The bell rang, and the doors were flung open,
disgorging the contents of the high school.
Students poured, flowed, spilled, spurted, streamed through the eager
doors. The school seemed visibly to
heave a great sigh, as it shrugged some noisy starlings from its west
wing. As the dust settled, following the
stampede of eager students from the gates, the school settled itself in its
foundations, and smiled gently in relief.
It was Friday.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Hey, Amy!” called Faeezah after her
friend. Faeezah’s long dark ponytail
bobbed up and down as she ran down the pavement after Amy.
Amy carried
on walking, not hearing Faeezah. The sun
held little warmth, although it made her regulation ponytail shine like
gold. Her cheeks were cherry pink, and
she held her school blazer tightly closed.
Her mind was preoccupied, and even the weight of her heavy school bag,
thumping gently against her hip as she walked, did nothing to bring her back to
earth.
“Hey, dreamer,” Faeezah puffed, out
of breath, as she caught up with Amy.
“What’s the big hurry? Aren’t you
going to come with the rest of the group to plan our after-party?”
Amy turned to look at her beautiful
friend. She stared, and as she did so,
tears welled up in her eyes.
“Amy!” Suddenly alarmed at Amy’s
evident distress, Faeezah quickly reached out to put her arms around her. “What is it, Ames? What happened? Is it Luke?
I’ll bet it’s Luke. It’s just
like him. Where is he? I’ll go and have a word with him.” She stepped back from Amy a little, as she
swivelled her head around
looking for the source of her best friend’s heartache.
Amy was searching in her pockets for
a tissue, trying not to sniff loudly, when Luke came into view and Faeezah saw
him. Then, instead of just a sniff, out
came a loud snort, as she reached out to grab Faeezah and keep her from
charging after Luke.
“It’s okay, Faeezah,” she said. “Luke hasn’t done anything.”
Faeezah turned to look at her.
“Are you sure?” she said. “You look pretty upset to me, and Luke is the
only one who has ever managed to make you cry like that. I think I should go and talk to him anyway.”
“No, really,” gabbled Amy quickly,
desperately wanting to keep Faeezah from getting Luke’s attention. “I really am fine. It isn’t Luke who upset me.” She managed a faint smile as Luke waved to
her before running to catch up with Matt, who was walking down the opposite
side of the road.
“Well, if it wasn’t Luke, then who
did?” demanded Faeezah.
Amy looked at Faeezah tragically.
“You did,” she said.
That was not the answer that Faeezah
had expected. She looked at this girl
who had been her best friend since they were in pre-primary school
together. Here they were – 18 years old,
just about at the end of their matric year, and she suddenly decided that she
didn’t have a clue who this person was.
“Me?” she demanded. “What did I do? I didn’t do anything. If you’re talking about that thing with Jed, it really had nothing to…do…” She slowed down to a halt as she saw the
look on Amy’s face.
“No, I don’t mean like that,” said
Amy. “You didn’t do anything. What thing with Jed, anyway?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Faeezah,
suddenly embarrassed.
“Fay, it’s just that whole slave
thing,” Amy suddenly rushed on. “You
know, from when we went to the Slave Lodge Museum today.”
“What are you going on about,
Amy?” Faeezah looked genuinely
puzzled. She couldn’t think how she
could have upset Amy, and especially what she had to do with the slave
history. It had been an interesting
enough history field trip if you really liked history, which Faeezah
didn’t. But then neither did Amy –
usually. Faeezah couldn’t figure out
what was biting Amy now. And she was in
no great hurry to talk
about the fieldtrip anyway, considering the way she had
felt on it.
“I’ve been thinking about it all the
way back from that place.”
“Yeah, I noticed that you had been
quiet the whole way,” said Faeezah. “But
then, it’s not all that unusual for you to be quiet. You don’t usually cry though. So what did I do?”
It felt a bit like worrying at a
loose tooth. It hurts to do it, but you
just have to carry on until the whole thing comes out. If she really had made Amy cry, then she
needed to know what the problem was to be able to put it right. They weren’t best friends for nothing. They’d always been there for each other. Faeezah was the feisty one. She was the one who had stuck up for gentle
Amy against the big Grade Three bullies when they were in Grade One
together. Amy had gently cleaned and
plastered Faeezah’s scrapes and cuts.
She had also been the shoulder Faeezah had cried on when her dad had
left, when they were in Grade Six. They
had giggled together, played together, cried together, worked together, shopped
together (especially shopped together).
