Memoirs of an Outstanding* Teen

Chapter 1: There's a Spider On Your Leg

If you see someone walking uncertainly and looking frantically from side to side, with their face twisted in such a way that it could be next to the word frustrated in the dictionary, you assume they're lost, right? I feel like that's the look I always have when I'm walking in a public place. And you don't think I would abandon my signature look on a day as important as the first day of high school, do you?

No, in fact, I added a couple of accessories to the look just for this special occasion: My school skirt was at least two sizes too big for me and it stopped awkwardly just after my knees. Even though it was in the middle of summer (mid-January for us Southern Hemisphere folks), I still donned on my pitch-black school sweater. And I had cornrows on my head. Yes, cornrows. Not the pretty looking ones like Alycia Keys has, but those awkward ones that you'll see on a girl that has just arrived in the city from some random village and doesn't even know what a TV is. I was the perfect representation of a clueless grade-8 student.

I was still modelling my lost look in the school yard when a twenty-something-year-old man walked up next to me. I made eye contact with him in the middle of my head gymnastics. Then, in a high-pitched two-seconds-away-from-crying voice, I asked, "Hello, Sir. Where should the grade-8s go?"

"I don't know, really. I'm also new here," he replied, a thick Afrikaner accent accompanying his words. Then he looked at me in a way that seemed to say, "I feel your confusion." When he walked past me, I felt calmer and carried on with just a little more confidence. Later, I found out that he would be my grade-8 geography teacher, with a very queer teaching style.

Not long after meeting him, I found a sign on one of the class windows that read, "GRADE 8S HERE." As I was walking over to the other bunch of 14-year-olds standing near the sign, I thought, "I can just go over there and bond with the other new kids. This day might not be terrible after all..." And then I found out what it meant to be joining a K-12 private school. It meant that most of those grade 8s were not new. They already knew each other from way back then in primary school. When I walked up to them, they were already standing in closed circles, filling each other's ears with all the juicy details of how they spent their December break.

Those circles seemed to have an invisible wall around them that I could not enter. Part of that wall was the fact that most of them spoke in Afrikaans, a language that at that moment, I knew only at a beginner level, and I could hardly speak without having to repeat every second word because I had mispronounced or misused it. So, I was left to stand awkwardly by myself, trying my best to hide my nervousness.

The bell rang, and I saw the circles finally opening. Everyone started walking to the red stones. I later found out that this was the place we all had to gather at for the opening prayer and scripture reading before class. Even though I didn't know exactly what was going on, I followed them. And for some reason known as "only the uncool kids sit in the front of the class or stand at the front of the assembly line" I found myself standing at the very front of the grade-8 line, facing the prefects. I stood there darting my eyes around nervously for a few minutes. Then I noticed something: One of the prefects, who was chatting casually with her friends about God knows what had a huge spider on her pantyhose.

I stared at it in shock for a while, then began having a mental debate on whether I should tell her and freak her out or just wait for the thing to crawl back down her leg quietly. But no, it was going the opposite direction. It was crawling up her leg and not down, and my heart started doing the Harlem shake. I instinctively turned to the girl that was standing behind me for some guidance. She was also staring at the spider. "Should we tell her?" She asked. "I don't know... Should we?" I replied.

The prefect noticed our stares, and gave us that, "Whatchu looking at?" look. I responded by pointing to her leg, and yes, she did freak out. She started beating at her leg frantically, screaming some non-existent words, and attracting quite a lot of attention. A tall muscular guy - her boyfriend as I later found out - ran up to her, flicked the spider right off her leg, and ended its webby life with one stomp of the foot. There were several sighs of relief from the audience members, including myself. The star of the scene, with her hand on her chest, turned to me, and in Afrikaans said, "Thank you, man. I didn't even see it!" I nodded and smiled, then immediately looked down as my face heated up.

The girl behind me, now laughing, said, "She didn't even feel it! My goodness!"

"Yeah, it went so far up her leg," I replied. I could hardly avoid smiling. Someone was finally talking to me!

We went on to talk for a while. It felt like the sun was finally breaking through the dark clouds on a would-be gloomy day. I found out that her name was Riana, she was also new at the school, and she came from a school that I had attended a math competition at.