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As for Lebo, she was just a young girl when the thing with Shatale started and that is why somebody somewhere came up with the statutory rape law. If I want my little brother to do something for me, I know just how to manipulate him so that he'll have no choice but to do exactly what I want him to do. This goes for all little boys and girls – I can manipulate them and so can Shatale. I learned from his relationship with Lebo that he is never in a hurry; he enjoys the process – from the very start until it ends triumphantly in his favour. Sometimes I even think that, though I know his tricks, I will one day discover myself in some secluded place, naked in the back of his car, in complete disbelief of the facts.

Shatale invades a girl's mind, exploring it and coming to understand that “to win this one I have to do this”. And that is all it is to him – a game where he never loses. When he looks at Mokgethi, he sees someone “playing hard to get” and this is a challenge to him. That I am not interested makes him more determined that one day he will see himself naked between my thighs. I know that he already has a plan of action specially for Mokgethi ...

Sometimes I can pretend this or that, but at other times I just cannot pretend and this is what happened with me and Lebo. I was talking to her less and less, having no time for her and showing less and less interest in everything about her. Even when all she wanted was help with schoolwork, I gave her some excuse because I didn't like what she had become. That got to her and she began to ignore me too, which worked just fine for me because I was free to stop pretending.

Then, one morning, I bumped into her coming out of a classroom. She was talking to some other girl.

“Hello ...”

She looked at me, then looked the other way. I called her name, but she pretended that she hadn't heard me and walked away with her friend.

A week went by. She was angry with me, though she wasn't showing it, but eventually it dug into her and she confronted me:

“Girlfriend, what is wrong?” she asked.

“I was wondering the same thing ... Did I do something to you?”

I wasn't being honest and I felt sad because of it.

“Mokgethi, you are treating me like I smell these days.”

“I said hello to you and you just pretended that you couldn't hear me.”

I was still being dishonest and she looked at me in a way that made me want to tell her the truth.

“Lebo, I just do not like the way you are handling yourself. I cannot be your friend.” I paused. “This is why I have been keeping my distance. It is not that I do not like you. It is just that ...”

I was not implying that I was a better person but that through the choices she was making she had outgrown me.

“I cannot have a friend like you. Birds of a feather flock together and I do not ever want to be what you are.”

She had been quiet the whole time, but then:

“Look who is talking! You think that you are so holy? You think you can judge people? Wow! Today I discovered an angel of God on earth. What do you know anyway? What do you know, Mokgethi?”

“Nothing, but ...”

“Yes. That is all you know. Nothing.” She paused. “Mokgethi, there is nothing you can tell me. You know nothing. Nothing. You are not holy, you are not an angel from the heavens above; you are a girl, no better than I am. Just as I am no better than you. And if you see me as a whore, know that I don't think of myself as a whore. And, one day, when you are walking the same path, remember to remind me who is the whore.”

“Lebo, I was not picking a fight with you.”

“Who said that I am fighting?”

Then, before I got very angry, I chose to walk away from her.

After that, Lebo started saying things behind my back:

“Lebo said that you are jealous of her because you are living a dull life and she is enjoying hers.”

“Lebo said that you are jealous of her because all the boys want her over you.”

“Lebo said that you slept with all the teachers at your fancy private school and that is why they chased you away.”

I tried to ignore what they were saying but one day I couldn't take it any more. I got very angry and confronted Lebo with the intention of beating her. But before I could say anything, James jumped between us.

“Talk is cheap,” he said, giving me a big hug and pulling me away. “Let them talk; we know the truth.”

I cried as I told James all the things that Lebo had been saying about me. I had told him all of them before, but for some reason I needed to tell him again.

“Talk is cheap,” he said again, after I had finished. “Let them talk; we know the truth.”

But the jibes kept coming and coming:

“Lebo broke up with Tumelo because she wanted to give you a chance with him.”

“Lebo said that you are just pretending to be a virgin – you are a big whore just having a big whore holiday and you cannot fool her.”

And, funnily enough, many people I had come to think of as friends slowly distanced themselves from me.

Finally she said something true, though she had twisted it at the end, and I got really mad. She said that I watched pornography with James and Mamafa. This was true – Mamafa has pornographic movies that we sometimes watched and still do watch together – but she twisted it, saying that afterwards the three of us had sex, copying whatever we had watched. This was a lie – we never copied anything we had watched and I have never had sex with either of them. True, I sleep at Mamafa's house sometimes, and if James is not there I sleep in Mamafa's bed with him, but we never do anything sexual. The truth plus the twist got to me. I was so mad that I wanted to deny even the truth and this time James was not there to stop me.

Looked at her in the eyes. “Lebo, what are you saying behind my back? What did I do to you?”

She looked back as if she had not been expecting this to happen. The whole class paused.

“Did I do something to you? Did I do anything?” she said, smiling a mocking smile.

With that she received three of the hottest slaps across her face. The whole class went “Hoo! Haa!” I, too, was amazed that I had done what I had done.

When she recovered, Lebo gave me a hot one back and then we were fighting. I cannot say that either of us won because we were holding and pushing each other around, trying to kick each other as the whole class became a stadium full of fans, doing their thing to support Banyana Banyana.

I spent less than two minutes in the principal's office, but after he was done with disciplining me, I wasn't allowed to go back to class. I had to wait outside while Lebo spent twenty minutes with her Mr LS in his office, probably crying and looking for sympathy.

When she came out I was dismissed and we walked back to our class.

“Go on bad-mouthing me and I am going to hit you again.”

She said something very unpleasant and then we were wrestling again, right in the middle of the whole school. When we were finally separated she was bleeding from her nose so badly that Mr LS volunteered to drive her to the clinic.

