CHAPTER 1
I always say, you never know what it is being poor until you walk to school barefoot. And then when you finally get that pair of shoes, you kick stones with it every day when you walk to and from school because it can’t be real, right? Until the shoes get tired and start swallowing the stones and eating sand, and you realise that you are poor again because you are either going to have to stitch up your broken shoes, or go back to being barefoot.
Funny, isn’t it? Except, I walked to school wearing a pair of black buccaneers with white school socks, and then I took them off during our reading period when the teacher decided that we were going to do yoga.
And then after class, my shoes just grew feet and disappeared. I told the teacher that was watching us, and she did a search, but we never found my shoes. I could have sworn that one of the girls in my class had worn out shoes, but now all of a sudden, she had black buccaneers. Crazy, right?
I was now officially the girl without shoes. It made me want to cry, but I refused to boost their egos; I didn’t want to let them know that they were slowly breaking me. And what hurt the most was that my mother had used the last money she had to buy me those shoes after my last pair took its last breath. They weren’t even older than a week, and now they were gone. I don’t know how I am going to break the news to her after school, and I dreaded going home.
This had become my life. I was a victim of bullying since I could remember. I never really had true friends. My life was a pain, and it was even worse at school.
I was Buhle, and I stayed true to my name. Beauty. That’s what I was; the true definition of beauty. I had the looks and the heart, and yet that was never enough to satisfy these humans.
And no, I am not an alien that landed on the wrong planet. Maybe I am wrong and I should test on that theory. Or maybe I am in fact no longer on earth...because if the earth really is flat, then someone please tell me why I’m spinning.
