Born a Crime
and girls exchanging cards and gifts, laughing and giggling and stealing kisses. I waited and waited. Finally Maylene showed up ...
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Well, um... happy Valentine’s Day.” I held out the card and the flowers and the teddy bear. She took them a ...
Girls did his homework for him; he was that guy. He was really good- looking, too. It was like when he was creating his characte ...
Petrol for the car, like food, was an expense we could not avoid, but my mom could get more mileage out of a tank of petrol than ...
was the master of coasting. She knew every downhill between work and school, between school and home. She knew exactly where the ...
“You sure?” “Yep.” “Can we help you?” “Nope.” “Do you need a tow?” And what do you say? The truth? “Thanks, but we’re just so po ...
...
OUTSIDER After finishing primary school at H. A. Jack, I started grade eight at Sandringham High School. Even after apartheid, m ...
the broken remnants of the Bantu system. Wealthy white kids—along with the few black people and colored people and Indians who h ...
a government school, Sandringham drew kids from all over, making it a near-perfect microcosm of post- apartheid South Africa as ...
A. Jack, race was broken up into blocks. Sandringham was more like a spectrum. South African schools don’t have cafeterias. At S ...
were mostly black. The kids who played tennis were mostly white. The kids who played cricket were a mix. The Chinese kids would ...
At break, as the only mixed kid out of a thousand, I faced the same predicament I had on the playground at H. A. Jack: Where was ...
money. We didn’t have any money, so I was out of the mix there, too. The group I felt the most affinity for was the poor black k ...
I was on my own. Weekends I was on my own. Ever the outsider, I created my own strange little world. I did it out of necessity. ...
period before break was assembly. The pupils would come together in the assembly hall, each grade seated row by row, and the tea ...
stood up and then the prefect named the five people and I wasn’t one of them. Everyone burst out laughing. Somebody yelled out, ...
hang out. Also, if you got there late, the best food was gone. Two things were true about me at that age. One, I was still the f ...
during assembly. They’d say, “Hey, I’ve got ten rand. If you buy my food for me, I’ll give you two.” That’s when I learned: time ...
fantastic! My parents spoil me, I’ve got money, and now I’ve got a way I can get food without having to work for it—and I still ...
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