-VEA-
“Have a great morning, sister,” the Head Prefect said to me. I smiled widely at him and waited as he extended the tray out to the girl sitting beside me, but her head was bowed in prayer. He flashed me another smile before he moved away from our bench, and went to the aisle again to walk down it. He took a few steps, and my mouth fell open as gasps sounded everywhere, and I heard sounds of benches creaking as people left their seats.
“What’s that?” a girl came from the side and pointed at the ground behind the Head Prefect.
“Huh?” he said, then looked behind him. On the ground was the underwear, and I cursed inwardly as the entire congregation gasped again. I thought I had sneaked it into his pocket properly. The girl pointed a finger at him.
“Why is that there?!” she accused.
The fallout afterwards was great. I thought that the guy would just come up with excuses to get himself out of the pinch he was in, but according to some of our classmates, he had sworn some vow to avoid falsehood altogether. Dumb fool. Because he stood his ground repeatedly and told the faculty that the underwear did not belong to him, but simply because he said that he couldn’t lie, the faculty automatically assumed he was already a pathological liar.
If someone told you they didn’t lie?
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That was a lie right there.
Hilarious.
The boy was stripped of his standing in the school, and the rumours that erupted around his possible expulsion was the fodder for the school’s rumour mill for a while. All this time, whenever we passed by each other in the hallway, he would send me a disturbed look like he suspected that I had something to do with his loss of standing. I did have something to do with it, and I was tempted to approach him and console him about it, but my eyes swiped over his empty breast pocket where his title tag used to be.
And I had completely lost all interest.
To make matters worse, the school decided to do further investigations into the boy’s background. Turns out, he was in the middle of chatting with one of the girls from the cohort, who was a minor.
That was all him.
Apparently, he was only sending her nice messages, but a negative impression of him was already in the minds of the adults, and they couldn’t help but see grooming all over the conversations. Interestingly, the parents of the underage girl with whom he was in contact with dug through her belongings, and happened to find it full of panties the same exact brand of the one that had slipped out of his pocket that morning, and well, what happened afterwards was a glorious sight.
Her parents were crossing the street on the way to church, with their little girl while his parents were already by the church doors, and waiting for everyone else to walk in. Their eyes crossed, and maybe there was a frown that slipped from their faces, because they were suddenly launched towards one another, and a catfight ensued.
Women and men of God, tearing wigs and dentures out.
The little girl was screaming at the top of her voice for them to cut it out, but they were not having it. The boy took one look, then bolted in the opposite direction. I watched the entire thing go down, and reflected deeply on it.
That was all me.
Well.
By then, I had also lost interest because I was convinced nothing would be able to top that catfight. The things that followed were boring, things like his mother getting kicked out of her job at church, and the other family having to move across towns to escape from the other family. I sat on the couch that faced my television, and popped frozen blueberries into my mouth while I watched Titanic. Time passed, and the bell to the front door rang. I waited for my godfather to answer the door, but I didn’t hear any footsteps coming down the stairs. Shrugging, I put the bowl down, and approached the front door.
And saw that piece of underwear on the floor sent through the mail slot on the door.