#especially when it's annoying high pitched speed up garbage god

[mothribcage]

I command death upon all who put music over videos of cats!!! You need to let me listen to your cat's sounds and if you don't fuck you

[zimboxl]

The Tearful Run Home

Highlands Junior School taught children between the ages of five and thirteen, grades one through seven. It became a government-run institution some time in the late 90s or early 2000s. “It used to be so good,” is the refrain often muttered by nostalgic alumni of all races, although some of the older Rhodies do seem to take a special pleasure in seeing their world views affirmed. “Ay, it was good man!”

Kudzai attended the school in the mid-nineties, his parents lived nearby, and its standards plus the convenience made it an obvious choice. All the students wore anonymizing grey uniforms with red trimming, knee high socks with shorts and short sleeved shirts for the boys; and knee-length dresses and socks for the girls. All topped off with a fashion crime of a floppy hat that was essential for children frolicking for hours daily in Zimbabwe's sun. Perhaps if more of our melanin-deficient comrades heeded the verbal warnings of earnest teachers about sun damage, more of them would have avoided morphing into red-browed reptiles in their mid-to-late thirties.

The Highlands School grounds seemed intentionally designed to instill nostalgia years later. The property was large for a school catering to a few, if not just a couple of, hundred students. There were open sports fields, tennis courts, and a consistent style to all the architecture with regularly retouched paint to match the students' uniforms. On any given day the air would be alive with the smell of freshly mowed grass and children playing outside during class hours. There was a tiny peep hole between the girls' and boys' change rooms by the swimming pool. An open secret that enabled an improv game of voyeur and exhibitionist between the naughtier kids at an age when nobody cared to ask what comes next. The 'Upside Down Tree' was a convoluted dwarf  tree which that was simultaneously grotesquely malformed, and cutely endearing. This tree is well engrained in the mythology of the place, taking on Tolkienesque proportions if you bring it up in conversation, just don't sully the memory by actually going to see it again. It still stands there, decades later, looking dejectedly over a set of unkempt tennis courts and the large grassy playground-cum-cricket pitch.

As is the norm, the students were split into streams. The dumdums and later bloomers were abandoned to the lower streams to contemplate their inadequacies, while the more cognitively gifted were placed in the upper streams to cultivate arrogance and a sense of entitlement. This was largely done fairly via standardized tests, but politics did play its part. Especially as one particular teacher, Mrs. Stenben, had two children, one year apart, enrolled in the school. A viral rumor once spread among the students that this she had conspired with her athletically challenged, overweight, and lazy older son to help him cheat during the compulsory cross-country run. She did this in typically crude Zimbabwean fashion by picking him up in the parking lot and dropping him off further down the course.

Break time, at about 10am, was a highlight of each day. Most children would split off into their groups and sit in circles, chatting hot air. They'd bring out their pack lunches, share jokes, mockery, play games.  The livelier ones would run around playing more active games while dodging the  seated groups. The main playground was vast, comprised of two adjacent cricket fields bissected by a straight walkway between the main classroom block and the boarding house. The flatness made it possible to  see and hear hundreds of kids all at once. The sounds blurred into a cacophony of chatter, laughter, and the occasional scream.

The Gang was a group of five generally unremarkable black boys who Kudzai often hung out with during break time. Farai, the ring-leader, was arguably the least intelligent. He had a somewhat misshapen, but functional, head and a jarring laugh that demanded a victim. At break time The Gang (TG) would slither about the large playground looking for naive cheerfulness to sully with their rebellious anti-social experiments. In hindsight, this was just a gentle introduction. The full extent of the casual cruelty of children would be revealed later in high school, long after The Gang had disbanded.

When kicking a tennis ball back and forth became boring, the Gang sometimes looked for someone to laugh at mercilessly until they cried. They almost always succeeded, in large part due to Farai's maniacal cackle and talent for accusatory pointing. They would just walk up and start laughing. No verbalized reason was needed, the mere sight and sound of the laughter was enough to prompt tears from the more sensitive children.

