Chapter 16 - Chapter 15

"Dammit."

I stare at my phone and fight the urge to punch the locker. Yoh. That is not how I wanted Naledi to find out that Vuyelwa and I have taken things to the next level. If I'm honest, I never wanted to discuss it with her at all. What I do isn't her business. I did want to avoid whatever that was at my house just now. And maybe, somewhere underneath, I didn't want to hurt her. Not that Naledi still wants me. But if it were the other way round . . .

I'd be fucked up.

"Why so angry?" Menzi Ngwenya — Mfundisi to everybody — my friend of nearly twenty years, asks. "Your side won, but only because Tebogo was sick. He's back next Monday and then we—"

"It's not the game." I zip my gym bag and slam the locker. "It's . . . never mind."

"The kids?" Mfundisi frowns, leaning against the next locker. "Sphe? Zee?"

"Nah. The kids are fine. Everything's cool."

Mfundisi — the name he earned in the second semester of our first year at Fort Hare, during an intense, short-lived religious phase he has never entirely stopped performing — studies my face. I doubt the mask I've pulled on hides anything from him. Not after everything we've been through.

"I hope this psychologist of yours can get you to open up," he says, picking up his own bag and shutting his locker.