I went to a mixed secondary school, somewhere in the south, no name mentions here!
I finished secondary school over 35 years ago and thanks to social media, I was able to reconnect with a few of my old classmates.
Then some five or six years back, one of us started a WhatsApp group for our classmates; and more and more of us were added and indeed it was great reconnecting with classmates who we hadn’t seen or heard from in more than 30years!
You see, that’s the thing with this reunions, whether on social media or physical, it always reignites feelings, either of love or hate.
Classmates who had crushes on one another while at school reconnected and you could see from the chat thread how they teased one another.
Others who hated one another rekindled that hate and bashed themselves on the platform without apology. Well, that is where my story of Ada came from.
Who is Ada? She was my classmate; of course, the one I had such a huge crush on when we got to Form 3. Back in the day, we didn’t do JSS, we did forms one to five and then you were done with secondary school.
Anyway, it was from Form 3 that we were all distributed into three arms- Arts, Pure Science or Social Science. Those who hated maths with a passion naturally gravitated towards the Arts class, those who were born efficos were in Pure science classes, these were the bookworms of our set. Then we the inbetweeners were in social science class.
Ada and I were in the social science class.
I had such a huge crush on this girl but never had the liver to tell her.
WHY?
See ehn, this girl, Ada was so cute. She was smallish, fair in completion and wore a short haircut even though the school allowed girls to plait their hair. She was the toast of our set; boys were falling for her like over ripe mangoes. Me, I couldn’t compete with the big boys of our set, boys who’s fathers could send mine on errands. Ha, no o.
So, when someone added her to the WhatsApp group, I was palpitating again. Let me say that before now, I had been making enquiries about her, I scoured for her on Facebook but couldn’t find anyone who knew where she was, so when someone added her, it was a different name, until somebody said,’ ‘Ada, aka sugaliscious is on the platform.’
Ehen! Ada is now Sugaliscious, o ga, o! Anyway, I went to her profile photo and Ada was still a knockout! Of course like almost all of us, she was married with kids, she had become a lawyer but wasn’t practicing. She married some Igbo chap she met after university and the rest they say is history…
I sent her a private message just to say ‘Hello, do you remember me? Nice to catch up with you again.’ Guess what? She did. She called me by my nickname. She teased me, telling me she knew I liked her in school but I was too shy to say it.
Das how we started o!
Over the weeks and months, our talk deepened into love notes; our love notes deepened into phone sex. No, we never sent nudes, those are for kids. Remember, we are both married to different people. I have a wife and two smart kids; so nudes were out! I on my own wouldn’t have minded but Ada was more cautious. No problem.
Ok, so on the other hand, on the general platform, we had planned a class reunion; physical reunion. We arranged to meet at some resort to have a fun weekend, you know, to reconnect properly. That was just the perfect excuse both of us needed to give our spouses.
My friend, a lot happened at the reunion and it wasn’t just Ada and I who rekindled something forbidden. Oh no, there was no sex between us, please! I can’t say same for the others but there was cuddling, there were other things that could have happened if we stayed just one more day…
Do I love Ada or is she just a crush?
There’s another reunion slated for next month…we will find out.
(Series written and edited by Peju Akande and based on true stories)