outside, but I hate the life inside.

Dlani is edging his way along the inside wall, heading for the front door. I stage one of my specialist collisions. I know the hardness of my boxer’s arm hurts him, but he has given up crying.

The same as I quit crying, even the secret inside crying, and turned myself into the person I need to be.

I catch Azile observing me from where she’s been watching television. It’s a furtive look, and she lowers her eyes when she sees me noticing. The fear I glimpse lifts my mood.

My cowardly little half-siblings. The woman I’m supposed to call Ma or Mama must have just got home, because she’s still in her work clothes, drinking tea.

“Get me some food,” I tell her. “I’m hungry.”

I grab the TV remote and change channels, to remind them who I am. The man, that’s who. I’m the man. When Pa isn’t around.

They’re all scared of me. It makes me feel good, and I’m still feeling good when I go out later.

Muscles Mabuza doesn’t ask for ID so his tavern is the popular hang-out for Kabokweni under-eighteens.

“That girl, she’s hot for you, Zwelo,” Mbuyi slurs.

He believes getting puza makes him a man. Wandile thinks it’s acting Mr Smooth and knowing how to flirt that does it. Bullet and I know that what makes us men is people’s respect, their fear.

I look at the girl Mbuyi is talking about. Jodie Ngoma is her name, daughter of some big-shot businessman. Every time I look at her she’s watching me. When she sees I’m looking, she gives me this slow smile.

I’m not sure if I like her. She’s got another way of looking at me, sort of greedy. I prefer the way Unathi and Gabile are around me, nervous and respectful.

***

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