‘Come on, Jabs. It’s just us. No one else,’ Moses urged Mojaba.

‘Yes,’ Sifiso said, agreeing with Moses for the first time.

‘Fine. Only once, though.’ Mojaba looked at his two friends with warning stares.

‘Yes, yes,’ Moses said, giddy with happiness.

Mojaba reached inside his blue school blazer and took out his cellphone. He punched in his passcode, scrolled to the gallery, and opened the video.

‘Here,’ he said, turning the screen to his friends, still holding the phone.

Moses and Sifiso came closer and craned their necks to see.

‘I can’t see. Turn on the brightness,’ Moses said complaining.

Mojaba quickly fixed it to maximum and turned the phone back to them again. The video was not that long, only three minutes long.

‘Play it again!’ Moses said when it stopped playing.

‘I said once!’ Mojaba protested.

‘One last time, boy,’ Sifiso begged.

‘Fine. One last time.’ Mojaba played the video again.

‘Oh, shit, look at that,’ Moses said laughing.

‘Shh! Keep it down, you,’ Sifiso hushed Moses and went on to watch the video.

‘Wow! She has a butterfly tattoo under her belly button? I didn’t know that,’ Moses said after the video finished playing and Mojaba took his phone.

‘Yes, me, too,’ Mojaba said, smiling at his proud friends.

‘So, are you going to delete it?’ Sifiso asked after being quiet for a couple of seconds.

‘Yes, let me delete it now, actually,’ Mojaba said, seeing a little frown fleeting on Moses’s face as if he didn’t agree with what he, Mojaba, was about to do.

Mojaba was about to press the red dustbin icon on his phone, when the bell rang throughout the school, and learners started running to their morning classes.

‘Eish! The school is in,’ Mojaba said, quickly pocketing his phone in his blazer pocket. ‘Let’s go!’

‘No, just wait a minute,’ Sifiso said softly.

‘Why? What’s wrong?’ Mojaba turned to his friend with confusion.

Sifiso didn’t say anything, he just gestured to his groin with his hands and Mojaba saw the tent in his pants, and the same thing on Moses, too, and he laughed.

‘Well, you wanted me to show you and I did, so don’t make this my problem, sorry,’ Mojaba said, laughing at his friends as he adjusted his schoolbag and ran to his classroom, leaving his them stranded under the tree with their erections.

***

‘Should I wipe here?’ Ma’am Maoka asked, pointing at a far-left chalkboard.

‘No, ma’am!’ the classroom chorused.

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t copied this here,’ Ma’am Maoka said in an exasperated voice, turning to face the classroom. ‘Guys, you’re Grade 11s, going to Grade 12 next year; you can’t be this slow copying notes, as if you’re Grade 9s.’

The learners just murmured, keeping their heads bowed, furiously writing in their exercise books.

‘You have your phones with you, right?’ Ma’am Maoka asked after a long silence.

‘Yes, ma’am, I do,’ Sihle, the class prefect, responded from the front desk.

‘Good. How about you take a picture of these notes, and give your phone to those who haven’t written them to copy from it while I wipe? I have too many notes to write today. The exams are coming,’ Ma’am Maoka said, and the classroom nodded to her clever suggestion.

Phones were whipped out and some learners came forward to take pictures of the chalkboard. Mojaba was sitting down because he had finished copying those notes and was moving with the teacher. He was a fast scribbler, which explained his bad handwriting, for which his friends always mocked him.

‘Jabs, please lend me your phone to take a picture.’ Moses, from behind, pocked Mojaba with a pen.

‘OK, cool.’ Mojaba unlocked his phone and passed it to Moses, who quickly got up from his desk, stood in front of the chalkboard, snapped the pictures, and came back to his desk.

‘Everyone done, right?’ Ma’am Maoka asked with the duster at the ready in her hands.

‘Yes, ma’am!’ the learners chorused softly.

‘Good.’ She ran the duster across the chalkboard, wiping the white scribbles on it, creating ocean wave patterns on a green-blackish board. ‘Write fast before my period ends, OK?’ Ma’am Maoka said, continuing with the notes on the chalkboard.

Mojaba turned to his book and followed the teacher’s writing as she wrote at the front.