Untitled by Kgebetli Moele Page B

was that they did not want me to hang around Lebo. Mamafa said:
    â€œMokgethi, let’s say you have never been to Joburg but people are always telling you this and that about Joburg and how wonderful it is there. What will you think?”
    â€œI will think it is a wonderful place.”
    â€œAnd you will long to see it and never long to see Cape Town because nobody ever tells you about Cape Town. If you continue hanging around with Lebo you are going to absorb her thoughts and ideas and somehow turn into her.”
    â€œI see your point.”
    I started to distance myself from Lebo. It was easy in a way – things had heated up between her and Mr S and what she thought was going to be a once-off fling had become a two-month relationship. I will never know how Shatale feels about himself deep in his thinking. He is an adult and one with a lot of responsibility – at any one time he is guiding about twelve hundred pupils into their future. And for this I have nothing but respect for him. But he is ... What is the word in English? He is irritating. Every time I see him I feel like I want to puke, but I still have to listen to him, learn as he is teaching me.
    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.
    â€œHello ...”
    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:
    â€œGirlfriend, what is wrong?” she asked.
    â€œI was wondering the same thing ... Did I do something to you?”
    I wasn’t being honest and I felt sad because of it.
    â€œMokgethi, you are treating me like I smell these days.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œLebo, 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