The Monday, After: Amanda POV

The place is huge, like a colloseum or a battle field enclosed in a wall of brick. It is bursting with trees and plants. Two guavas stand guard at its entrance like gnarled sentinels of bark and green, pink hibiscuses and purple heart plants line the hedges at the wall of each block in a carefully tended array. There is an unending field of trimmed grass and two building stand adjacent to each other; both are stories high,  almost blocking out the rays of the sun. It is a world of its own, completely divergent from the one beyond its walls.

The school co-ordinator is a short plump woman,with conspicuous strands of grey in her bun and a face with more edges than a decagon. She looks like the kind of person that will switch into her language the moment a phone call comes, the type that will make exaggerated expressions and funny sounds egging the speaker on the other side of the line to go on with the story. I like her, instinctively, because she does not give Dad one of those bullshit smiles everyone else seems to have plastered on their faces when we show up.

"These are the files you will be required to fill in," she says in a practiced tone, handing me a white file  "please endeavour to fill them in correctly,we will be making reference to them during your stay here."

She's all formal till she asks Dad what my "academic performance" has been like by his estimation, i notice that she does not say–grades, better still, i notice the dimples in her cheek when dad tells her i am a straight A student; when her controlled expression melted into a pleasant smile. I do not know if she smiled at me for being a nerd, or my dad for being the parent of a nerd, or at my brain cells for actually functionin. What i do know is that she should smile more often. The cocoa brown edges of her face transformed into soft curves and her eyes crinkled a little bit at the sides.

 For the first time in what feels like forever, looking at that smile, i nearly feel welcome there.....almost, like I am, for once, not an intruder in someone else's world.

The absence of stickers all over the walls in the hallway hits me in the gut like a well aimed jab, it reminds me of Queen's. There will be rows of wallpapers and notices on the walls and the lights will hit the tiled floor through the glass doors like a glow of rainbows from a prism. 

The room that is supposed to be my class is a wide square, with a white board up front,there are a dozen desks and each has a miniature locker right under the tabletop- a space just enough for books and a few personal effects.

 Then there are my would-be classmates. The whole word rumbles to a silent hush when i step in.

Nothing. Nothing prepared me for the unabashed stares they handed me like a trophy.

Nicki Minaj's All eyes on me couldn't have been more apt. I want to shrivel until i disappear, but i settle for biting my lower lip and looking straight ahead.

I don't know what gave me away,what made it so obvious that i'm not from around, but they knew alright. I know because of the lowered voices from behind me–too audible to really be whispers, from the desk i sat (the one closest to the door,so that i could bolt if it came to that.) 

I can just feel the weight of their stares on my back, like a sumo-wrestler's behind dropped plom! on my chest.

I feel it just the same way you feel someone watching you when you can't see them-with the hairs on your nape standing on their ends, a prickling heat crawling underneath the layers of your skin.

I am forced to sit through the Agric period barely through the literature class and i am astounded when the bell rings—an actually bell, not an alarm—it sounds like a giant gong and my ear-drums reverberate from its melody lacking tune.

It is early evening by the time Dad picks me up,and he knows not to ask me "how school was."

I couldn't have answered him either way, i am too busy savouring my first breath in what feels like years.