A perfect day to be fooled

We had just returned from the morning prep and the day was about to get started for all of us. Our housemistress had travelled home and wouldn’t be back until the day after, so it was a free day for us girls. We were about to have a fun Sunday, but we thought of a better way to do it. I don’t know how the plan started, but everyone knew when the execution began.

“Everybody run!” who dumped this here? Why would anyone dump a corpse right at the back of our hostel? Ah! Everybody, out! This is serious.” These were the words of senior Funmi who was the first to see the body.

Our hostel was in the middle of something close to a forest, and except for the mechanic shop that was adjacent to it, no other building was close by. We’ve had encounters with many creatures that were non-humans and ran for dear lives, but it was all part of the experiences that made our stay fun.

There were times we were required to bring bamboo and palm fronds in school for some shed construction. We would enter the bush to harvest these things and would see many things that we wouldn’t see if our hostel was in the middle of a city. On these occasions, we would report to Uncle Mustapha, our housemaster, and he would say, “stop going to these places. As long as you are not seeing them in your hostel, then you should stop going into their habitats too”. Well, he was right. We were the intruders. However, on this fortunate morning, we were so lucky to receive the visitor (the body) right at the back of our hostel.

Oh, on some days, we would wake up to see mutilated bodies somewhere not too far from our hostel, so we had learnt to be super-careful, but on this day, I think the body was dumped behind our hostel when we went for the morning prep.

Where did you see it? Peter, who had come to see senior Kemi asked, and we pointed to the direction for him, however, he couldn’t get close because he was scared too. He was waiting for the other boys to arrive so they could confirm for real.

Few minutes later, senior Kemi was running from the boys’ hostel with 80% of the boys while the remaining 20% were coming behind with Uncle Mustapha. The pandemonium continued.

There was no elder around except our housemaster, so we waited for him to help us. Our calm and cute housemaster forgot everything about his steeze and just came running to the girls’ hostel in his striped shorts and white t-shirt to ‘protect’ us from the visitor. Who knows? The people that dumped the body there may be somewhere close and could be ready to attack us.

Uncle Mustapha got to our hostel, and everybody paved way for him. He went directly to the blood-stained neatly wrapped body and stood with his hands akimbo for a while, then gradually, he bent towards the body to unravel the packaged plantain tree that was wrapped in a blood tonic-stained white cloth.

April fool! We shouted in unison.

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Our housemaster had forgotten it was April 1st and because something of such had never happened before, he was beyond shocked.

He looked back at us with many expressions on his face and particularly at the people he trusted the most. He was angry, confused, stressed all at the same time. We knew we were in trouble because of what we did, but he slowly bent, placed his hands on his knees, heaved a sigh of relief and smiled. Okay, we were safe from getting punished.

“You guys got me”, he said. Actually, nobody would’ve suspected it was a prank because of our environment, so we got him really good. However, he said, “this was good, but don’t try it again”, and we never did,because doing it again would mean that we would pull his anger instead of his legs.

However, when another housemaster took over, we did something close to it once again even though we nearly got into trouble.

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