Chapter 3 – School Shoes and Street Fights
They say school is the great equalizer, but in Ajegunle, it was just another place poverty dressed us differently from the rest. My classmates wore crisp uniforms, the blue and white shining as if their mothers ironed them with fire itself. Mine… well, let's just say my shirt had seen better days. It was always a little too faded, a little too big, and the collar had that stubborn brown tint no amount of scrubbing could erase.
But the real humiliation sat on my feet.
Shoes. Or what passed for them. Papa had patched them so many times they were less leather and more thread holding memories together. Whenever I walked, the right sole flapped like a mouth about to tell the world my secrets.
"Michael, your shoe dey talk again," one of the boys jeered one morning as we lined up for assembly. The laughter that followed was louder than the morning bell.
I laughed too — what else could I do? In Ajegunle, if you can't laugh at yourself, others will do it for you, and they won't be kind.
Still, each laugh carved a small wound inside me. By the time I was fifteen, my skin was thick, but not so thick that insults didn't sting.
One afternoon, a boy named Tunde pushed me too far. He was taller, stronger, the kind of boy whose parents slipped teachers "thank you envelopes" during open days. He blocked my path after class, sneering.
"Shoemaker's son. Shine my shoes."
I don't know what burned hotter — the insult or the laughter of the other students. Something snapped. Before I knew it, my fist connected with his jaw. The sound shocked me — that dull thunk of bone meeting bone. The laughter turned into chaos. He stumbled back, eyes wide with fury, then charged.
We rolled in the dust, fists flying, uniform buttons tearing. Teachers rushed in, canes swinging. By the time they pulled us apart, my lip was bleeding and his nose was gushing red like a broken tap.
They suspended us both for a week.
Papa didn't shout when he found out. He just looked at me, long and hard, his face carved with disappointment. "Michael, is this the way you will change your life? With fists?"
I wanted to tell him the truth — that sometimes fists were the only language the world respected. But I swallowed the words.
During that week at home, sitting on the bench beside Papa while he mended shoes, I realised something. In our world, dignity was fragile. People would step on you if you let them. If you wanted respect, you had to demand it. Sometimes with words. Sometimes with fists.
And sometimes, with more than that.
That thought scared me. But it also excited me. Because deep down, I knew: school wasn't going to save me. Not with grades that barely scraped by, not with teachers who looked through me as if I was already a failure.
If I wanted to climb out of Papa's shadow, I would need more than patched shoes and classroom lessons.
I would need to fight.
Not just with fists — with my mind, my hunger, and maybe, one day, with choices that would change everything.