Once, again for no reason, Farai turned his talents against his fellow gang member Kudzai. Kudzai was caught off guard and felt a horrible nauseating churn in his belly, but he managed to avoid the final humiliation of tears. For revenge he later hid a soft-core porn magazine (tits only) in Farai's desk, which an appalled teacher later found. Farai was punished and Kudzai never confessed his role in the debacle. It was easy for all to accept that Farai had naughty magazines, just as it was easy for Farai to accept that one of his many victims over the years had finally struck back.

The Gang was over after the boys passed their Grade 7 examinations and returned to the bottom of the social cesspool as Form 1 students at their respective high schools. Years later Tapiwa, one of the quieter Gang members, would win an athletic scholarship to an Ivy League University in the US, rumored to have been Harvard. A scholarship which he never used because he tragically got a girl pregnant a few months before he was due to depart to what would probably have been a better life. The rest blurred into obscurity over the years, either leaving Zimbabwe quietly or settling into well-adjusted, socially acceptable Zimbo routines.

Classes ended at 1pm and the students either went home, ate lunch, or starved before afternoon sports. Since his family lived closeby, Kudzai usually walked home to for lunch, even if he had to come back for sports. He alternated routes between Kew Drive and Dromore Road. Both were about the same distance, conventionally pretty streets with a variety of flowering trees and domestic workers passing time and braiding hair outside their gates. Kew Drive had more traffic, while Dromore Road was a quieter and shadier street. Most of the children who took that route walked alone as opposed to the groups on Kew Drive.

On his walks home down Dromore Road Kudzai had observed a mysterious man in a Mazda 323 who regularly came and parked there for about half an hour before leaving. He always parked in the same tree shaded spot furthest from any house gates and the Seventh Day Adventist church towards the other end of the street. The man clearly had a littering problem and was creating a growing mess of discarded fast food packaging and other plastic garbage in his go-to spot. Usually the man wasn't alone, but his companions seemed to have a dark talent for evading Kudzai's curious side eye as he ambled by, slowing down just enough to not make it too obvious that he was watching them. One day the mystery died and it became obvious what was going on. The Mazda 323 wasn't there, but it was clear that amongst the dirt-stained and broken Chicken Inn packs were a lot of used condoms. One of which was still glistening and relatively fresh. Suddenly Kudzai got an idea.

He ran loosely and seemingly tirelessly down Dromore Road. Like most eleven year old boys who ran a lot. Beth, wrong place wrong time, ran breathlessly like a novice, reaping the rewards of having managed to dodge most physical training and compulsory cross country runs with her various parents' and doctor's notes. Kudzai had used a stick to pick up the gnarly condom. He ran with it on front of him, a little to the side just in case it fell off so he wouldn't run into it. He cried ecstatically from laughter as he chased after Beth, leaving a misty trail of tears in the wake of her annoyed screams. This was just the sort of asinine prank that perfectly tickled his adolescent sense of  humor. He could laugh so much at times he had to force himself to stop before his jaw cramped or he tweaked an intercostal muscle in his rib cage.

Beth was horrified, and she was tiring. Kudzai, thinking devilishly on the fly, consciously slowed to just the right speed to sustainably keep her running, backpack and all, for the road's roughly three hundred meter length. His intention was not to catch her, only to make her run all the way to the intersection at which point they could turn their separate ways towards their respective homes. Catching her prematurely would only ruin his fun. And if he actually touched her (or god forbid, himself) with the gooey contents of the used condom that would be too gross and probably lead to peeved parents getting involved. Kudzai didn't fully understand the mysterious goo or condom at that point in his life, but he knew it wasn't something he could put on someone forcibly without getting into real trouble.

As they reached the intersection Bertha turned right and looked over her shoulder to see if Kudzai was going to follow her. He did not. He waved goodbye to his classmate grinning, his growing appetite for mischief satiated for one more day.