In fact, they had done everything together – except fight. Most of the other girls they knew at school
didn’t believe them when they said that they had never had a fight. But they really hadn’t. When one girl needed her space, the other one
quickly realised and left her alone for a while. And then they would carry on again when the
time was right. They had always known
each other’s needs. Until now, that is…
“Amy!” Faeezah nearly shouted. She was getting upset with Amy
now. She tried to rake through her
memories with the fingers of her brain.
Nope, nothing there. Well, not
nothing – just nothing that should be causing this whole gemors[1].
“Well, Fay. I just got to thinking how your family had
come to this country. Your people were
slaves, weren’t they? It must have been
horrible…”
“Are you telling me that this whole
thing is because you’re feeling sorry for me?”
Faeezah looked furious.
Amy
backed a step away. She had never seen
Faeezah look like this. “Since when does
race or family history come into our relationship? Is this some little ‘white girl feeling
guilty for the sins of her fathers’ trip, hey?”
“Fay, you know that’s not what I
meant.” Amy hadn’t realised that Faeezah
would react like this. She was generally
an easy-going person. She never got
herself into a state about things that other girls got upset about. Amy was usually the sensitive one, the
emotional one. Faeezah certainly could
be a little stormy, but this was out of the ordinary – even if she were
drowning in PMS. Most of her storms were
directed at her absent father or the males of the species in general, in which
case they were generally in agreement.
Except that Amy was a little quieter about it.
“No?” Faeezah looked fiercely at Amy. “Well, just bottle those pathetic feelings
of pity, okay? It’s all ancient
history. I don’t want to hear about it
again.”
With that, Faeezah turned and strode
away in the opposite direction from the one that they usually shared when going
home from school.
She stopped without looking back.
“Are you coming?” she called back icily. “We were supposed to be meeting everyone else
at Wayne’s place to plan the after-party.”
“Oh yeah,” Amy called back into her
tissue as she wiped her eyes and nose.
She stuffed her shredded and sodden tissue back into her blazer pocket,
and followed after Faeezah.
“I’m sorry, Fay,” Amy muttered as
she drew up alongside the striding Faeezah.
“I really didn’t mean anything bad by what I said. I don’t know what it was that got to me about
that place. Somehow, it all just seemed
so real. I’ve never felt anything like
that before.”
The words tumbled out, filled with
emotion and an urgency that Amy couldn’t have explained, no matter how hard she
tried.
“Didn’t you feel it too?” She looked at Faeezah. Faeezah’s beautiful olive-skinned face was
set in hard lines that Amy had never seen before. “Fay, why are you being like this? You’re my best friend. You know I would never purposely do anything
to hurt you. It was just, like… Oh, I
don’t know… Like there was someone there.
I stood alone in the courtyard for a moment when the class moved on
after Miss Phillips. And when I was
alone, it was like I wasn’t alone at all.
I know it sounds like a whole lot of junk, but there really was
something about that place…”
She looked back at Faeezah and was startled to see a tear running
down her cheek.
“Fay,” she exclaimed. “You did feel it too, didn’t you?”
Faeezah nodded. Her heart felt strangely full and sore, in a
way that she couldn’t explain or describe.
She had no idea what the source of the pain was, but she knew that she and
Amy had experienced the same thing.
“I didn’t want to really try to
understand it,” she said. “I didn’t know
that you had also felt it. It felt,
like, creepy, you know. So, I didn’t
want to talk about it to anyone. I just
tried to push it away.”
She lifted up her head and tossed
her silent tear off her cheek.
“Hey, it’s a beautiful day,” she
said brightly. “Cold, but
beautiful. Let’s not think of scary
ghostly things. I don’t believe in
ghosts, anyway.”
“Who said anything about ghosts, you
crazy creature?” retorted Amy, with almost equal brightness. She was determined that if Faeezah could act
like nothing had happened, then so could she.
It wasn’t her ancestors, after all.
So why should she have been affected like that, anyway?
“Okay,” said Faeezah. “So, let’s get to Wayne’s place, before the
group have planned the after-party without us being there to have any say in it
at all.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Amy. “Just our luck, all they’re going to want to
do is spend the whole night at a club. I
really don’t want to do the whole club thing. Honestly, what’s the point? It’s
not even like they remember it the next day!”
“I know what you mean,” said
Faeezah. “And they all think they’re
being so cool – they don’t realise how stupid they look!”
“Right, so let’s go rescue our
matric dance night.”
The girls linked arms briefly,
smiled at each other, and stepped lightly, with some sense of relief at the
brief moment of discomfort being past.
