After years of lies, all those phone calls promising "I'll come, I swear", Tadala finally showed up. The girl whose body was shaped by Lilongwe heat and teenage sin, who once breathed the same dusty air as her mother and siblings.
At fourteen she already knew a man's fingers inside her panties. Tadala was fucked by the minibus driver, Mr. Mbewe, who used to cover her junk-food and transport fares every week. That man had no good intentions; he'd already been fantasizing about her budding breasts and rounding hips until the day he finally tasted what lay between her young thighs.
And this grown-ass man really enjoyed that unripe fruit raw and plain? I just couldn't wrap my head around it.
Tadala bit her lower lip, knowing everything had tangled the day she got fucked and that night she discovered her pussy could buy silence, though silence was never free. She never told a soul, not her mother, not her siblings. The secret stayed locked inside her like a stone.
"She knew sex too early, what a disgrace to society," I muttered under my breath, the words tasting bitter.
By fifteen she was trading orgasms for airtime credit and lace bras the kind that made her nipples poke through like forbidden fruit, tempting any man who looked too long. And this… this was just the beginning.
But even in the haze of those trades, Tadala never quit school. She dragged herself to primary classes along Lilongwe's dusty paths, hiding the exhaustion under her uniform, and poured what little focus she had left into her books.
When the time came, she sat the Primary School Leaving Certificate Examination; the make-or-break test that decides who advances to secondary. Her scores came back strong: high enough in English, Math's, and the rest to earn merit-based selection to one of Malawi's top national boarding schools.
That's when the miracle landed; the Gateway bursary, a scholarship for vulnerable girls from poor urban areas like hers, covering fees, boarding, uniform, and basics through an NGO program that targets exactly the kind of student society might otherwise forget. Word raced through the lanes of Lilongwe: Tadala was going to St. Mary's Secondary School in Zomba.
"Thank God her future wasn't shattered," people said, as if the past could be wiped clean with a single letter.
They thought St. Mary's was only the place where the nuns would shape her, uniforms would cover her, and rosaries would redeem her and for a while, it seemed to work.
But redemption doesn't erase memory. One year later, on a Monday morning assembly, the girl who had knelt for men who should have protected her stood tall before the entire school. Her skirt rode two inches above regulation, daring them to look.
And when she read her poem, the headmistress clutched her rosary like it could ward off the truth:
"Your God lives between my legs, Sister."
"Stop praying with your mouth."
"Start kneeling."
The silence that followed wasn't free. It cost them everything they pretended to believe.
After the assembly hush broke into chaos, whispers turning to gasps, the headmistress's rosary beads clicking like angry castanets and the punishment came swiftly.
During midnight classes, those hushed hours when the rest of St. Mary's bent over textbooks under kerosene lamps, cramming for the MSCE that could lift them out of poverty, Tadala was summoned to the office. Suspension: three days. Pack your small bag, leave the dorm, go home to Lilongwe's dust. The nuns hoped the isolation would teach humility.
But Tadala wasn't shocked at all. She even smiled, a slow, knowing curve of the lips as she folded her uniform and walked out the gates. The headmistress had clutched her rosary; Tadala clutched her poem.
Three days would pass. The words she had spoken in assembly lasted forever, echoing in the corridors long after she returned, whispered among the girls who now looked at her differently, not with pity, but with something closer to awe.
God forbid she should feel regret. In the silence that followed her defiance, she had finally bought something more valuable than airtime: her own voice.