Thread by @CSakwah

Story thread.

I was recently dismayed to learn that my former schoolmate still hates me 11 years since we had friction over a girl back in high school. It has been 11 years since we had any kind of contact.

I wonder, how long should one bear the burden of harboring hate born out of a trivial matter like a fight over a high school girlfriend? And to what extent would one go to revenge?
Alex was very excited when he followed me outside his NGO’s premises with a sneer on his face

and a ‘karma is a bitch!’ expression on his lips. He disqualified my friend and I from a startup funding that we had pitched at the NGO. He occupied a high-rank position.
11 years earlier, I attended a school in which we shared the same church with our girl school every day.

It was a catholic church-sponsored school. Whereas boys and girls were not allowed to mingle before, during, or after the mass, YCS (Young Catholic Students) officials from either school mingled during the choir and liturgy dance practices and during the mass.

The YCS officials from both schools facilitated the smuggling of love letters across the two schools, an act that was outlawed.
One of the YCS officials was my friend. Samuel. Samuel used to smuggle love letters from form fours to their girlfriends.

He charged a courier fee of around 5 bobs to smuggle a letter in and out of the school.
Alex, on the other hand, was a school prefect; a house captain. He was my form four deskmate. Alex came from a very rich family in Kitale.

As his friend and deskmate, I had to endure long evening preps listening to his family stories about their family trips, holidays et. al. In exchange for being his friend, he used to share the food that his parents brought from home whenever they visited him in school.

He was visited almost every weekend.
Towards the end of the second term, Alex started bragging about how he had won the heart of one of the most beautiful damsels from our girl school. Let us call her Makena. She was one of the most famous girls in the boys’ section.

This was owed to her beautiful face,enchanting voice, and model walking poise. One of the reasons why some of us religiously attended church was to have a peek at her while walking towards the church alter either to receive the holy communion or to recite the responsorial psalms.

I remember her signature poise whenever she led in reciting the responsorial psalms. ‘God is good,’ she would say and bribe our eyes with a wicked and infectious smile to earn a loud “All the times” response from boys.

The church would be filled on the days when it was known that she would be among the altar girls. We went to church to seek SALIVATION because of Makena.
Makena had a pious aura that intimidated most boys for the better part of our high school life.

It was rumored that she was being groomed into sisterhood. A shame, some of us had thought. She was too beautiful to be a nun. She had remained without a boyfriend until Alex claimed to have won her heart towards the tail end of our high school.

He confirmed this one day when he allowed me to read the love letters that she had written to him. Because I was good at English and composition writing, he tasked me with composing his love letters.
This, I did at a fee of 20 shillings per letter.

I used to scavenge through West Life, Boys II Men’s lyrics for lines. One day I paraphrased a vibe that Waiyaki had used to seduce Nyambura in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s set book called The River Between.
Alex allowed me to read the letters.

Sometimes he would ask me to read it aloud as he listened. Such was his self-conceited nature. Also, reading the letters helped me to compose a reply that was contextual to the letter from Makena.
In one letter, Makena complained that she was broke.

She was not asking for money from Alex. She just mentioned that she had been whistling for days. After reading the letter that I had composed, Alex folded a two hundred shilling note between the writing pad and smuggled it to her school through Samuel.
Our friendship was great.

We spent most of our spare time together talking about Makena or the 2010 World Cup, or the European Football leagues. Until one day, during the first week of our third term, when Alex decided to betray our friendship. It was a hard stab on my back by a friend.

I remember this very fateful evening that sparked the friction that culminated in me missing out on funds from the NGO that he worked for 11 years later.
Alex and I had decided to skip an evening form 4 CRE group discussions.

While the rest of form 4 discussed, we hid inside one of the houses’ bathrooms discussing Makena, football, and other trial topics that students would chitchat about, like Chris Brown and Rihanna’s break-up a year earlier or Selina Gomes and Justin Beiber’s love story in 2010.

While we were engrossed in our chitchat, we spotted a teacher walk towards the bathroom. The bathroom had just one door. There was no way to escape. We stayed put, praying for God’s intervention. He was a no-nonsense and fierce teacher with great enthusiasm to cane students,

sometimes for fun. A whip was firmly clutched in his arms. Skipping the discussion with the company of a school prefect gave me a false sense of hope and comfort. I thought Alex would come to our rescue. I was wrong.
Suddenly, as the teacher edged closer,

Alex turned and held my shirt’s collar and started acting like he was wrestling or trying to fight me. I was shocked by his sudden change of emotions. A friend with whom we had been sharing jokes and laughing shifted his face into a serious face, an angry one.

