Read Online Untitled by Kgebetli Moele - Free Book Online Page A

office, but after he was done with disciplining me, I wasn’t allowed to go back to class. I had to wait outside while Lebo spent twenty minutes with her Mr LS in his office, probably crying and looking for sympathy.
    When she came out I was dismissed and we walked back to our class.
    â€œGo on bad-mouthing me and I am going to hit you again.”
    She said something very unpleasant and then we were wrestling again, right in the middle of the whole school. When we were finally separated she was bleeding from her nose so badly that Mr LS volunteered to drive her to the clinic.
    I was the one punished because I was the one who started it – they overlooked the fact that I was provoked – and from that moment on I became a social outcast. My friends were not my friends any more and when they did talk to me it was as if they were committing some kind of a crime.
    What were Mokgethi and Lebo fighting about? If they had asked me, I would have told them that I was just teaching her a lesson so that she would stop bad-mouthing me, but they didn’t ask me. Instead there was a story – that I had attacked Lebo because I was jealous that Shatale had chosen her over me, that Mokgethi and Lebo were fighting over Shatale. It wasn’t true but everybody who knew Shatale believed without doubt that Mokgethi and Lebo were fighting over him because everybody knew that Shatale was dating Lebo. So, why were Mokgethi and Lebo not friends any more? There could only be one reason – Shatale.
    Then, one day, out of the blue, she called my name in the most unusual of ways:
    â€œMokgethi.”
    As if she was in desperate need of redemption, her tone commanding that I listen to what she was about to say. I could not respond in words because of the tone of her voice. I gave her a sympathetic look as a sad feeling overtook me.
    â€œMokgethi, I am a whore. You are right. It is just that ... I don’t know ...”
    â€œLebo!”
    I looked at her – she was fifteen years old, just as I was, but ...
    â€œI am sorry that I said all those bad things about you. It is just that you are not like any other girl here. You are still complete and happy as you are. You are beautiful and I am a whore.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt is the truth. I am sorry.”
    She tried to smile.
    I knew that Lebo’s dream had always been to marry Thabo. He was the boy who had started her sexual life before he got mentally disturbed and died.
    Thabo was a gardener, a respectful young man and a friend to everyone. One day, when he was busy with the garden at Lebo’s home, Lebo’s mother left him to look after Lebo – she had to attend to other things. Thabo left the garden and attended to Lebo instead and that day she was deflowered and they kept doing it until he went mad.
    Then she told me how afraid she was of her father; how one day he had smelled her boyfriend’s aftershave on her.
    â€œYou are not having sex, are you?” her father had asked, sniffing at her like a dog sniffing after something.
    â€œDoesn’t your father love you?”
    â€œMy father is not like everyone else’s. He doesn’t talk to me at all, not unless I talk to him first. But if I ask him for money he will give it to me without even asking what I am going to do with it.”
    She paused.
    â€œLast year he gave me the money for an abortion. He didn’t know it, but that’s what he did.”
    â€œYou had an abortion? You are lying! We would have known about it.”
    â€œI had the abortion at a private clinic.”
    Then she told me that my breasts have something like a nut inside them, something hard that is very painful if one presses it. Sure enough I had it. Then she made me feel her breasts. The hard thing was not there. Then I learned that if I was to fall pregnant the hardness would disappear.
    Even now, today, everybody knows that I was one of Shatale’s many underage girlfriends. I cannot