The Worst Day Of My Life…
They say… If a memory haunts you, tell it to as many people as possible.
Let me tell you a story of a kid named Kay. A story about the most annoying day of my life. And I promise it’ll be the most beautiful piece you’ve ever read.
This was roughly fifteen years ago. The kind of memory that sits somewhere between your chest and your throat, refusing to dissolve. I was in SS2 (Senior Secondary 2), final term, just weeks away from becoming an SS3 student, which was a big deal.
In Nigeria, SS3 is when you become the senior.
There was this girl I was eyeing. An SS1 girl. We took the same school bus every morning, and during that hour-long ride to school, we would attempt to talk. Not about anything profound, just the unnecessary conversation of young kids who hadn’t yet learnt that silence is golden.
I wanted to ask her out, but I didn’t have the ginger (courage), so I kept postponing it. I no wan fall my hand, as we say. I didn’t want to embarrass myself.
Then came the big announcement…
A debate was announced.
SS2 Art Class versus SS2 Science Class. I was a science student. Word on the street was that this debate would decide the senior prefect (head boy in SS3), though I’m not sure whether that was true or just the kind of rumour that builds around any high-stakes school event.
“Give us your best student”, they said, and my classmates pushed me forward. Because, to them, I was “that guy”.
This was my chance. Not just to win. This was my chance to impress my crush.
I wrote my points with the intensity of someone drafting a love letter disguised as an argument. Then I crammed every word. I recited them in the bathroom, bedroom, in my sleep. In fact, I remember my brothers went to play football in the streets one evening, and I followed them, not to play, but to sit at the edge of the pavement and recite the entire debate, word for word, staring at nothing.
Someone said, “Your brother doesn’t play ball? He’s weird, just talking to himself since.”
I didn’t care. I had bars to memorise.
The D Day Came…
The morning of the debate, I woke up before any cockcrow. I remember standing in front of the mirror while getting dressed, watching my own lips form the words I’d practiced a hundred times.
I got to the bus stop early for the first time in my life, waiting with a restlessness that made my fingers tap against my thighs.
The bus came. I stepped on. I looked around.
She wasn’t there.
“Oh damn”, I thought. “This can’t be happening”. She was never absent. And why would she choose today of all days to not show up? The universe had terrible timing.
I sat there, pissed, for the entire one-hour ride.
At every bus stop, I would look up, hoping she would appear with some explanation, like, “Oh, I changed bus stops today”, but she never came. The door of the bus would open, all these other annoying students would board, and the small flame of hope in my chest would reset.
We arrived at school around 7:50. Assembly was at 8, which meant the debate started at 8. I jumped down from the bus and forced myself to shake her out of my head. I had work to do.
By the time I entered the school compound, she had faded from my thoughts. Friends surrounded me, asking for preview lines and hyping me up. Bad guy, they called me. I started to believe it.
The T Time Came…
It’s strange how precisely I can remember the details. We, the debaters, sat at the front, facing each other, our sides facing the school. The entire student body was seated to my right. I looked across at my opponent, a guy named Akin-something Femi, and I remember thinking, “This poor guy doesn’t know what’s about to hit him”.
After the whole prep talk by the principal. It was my turn to go first.
I stood up. Grabbed the microphone, a wired one, the kind I don’t think they use anymore. I remember stepping over the wires, carefully pulling them out from under my legs before moving forward. In the audience, my boys were hailing me.
FATU! FATU!! FATU!!! FATU!!!!
Fatu is short for Faturoti, my surname. That’s what they called me in secondary school. (Please don’t start calling me that now.)
I began spitting. And it was going good. Word for word, bar for bar, exactly as rehearsed. Twenty seconds of beautiful, flowing argument. I was in the zone.
Then, out of nowhere, my eyes found her in the audience.
What the helly…
She was there. Sitting in the crowd, staring at me.
“How did she get here? Did she miss the bus on purpose? Why isn’t she smiling?”
My brain went off-topic completely. By the time I snapped out of it, I had been staring blankly at the audience for about ten seconds. The words were gone. All of them. Every single point I had memorised in the bedroom, on the pavement, in front of the mirror, vanished.
I stood there. The whole school went quiet. I could hear myself breathing into the microphone.
You know how the brain works when you’re panicking. The harder you try to remember something, the further it runs from you. I was just grasping at smoke.
Fifteen seconds passed. Maybe more. Then a voice erupted from the back of the assembly.
It was the principal. Mr. Ajiboye.
“Get off my stage, naughty boy! If it’s to make noise in class, you’d make noise!”
He said it exactly like that. To be fair, I was quite a menace back then, and he knew it.
This isn’t even the worst part. And this story has a happy ending…
Let’s get to the worst part…
I crawled back to my seat at the front. Buried my face in my lap. Cried a little, or maybe a lot, I don’t remember the exact amount of tears, only that they came.
I could hear the other guy from art class dropping his weak points. In my head, I was thinking, “This guy isn’t even spitting anything solid.” Then another vicious voice inside me responded, “Well, at least he’s spitting something”.
Chai. I had just dissed myself.
The cruel irony was that by now, with the pressure gone, every point had returned to my memory. Perfectly. The whole speech sat in my brain, complete and ready, like when a guest arrives just as the party ends.
As my opponent finished, something rose in me. Maybe we can call it courage. Or desperation. Or the stubbornness of a boy who couldn’t accept that this was how his story would end.
I raised my hand.
The principal acknowledged me. “Yes?”
“I’d like to try again”, I said.
He looked at me. The whole school looked at him.
“NO!”, he said. “You’re not trying again. And I better not hear any report of you causing any issue in class again.”
Haaaaaaaaaa…
And that response, not the failure itself, but the refusal to let me try again, is what made it the worst day of my life.
Every time I remember this story, my anger goes toward that man. Because the worst thing you can do to someone who has fallen is refuse to offer them a hand to stand back up. Especially when that someone is just a kid who was willing to try again.
If Mr. Ajiboye had let me speak, today this would be a different story. A story of resilience, titled “The Time I Fell and Rose Again”. But he didn’t. So it’s not.
That man is probably seventy or eighty years old now, if he’s still alive. And he must have forgotten this incident.
So what’s the happy ending…
Haha… The happy ending, if you can call it that: the girl left our school at the end of that term. Moved somewhere else, for some reason. I never saw her again. So, at least, I didn’t have to spend another year avoiding the school bus.
I don’t know what lesson you can take from this. Maybe there isn’t one, or maybe there are several.
I told this story to a group of people recently, and someone offered a sharp interpretation: “Maybe the lesson is to never expect a second chance. You have one shot. Use it correctly”, She said. And I believe that’s a valid point.
But the point of me writing this is… I’ve learnt that if an annoying memory doesn’t go away, tell it to as many people as possible in a fun way. Over time, the fun takes the teeth out of it.
Until recently, I had never told anyone this story, not even my family. But over the past few months, I’ve told almost everyone who cared to listen. Now, I just remember the fun story anytime the event comes to my mind.
For most people, when something bad happens, all they can do is feel bad, complain, or press charges.
But I think life is worth talking about. Some stories should be shared. Not because sharing erases the pain, but because it transforms it into something you can hold, examine, and eventually, set down.
So there you have it. The worst day of my life.