He started shouting with anger.
When the teacher sought to know what was happening, why we had skipped the group discussion, with no shame, totally unprovoked, Alex said, ‘it is this boy, sir. I have been trying to implore and force him to attend the group discussions.

He is disrespecting my directives. A disobedient student. He has even tried to wrestle me.’ Disobeying and wrestling a school prefect were crimes equal to treason in school.
I was manhandled, frogmarched, dragged, and hauled to the staffroom.

When the teacher was done thoroughly deconstructing what God had created on my body, he reported me to the deputy school principal. The DP dished out a suspension letter without a second thought.
I spent one week of the third term at home.

After serving my suspension, I reported back to school and faced the punishment that the disciplinary committee deemed fit enough to correct a rogue student. I went back to class. Life went on normally.

Shamelessly, Alex told me that since I way away, he had not replied to Makena’s letters. He did not trust his grasp of English. Plus, his handwriting was not as attractive as mine. He apologized as well and begged for the rebirth of our friendship.

He claimed that he had not anticipated the suspension. ‘I thought he was only going to punish you. I lied because I had to protect my reputation as a well-mannered school prefect.’ This, he said while we sat on my bed. In his possession were two loaves of family bread.

For the better part of the week, he made sure that I did not whistle while taking my tea.
When I narrated what had happened to Samuel, he was infuriated. ‘His betrayal and lies should not go without a fitting punishment.’

Together, we hatched a plan to punish and revenge Alex. I resumed my love letter writing duties. I wrote the letter, shared them with Alex. When he was satisfied, I took the letter to Samuel. Instead of Samuel smuggling the letter to Makena, we tore it, read it,

and decided to reply to. We contracted a form three kid with the talent of forging and imitating other people’s handwriting to imitate Makena’s handwriting.
In the reply, we instructed the form 3 to claim that Makena had missed Alex.

She couldn’t wait to clear school so that they would start living together, and most importantly, Makena was broke again.
After three days, Samuel dropped the letter on my desk. Alex read it and shared it with me. I composed a reply with his instructions.

He folded four hundred shillings between the writing pad and asked me to hand it to our postmaster, Samuel. Samuel and I opened the letter and shared the money equally. We composed a reply on behalf of Makena, thanking Alex for his generosity.

We blew so many kisses through the letter and dedicated to him, Fool Again by Westlife.
A few letters away, we were broke again. Meaning, Makena was broke again. Her school had taken form fours out on their last academic trip. She had spent the money on the trip.

Alex sent her two hundred shillings.
At that time, we were a week away from sitting for the KCSE. Samuel and I decided to retire from our money-making venture and concentrate on preparing for the KCSE. These used to be the times when we got saved and denounced sinning.

Therefore, we composed a love letter where Makena dumped Alex in the gutters that he belonged to. Among other means words, Makena claimed not to have been in love with Alex. ‘I was pretending. I want to remain chaste until I am married.’ Alex was not good-looking,

the letter also read. When Alex read the letter, he was very devastated. He cried during the whole of the evening preps time. I consoled him while hurling all kinds of insults towards Makena.

When he was calm, I advised him to compose a reply naming Makena a gold digger who was interested in him only for his money. We accused her of using the church to hide her evil manners and threatened to unmask her to the boys.

This particular letter, Samuel smuggled it across to the girl school.
In high school, we had something called writing autobiographies. One student would buy a book on which his friends and classmates wrote an experience they had with the owner of the biography

during their 4 years in the school. The owner of the autobiography was not supposed to read whatever the friends and classmates had written about him until he had cleared school.

When it was my turn to share my memories with Alex in his autobiography, I revealed what Samuel and I had done. ‘And that is how I conceived a plan to separate Alex and Makena to revenge for the suspension that I earned because of Alex’s lies,’ I concluded on the autobiography.

That had been the last contact I had with Alex, until this year when I walked into their offices and found him sitting on the vetting panel. ‘I still have the autobiography at home,’ he said, 11 years later. ‘My colleagues thought your proposal was the best.

I thought so too, but, I can’t forget that you separated me from my first ever love and caused me a painful heartbreak at a time when I was sitting for the KCSE.’ I wanted to remind him of the lies that he told the teachers, lies that earned me a suspension a month to my KCSE.

‘I am the one who calls shots here. Try elsewhere, ’ he added before I talked.
END