Islander

Chapter 1: Everything

  "Adam??!" That was the third time I heard my mother yell my name from the living room. She was the paranoid type, always stressing about everything. I was doing it again; the things she literally hated the most. Playing video games and letting very loud rock music blare through my speakers. She always yelled, "keep it down in there!!!" But I always yelled back, "I can't hear you, music's too loud!". I frustrated her a lot, my door was always locked. That helped a lot sometimes because mother would always try to push down the door with her weight. But the door never budged once I had it bolted. I wonder what human does that. As far as I'm concerned, 14 year olds should be left alone. This was the time when everything mattered; video games, Facebook, girls, and even grades when we weren't too bored to bore ourselves with bookwork. But my mother would never give me my space. Father was an engineer who worked on a rig on the high seas. So he never came back home till Christmas, and I never had to worry about some old man giving me motivational talks about choosing the right careers and staying away from girls and the need to keep my games locked up. I could avoid my mother the whole year. But my Dad? His old leather whip sang songs I still cannot forget. Here in Nigeria, parents were not locked up for beating up their kids when they erred, at least not like we saw in the movies. And my Dad never took my misbehavior from me.
That is why I so dearly cherished his time away from home.

The neighbours said I was a proud kid. I always overheard them saying my father's money will kill me, like I ever even saw any of it. I did not even have a bank account. Father insisted I got to college first, which was something I was not intending to do. I was one of those with the view that maybe school was not for everybody. I was too smart for school. But my parents always insisted everything be done like the other kids did. "Go to school, go to college, make good grades, get a good job". Like that was an assurance. But that is not why I hated school, or why I stuck to video games and occasionally locked myself in my room. I hated school because everyone at school hated me, like they always did every new student that came around for the first time. Only that they decided to extend my hate till forever. I had no friends in school, or anywhere else. I was always new to this town of Uyo, but I lived here all my life.
I had just got transferred from my old school to this one. I was in Junior Secondary 2 and I was as confused as a new born mouse whose mother abandoned it. I was assigned a temporary class, till my real class be determined later. That was JS2C, the class with all the mean boys. I stood at the back all day because nobody allowed me to sit down next to him or her. I would have sat with Alice, she gave me compassionate eyes every now and then. And the seat next to her was empty, but once I tried, a big boy stood up and pushed me away yelling "she's mine!!". Then I reasoned that was her boyfriend, or really really bad admirer. So I stood at the back, till Science class, when my normal life turned around.

"You should consider going back to primary school. Your mates are there". A boy sitting in front of me said.

"And you are? Thomas Edison?" I asked.

"Call me George" he said with a smirk on his ugly face.

"Well George is a stupid name". I looked away.

I could hear the murmurs my classmates made. I could hear them whispering that George was going to beat me up after school. Yes, George was the class bully, more or less Junior Secondary's. Students in JS3 feared him too, or so I heard. So my dumb pompous mouth got me in trouble with him.

"You got balls kid, running your mouth like that. Who do you think you are? The governor's son?" One other boy said.

"The governor can kiss my butt. I'm taking him to painfield after school" George said storming out of the class.

Then in came the Science teacher.
He found me standing at the back and gave me a seat in front with the nerds. He made one of them go to the back where Alice was. Then he asked me strange questions like "what's your name?" "how was your old school like?" Then he started teaching. When he did, I answered all the questions. I mean ALL of them. The kids in my class were too dumb to not know things I considered too elementary for me. I always thought I should be in Senior Secondary by now, and even with that, I'd be smarter than them all. So after that class, I was given the name too- 'nerd'. And with it followed all the punishments therein. I should have kept my mouth shut in class.