Purple Bougainvillea

Three

Kelly came from a family of four, his elder sister was abroad in Canada with her family and he was in Lagos waiting for the next year when he would be out of school.
School, it all seemed like stress to him especially now that he was assigned the post of the labour prefect, no wrong doing must go unpunished.
It was about the sixth week on their academic calendar and he knew that after the tests, they would be given a mid-term break that lasted a whole week. After that lashing incident Jumoke hadn't spoken to him and he almost felt bad for her but she was the one that brought it upon herself.
It was Monday and they were through with their tests when he was sitting behind the school garden and he felt that suppressing feeling. It held him this time and he knew what it was; it was his asthma.
When Kelly was ten he was diagnosed with asthma, but before then he had bouts of sicknesses and attacks and the doctor finally told them of the ailment. It didn't sound bad at first until he told someone else and he freaked out thinking it was contagious. That made him resolve to keep his secret to himself and even Deji didn't know about it. Now five years down the line he was still alive not minding what the doctors said about asthmatic patients not getting past their childhood. He was scared that he might not be able to write his final exams and would have to repeat a class again. It had happened before, when he was in JSS3 he had been beaten down by another sickness and it made him miss his JSCE, so he had to repeat the class. And it hurt like mad seeing your classmates transit to a higher class while you stay behind, he would have said it hurt like hell but then he didn't know how hell hurt.
He dipped his hand into his pocket and brought out his inhaler, colored ash it sat in his palm, and he swiftly brought it to his mouth. He pressed the dispenser and inhaled deeply, he could already feel his lungs taking charge so he repeated this twice.
That was when light flashed on his face which brought him back to reality to see Jumoke with a phone in her hand. He jumped with a start and quickly hid his inhalers in his pocket, trying to be cool.
"Hey, Jumoke how're you doing?"  he said to Jumoke who had a smirk on her face.
"When did you start caring about how I'm doing?" she accused and he shrugged in resignation.
This girl is definitely the definition of difficult and impossible.
"Why were you taking pictures of me? So you can't stay a week without seeing my handsome face?" he said and she hissed loudly quickly operating her phone.
"Wait till the principal sees this" she said and showed him a picture of him holding his inhalers in his hand. He was confused, why would the principal be angry with him for applying his medications?
"Wait till the principal sees his brightest student smoking shisha"
For a moment Kelly froze, his lips turned in a way that showed he was barely managing to hold his laughter. He couldn't believe she thought his inhaler was shisha.
"Laugh all you want, I'm still telling on you", she said, walking away.
She had the same joyful smirk on her face when she had turned to leave and Kelly knew he had to do something fast before she went around sharing fake news.
"See eh Jumoke let me explain something to you" he said, dragging her back and motioning for her to sit down on the place which he had occupied at first.
She did sit, but she sat with the mindset that whatever he would say would be like pouring water on stone because she knew that forgiveness was not an option; she had been through so much in his hands.
Kelly breathed in as Jumoke's eyes stared back at him, he didn't know how to explain this without telling her that he had asthma. So he decided to tell her even though he knew that she might want to use it against him in the end.
"I wasn't smoking shisha; I was taking my medications"
"That didn't look like medicine to me" she retorted
"I have asthma" he said and waited for her to take in the news.
"And that was my inhaler" he continued.
"Don't lie to yourself, before you will talk one now and it will be permanent".
That blew him off since it was not the answer he was expecting.
He was expecting sympathy, the kind that always came when you told someone that your heart was broken or that you were dying soon. But none of that came as the little witch stared at him with a straight look on her face.
If not that her claim would affect him, he would have let her go to the principal and make a fool of herself, calling an inhaler shisha. But if she told the principal, he would ask to see it and when he finds out about his asthma, he would start to treat him differently, like he is a child and he might even take away his badge saying the work is too strenuous for him.
And then if his friends hear about it they may start to stay away from him and then he would be isolated and stigmatized for having an ailment he didn't bring upon himself. Telling her this would be of no use so he approached her in a different way.
"Have you seen shisha before?" he asked her and Jumoke panicked.
She hadn't seen shisha before but Vera had told her that people normally held it in their hands and inhaled it.
"No I haven't bu... ."  she was saying until he interrupted her
"Eh if you have not seen it why are you now accusing me?" he asked the clueless girl before him.
His question had wiped the blank look off her face and replaced it with a very confused look.
"How does the inhaler work?" she asked breaking the silence after a very long time.
Kelly stared at her and raised his left eyebrow.
"Why should I show you?"
"Because I want to know if you're saying the truth"
This was a very obvious lie, even Kelly knew that it was a lie but he still showed her. She was calm now and quiet, unlike the girl that sat before him previously, as he showed her how he dispensed it.
"Is there an overdose of it?" she asked
"I  don't know, I've never asked" he said and she went quiet.
"You owe me one. You know right?"
"How?" he asked. He had already proved himself so she had nothing against him.
"For not telling anyone about your sickness" she said and Kelly hissed.
He thought this girl was illiterate; at least that was what Vera had told him. But now it was very obvious that this girl rarely forgot anything, which was probably the reason why she nearly cleared him out of the first position this half term. She was good academically unlike most children from rural areas that bore the trademark of their village's dialect and an empty brain.
'Hey, I didn't notice that your accent is gone' he said to her in a bid to upset her, and he was just realising also.
There was something about her that made him want to always upset her, because there was no consequence for it.
It was fun to see her face go blank and after a while, when he acted like he wasn't getting the gist, she would replace it with an angry look and hiss to pass the message.
That was what she did when he said this and then those actions she added:
"Look Kelly I do not have time for you" she said before standing up to leave.
That was when Vera came and hugged Kelly, telling him how she got the third position and how that was an improvement. She seemed to mind, a lot, about Jumoke getting the second position and she kept repeating the words:
'How would Jumoke pass me in school tests?'
When Kelly got tired of this and asked why she thought that Jumoke shouldn't be able to score higher than her, she gave the same old excuse; the one Kelly knew she would give:
'She came from a village school, why should she score higher than me?'
This really hurt Jumoke as she thought of Vera as a betrayer. Wasn't she supposed to stand by her or something?
She had failed at this twice, firstly, when she had arrived first at the school, when Kelly had laughed at her.
Now she had failed again, she had even downgraded her in front of Kelly.
And as she slept that night she dreamt of Kelly telling everyone in their school that she came from a village school.