Excerpt
Excerpt from FEDDIE GIRL, by Nona David.
Bernard Books Publishing https://bernardbooks.com

The next morning dawned bright and clear, but Carlotta was apprehensive in the presence of her new classmates.

Attending a girls’ boarding school in a foreign country wasn’t detestable. What Carlotta loathed was the deafening and head-splitting quarrels her classmates indulged in when there was no teacher in the classroom.

It was only 8:45 AM and, already, the JS1D students were at it again. This time, they were bickering and fighting one another about what cities and towns in Nigeria had the best residential areas. When words weren’t enough, they resorted to throwing missiles in the form of books, combs, and school sandals.

As if anyone cares where others grew up, Carlotta thought, feeling miserable. She’d lived her whole life in the Unit-ed States and couldn’t do a thing about her parents’ decision to have her enrolled in a boarding school in Nigeria.

The noise was making her head hurt. Carlotta depressed her vibrating eyeballs with her knuckles, hoping to keep them from shooting out of their sockets. She was wondering how the girls were able to keep up such a racket, when a particularly loud bang surprised her into snapping her eyes open.

A furious-looking male teacher stood at the classroom door.

The fighting stopped at once. The screeching was cut off from the throats of two students—like a raging fire abrupt-ly doused with water. One final sandal arched high over the heads of the students and landed squarely in the middle of the blackboard with a loud thud, then skidded mournfully down to the ground. Several girls scuttled back to their seats. Ndidi and her cohorts scrambled down from their lockers.

When all was calm, the class stared sheepishly at the dark male teacher leaning against the door-frame.

The teacher considered them for a while, his handsome face devoid of expression. Without much show of annoyance, he strolled into the classroom and stood before the students.

“I am not going to inquire into the cause of the noise,” he declared. “But, this is a classroom, and it is time for my lesson.” He strolled over to the blackboard and picked up the lone sandal. “Who lost this?” he asked in a scathing tone, holding the rubber footwear aloft by the tips of his forefinger and thumb, dangling it like an offending rodent for the whole class to see.

A chubby girl walked up to him like one would to a dangerous dog. “Please sir, it’s mine,” she breathed, and held out her hand for the shoe.

The teacher cast her a wary eye, snorted, and dropped the sandal in her hand.

The girl clutched the shoe and scurried back to her seat.

The teacher sneered then turned abruptly and picked up the duster. With a swift swipe of his left hand, he wiped the board clean. His right hand moved with lightening speed as he wrote the word mathematics on the board with a piece of white chalk. He whirled around in one fluid motion and began to teach.

The teacher’s mannerisms were mesmerizing: teaching—effortless, movement—electrifying, voice—spellbinding.

There was not a peep from the class during the entire lesson. The students were caught in the fast-paced style of his teaching. They watched in fascination as he stabbed and slashed at the blackboard with the chalk, whipping-up seemingly intoxicating mathematical symbols and equations from thin air.

The math teacher was the performer; the mesmerized class his spectator.

Not until the bell rang did Carlotta realize she hadn’t grasped a thing from the lesson.

The math teacher had raced through his lesson in a well-meaning tactic to revise the basic skills he believed the class had already acquired. He’d breezed through even and odd numbers, and the rules of addition and subtraction. After those came multiplication and division. Then types of fractions. Simple proportions. Percentages. Finally, it had come to algebra and the real lesson had commenced.

The math teacher sauntered out of the class as soon as the bell rang, leaving an awed class behind him. He didn’t even bother to introduce himself.

A stunned silence followed the teacher’s departure until someone broke the spell by saying, “Please, what was his name?”

“Mr. Wesley Iorshimbe-Ngongngong,” another offered.

“Mr. Wesley what?” a different girl quipped.

“Wesley Snipes!” Joyce snapped at the girl. “Kai, are you deaf?”

The student gave Joyce a reproachful look. “Please allow me oh, the man’s name has k-leg, abeg.”

Another admonished Joyce. “Yes oh, allow her. I’m sure that even you can’t pronounce the name sef.”

Nelly laughed and shook her head. “Come to think of it, that mathematics teacher is a real Snipes.” She jumped to her feet, her eyes shinning with mischief. She couldn’t stop laughing. “Wait oh, he even looks like the real Wesley Snipes.” She stopped to catch her breath.

Several girls laughed, too.

That opened the floodgates. In excited tones, the students compared the math teacher’s movements to that of Wesley Snipes’ ingenious stunts in the ‘Blade’ movies.

They got so wrapped-up in their stories they lost track of time, until Rosemary, the class prefect, announced in dis-may, “You girls, it’s time for integrated science, and it says here on the time-table that we are supposed to go to the biology lab for the lesson.”

They were already six minutes late. Lockers were opened and banged as the students reached for their science texts and notebooks. In a flash, most of them were out the door.

“Biology lab, Carlotta. Let’s go,” Ossie apprised. She scooped up her books, shut her desk with a bang, and ran for the door.

“Hey, wait up!” Carlotta called to Ossie, “I dunno where to find the biology lab!” In a rush, she grabbed a heavy textbook she assumed was for integrated science, and bolted out the door after her classmates.

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