The Boy Next Door Read Online Free PDF

my homework. I did not want to write about “My Holidays,” the essay assignment my teacher had given us that morning
     on the very first day of term in my new school
.
I did the long division, which was easy.
    I picked up my English essay book, opened the page, and wrote the title “My Holidays.” I thought and thought. I had to fill
     two pages with “My Holidays.” I knew what some of the girls were going to write about. They had already started talking when
     Miss Turner wrote the title on the blackboard: Natal and Durban, Cape Town, Okavango Swamps, and even London. My holidays:
     16 Jacaranda Avenue, Baysview, Bulawayo. But I wrote something else. I went
away.
    When I finished, I went outside and started reading on the veranda. Sue Barton, Student Nurse, had just met the intern, Dr.
     Bill Barry, when the commotion started. The shouting was coming from the McKenzies. It was happening right by the gate. Mrs.
     McKenzie was holding on the latch, rattling it up and down.
    The boy was leaning against the Datsun Sunny with his hands crossed on his chest. He let Mrs. McKenzie shout and shout, and
     then he got into the Datsun Sunny and drove away. Mrs. McKenzie kept shouting after the car. Rosanna, who was coming back
     from the tuck shop at the corner, said that she had seen a white woman in the passenger seat.
    Mummy who’d been woken up by all the noise said, “Look at how she’s continuing. That woman is only asking for trouble.”
    We could still hear Mrs. McKenzie from the veranda, and when I stood on the clay pot that had the elephant’s ear plant growing
     in it, I could see her. She was already in her dressing gown. Her hair was all tangled up. But we didn’t tell the police any
     of this because Daddy said it was best to mind one’s own business; once you became a part of a police case, it was very hard
     to extricate yourself out of it.
    I thought that if only all this had happened during the holidays, I might have made use of it in my essay.

7.
    For the first
day of school, Aunty Reggie had straightened my hair in her kitchen. She left the straightening cream on for too long because
     she was busy talking to Mummy about something that was happening at church with one of the girls who was rumored to be pregnant
     and so should not be graduated.
    “It’s burning!” I shouted, jumping from the chair and dashing to the sink.
    The back of my head was covered in blisters, and when Daddy saw them, he asked Mummy, did she and her friend intend to kill
     his child or what? “They must see that she is a colored,” replied Mummy.
    At my old school the real colored girls had called me names because I was not light-skinned and I had a wide nose. My new
     school was a former whites only, Group A school. I had passed the entrance exam.
    Daddy twisted his mouth; he didn’t like it when Mummy talked about coloreds and blacks. Although everyone classified him as
     a colored (he was light-skinned, had good hair and a straight nose), he didn’t see himself as one. He didn’t talk like a Barham
     Green or Thorngrove colored and his Ndebele was perfect. He was proud of his mother who had brought him up in Nyamandhlovu.
     His father was a white farmer in the area who had agreed to have his name on the birth certificate and who had paid for his
     education.
    Mummy made me practice all the way in the bus, “good morning,” “good afternoon,” using my best European accent.
    We reported at the headmistress’s office. The headmistress, Mrs. Jameson, smiled very sweetly when I said, “Good morning,
     headmistress,” and even commented on my pronunciation. She called in the deputy headmistress and asked me to read some words
     from a piece of a paper that she pushed towards me:
“
The Annual General Meeting of the PTA.” The words were getting entangled in my mouth with my spit. The deputy headmistress
     stood by the doorway smiling with her hands crossed.
    “Hmmmm, that’s quite a lardy-dardy accent you have