I was the one punished because I was the one who started it – they overlooked the fact that I was provoked – and from that moment on I became a social outcast. My friends were not my friends any more and when they did talk to me it was as if they were committing some kind of a crime.

What were Mokgethi and Lebo fighting about? If they had asked me, I would have told them that I was just teaching her a lesson so that she would stop bad-mouthing me, but they didn't ask me. Instead there was a story – that I had attacked Lebo because I was jealous that Shatale had chosen her over me, that Mokgethi and Lebo were fighting over Shatale. It wasn't true but everybody who knew Shatale believed without doubt that Mokgethi and Lebo were fighting over him because everybody knew that Shatale was dating Lebo. So, why were Mokgethi and Lebo not friends any more? There could only be one reason – Shatale.

Then, one day, out of the blue, she called my name in the most unusual of ways:

“Mokgethi.”

As if she was in desperate need of redemption, her tone commanding that I listen to what she was about to say. I could not respond in words because of the tone of her voice. I gave her a sympathetic look as a sad feeling overtook me.

“Mokgethi, I am a whore. You are right. It is just that ... I don't know ...”

“Lebo!”

I looked at her – she was fifteen years old, just as I was, but ...

“I am sorry that I said all those bad things about you. It is just that you are not like any other girl here. You are still complete and happy as you are. You are beautiful and I am a whore.”

“No.”

“It is the truth. I am sorry.”

She tried to smile.

I knew that Lebo's dream had always been to marry Thabo. He was the boy who had started her sexual life before he got mentally disturbed and died.

Thabo was a gardener, a respectful young man and a friend to everyone. One day, when he was busy with the garden at Lebo's home, Lebo's mother left him to look after Lebo – she had to attend to other things. Thabo left the garden and attended to Lebo instead and that day she was deflowered and they kept doing it until he went mad.

Then she told me how afraid she was of her father; how one day he had smelled her boyfriend's aftershave on her.

“You are not having sex, are you?” her father had asked, sniffing at her like a dog sniffing after something.

“Doesn't your father love you?”

“My father is not like everyone else's. He doesn't talk to me at all, not unless I talk to him first. But if I ask him for money he will give it to me without even asking what I am going to do with it.”

She paused.

“Last year he gave me the money for an abortion. He didn't know it, but that's what he did.”

“You had an abortion? You are lying! We would have known about it.”

“I had the abortion at a private clinic.”

Then she told me that my breasts have something like a nut inside them, something hard that is very painful if one presses it. Sure enough I had it. Then she made me feel her breasts. The hard thing was not there. Then I learned that if I was to fall pregnant the hardness would disappear.

Even now, today, everybody knows that I was one of Shatale's many underage girlfriends. I cannot dispute it; it has become a known fact. Even Shatale knows it. He said to me a few weeks after my fight with Lebo:

“Did you hear what they are saying about you?”

“I don't care what they say about me.”

“We could just do it and maybe then they will shut up and mind their own business.”

Looked at him – this is a man who once dated my Aunt Sarah. I ran out of words.

“Because this is what they want for us, they want me and you to be.”

“A yi nna thaka yago.”
I am not of your generation
, I told him as I walked away.

His mind has completely decayed; he could not see anything wrong with what he was doing. Then I realised that to him what the community was saying did not matter at all. Here I was, feeling ashamed and guilty, having fingers pointed at me all the time because of something I didn't even do, and he did not care at all.

My pastor's wife said while she was preaching that “young girls should stop breaking up families and start building their own families with their own men because you cannot build a family with someone else's husband.” It did not occur to me that she was referring to Mokgethi, but over time I realised that she was making an example of me. It made me feel sick and very much unholy.

A few weeks later, one of the women I attend church with called me:

“Mokgethi.”

She said my name as if she had given up on something that she had been hopeful about, that she was hoping for with all her heart. She said it again, this time shaking her head slowly:

“Mokgethi.”

I got scared and asked her to stop calling my name because by now she was right in front of me.

“Mokgethi. Not you too, my dear. This is something very much not you. You must just stop it. Stop it, my dear. I didn't expect it to be something that you, you Mokgethi, would do. Please, stop now. When I heard it, I didn't believe it, not even a bit, but if it is true, just stop it. It does not suit you. It is not the you that I know.”

She turned around, continuing with her business as I tried to figure out what she meant. Then I remembered what the pastor's wife had said and all of a sudden it came together. They believed that I was sleeping with Shatale ...

What could I say to that?

Nothing.

If I defended myself and told them that nothing like that was happening, well, they would be expecting me to say that. In fact, the only thing they would not be expecting was for me to say, “Yes, I am sleeping with him, so what?”

Mamafa tried to comfort me by telling me to ignore the rumours. He said that I wouldn't be able to alter what was in people's minds so I might as well get on with my life. Still, I wished I could do something to change things, but I didn't know what, so when I saw her the next morning, as I was passing her house, I greeted her the same way as I always did.

“Tamaaa!”

She acknowledged me with a wave of her hand, as if she were shooing away flies. Usually she would want to chat with me about this and that, but that morning she was not interested in talking to me.

I continued walking for a little way, then I turned around and approached her.

“People are saying that I am sleeping with Shatale. If you believe that I am sleeping with him, let me tell you the truth: I am not sleeping with him and I never will. Lebo is the one sleeping with him. She was my friend, then we had a fight and now people think we were fighting over Shatale.”

Tears started to come out of my eyes because she was looking at me as if she did not believe a word I was saying.

“I am not sleeping with Shatale! He is the one who wants to sleep with me. It is just that I was a friend of Lebo's and then she started dating him. I didn't want to be her friend any more, so she got mad and started saying things about me that made me angry. Then we fought and now people think that we were fighting over Shatale. I am not Shatale's girlfriend!”