“You’re not funny, Natalie,” I say, annoyed.

Natalie Davids is my best friend. Just like me she’s also grandma-and-grandpa-kid; like mine, her mother’s also AWOL, but more in the emotional sense. A few years ago her mom came to stay with them after a few years out of orbit. Natalie has an older sister, I’m a single child. But then again, like mine, her father’s also a fuckup. The drunk drifter type who only pops up twice a year with a stolen teddy bear and a pack of marshmallows. Her dad stays with his other family a few streets away.

“Have you received your annual letter from your annual mom yet?”

She’s so casual about stuff. Sometimes I think my friends, even my best friends, know too much. People who know too much about you are a danger to your future. When I leave here one day, I want no one to me know me that well. On the other hand, I also know too much about Natalie, for example that her mom misspelled her name on her birth certificate, “Nathalee.” To Natalie, that is the biggest sign of disrespect.

“Imagine your mom is so careless, she fills in your fucking birth certificate wrong. Like, fuck this baby, get done. I have to abandon her before she remembers my smell,” she told me once.

We even look like family. We have the same eyes and noses, just our mouths are different. She looks like she wants to smile the whole time, the kids at school call her Smiley. They call me Sleepy, because my eyes look so sleepy. She is light skinned and I am what people call a little dark skinned. The biggest difference between me and Natalie is that I live at the spaza shop-house. That practically makes us ghetto royalty.

The spaza shop was my mom’s idea, but my grandma turned it into a business. The spaza shop is a metaphor for everything my mom starts and my grandma has to finish. Story of my life, too literally. My grandma’s great entrepreneurial venture, the great spaza dynasty. “Aunt Lily’s spaza shop — where you can buy if you want to,” is what’s written on the Coca-Cola sponsored sign. My grandma doesn’t have a love for words. She took the first and best thing that came to mind and put it on that sign. My love of words come from my mom. My mom with her long letters and shitty ideas. And I think that’s appropriate. Because I think it’s my love of words that’s going to fuck up my life someday. It’s that same love that already makes me feel like I’m always alone around the people I love. I feel like that Bukowski poem, “Alone with Everybody”. Other people use words to say what’s necessary. And I want to use words to say what doesn’t want to be said.

My grandma supports my writing with confused squinting and head nodding. She doesn’t have it in her heart to tell she doesn’t consider it to be real work. My life lies spread open before my grandmother’s like a short street that ends at the park that separates us from the next street. We live in a nice neighbourhood, it’s township but about two inches above the poverty line. Everyone in our street has jobs. Half the people have cars, half the people have vibracrete fences. Those that don’t go to church go to the masjid; those that don’t go to the masjid go to the liquor shop in silence. They drink respectfully, and only on weekends, and they keep to themselves when they’re drinking. For my grandma, that’s enough.

“Are you seriously going to celebrate sweet 16 again?” Natalie asks, at least trying to contain her laughter.

I roll my eyes and pick up my school bag. She opens the front gate and we walk. I light a cigarette.

“Nippy,” Natalie says.

“Puff, puff, pass,” I give her the cigarette.

“Damn, my mom should try that shit!” she says.

“Oh, please, don’t act as if your mom’s any better,” I say.

“I know, I’m just saying. My mom’s in a league of her own.”

We continue our walk in silence, till we get to the school’s street where our other friends, Jaimie and Felix, are waiting at the gate.

Tell us: What do you think will happen next?