“Mum, what is suicide?” Tade, a 10 year old boy asked his mum who was in the kitchen slicing onions. What a fright she had! “What a question my young chap asks,” she said to herself, “not about Chocolates, not about dinosaurs, but about SUICIDE!” she screamed and ran into the room to tell Tari, her husband.
“Surprising question”, I’m sure you’d ask, but it was not like he had any need of it, that was just a word of the news that passed earlier in school of a 12 year old JSS3 student, Ada who committed suicide in the school toilet after having been bullied, and that sure stirred some curiosity in him.
Ada, a beautiful nerd with big round glasses, braces on her teeth and her socks high up strode into school with her bag strapped to her back, cheerfully anticipating her first class, Maths which was her favourite subject of all, but I guess those young teenagers didn’t quite agree to her terms. “She was too young for our class”, they had concluded, and certainly too young to top the class in every assignment, test, competition and soon to be every term. It was her last term in JSS3 and their third round in it, and would probably be their last in the school if a miracle doesn’t happen to make them pass the Junior WAEC examinations in a fortnight. Their plausible withdrawal was due to their incessant and unapologetic failures, and anger of which they decided to take out on Ada the entire time. Hence, it was their final opportunity to give her the last doze of their entrenched discrimination, but you’ll agree with me, this time, they took it too far!
It’s been over two terms of planned and unplanned dis against young Ada, but she managed to live through it with the help of constant interventions from Miss Bee, their class teacher, Principal Ruby and several staff and student witnesses who would either punish, detain, suspend, separate or report them as need be. She however kept up with most of it due to her ever-optimistic spirit, thinking each time that, “that is going to be the last”, but unfortunately, every last had a past that was also last.
To prepare their grand masterpiece, they took out two weeks, first, to get the idea in place, then, to set out necessary tools. A fork, some blades, a knife and an emptied memory space on Yaru’s phone they had made ready with the D-day being only a day to go to bid Ada farewell with their grand finale, but unknown to them, it was her who was going to bid the world farewell.
On Friday, 16th of November, 2018, the general morning assembly had ended and the bell for the first period had jingled. “Let me go take a quick pee before French class commences”, Ada said to herself, but unknown to her, Tobe, the shortest of the three who was always lined up behind Ada on the assembly queue had overheard her and hence, hurried to the back to inform Yaru and Tunbi who were queued far behind, being the tallies of the class.
“So early”, Tunbi chuckled, so they hurried ahead of her, first to the classroom to get the items, then to the 3-man capacity toilet to set things in place.
“What did they do next”, I’m sure you’ll ask me; well, I’ll tell you all of it when you log on next Wednesday as we complete this series on ADA.
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Written by: Adenaike Ayomide.