I am still smiling to myself with pride for sneaking Capital High’s K Beck into #Room1045. I love love love the reactions of the K Beck lovers. He is still the most popular Kenikodjo guy (or is it Prosper?) ever! How is your 2018 treating you so far? Well, I hope! Let’s reach those goals and targets, shall we? Have a blessed week, guys! I have had phone problems for the last two weeks, so I can’t do a WhatsApp broadcast just yet. Apologies 😥 

The Kenikodjo meetup 2.0 is finally happening in March. (Sorry guys, I tried to push for January but this was out of my hands). Designed this poster myself- I am super proud of it. I really can’t wait to see you guys! And this one will be so much more fun than the last one was. There will be karaoke (who can sing Despacito? 😂), games, photos, nibbles and surprises! You have to be there! Register here!  More details soon! Already excited just thinking about it. 🙂 

Now to this week’s story!

‘Is it me or this office keeps getting smaller?’

He wasn’t sure whether or not to answer. These days, he kept getting this nagging feeling that he was being recorded.

It made him paranoid most of the time.

Well, he liked to call it being careful.

A dean of students should not be caught having an affair with his former teaching assistant, especially when she happened to be the daughter of the Vice- Chancellor. 

Key phrase was ‘should not be caught’. That was all he was trying to do- to not get caught.

‘Paapa, when a beautiful woman is sitting on your office desk half naked, you don’t zone out and think about the 1000 different ways her father is going to kill you when he discovers that you have been sleeping with his precious innocent virgin of a daughter.’

‘1000 ways? I didn’t think your father was this creative.’

‘Vengeance brings out the creativity in a man. Now stop zoning out. Focus on the now. Focus on the half naked girl. Can you do that?’

‘Mit gerne*.’

‘Yes baby! I love it when you speak German.’

Paapa smiled and took off his trousers. He skillfully unhooked her brassiere with his left hand and cleared his desk with the right hand. Before he leaned in to kiss Ohemaa, his eyes fell on the back of his desk sign. He knew what the inscription on the front said: Dr Paapa Nsiah Ankama, Dean of Students.

He was the youngest person to hold the position. When he was appointed, a lot of the other senior members had complained.

He is too young.

This boy is not mature enough to handle these manipulative students.

It must have been his father who pulled the strings. 

The small girls are going to throw themselves at him.

And they were right. Especially about the last one.

He was only 37 with the face of a 26 year old. His father was very good friends with Chairman of the University Council. In fact their children had been raised together. It was easy to convince him to nominate Paapa as Dean of Students. Of course, with a very generous donation to some charity foundation that the Chairman had set up for his social initiatives.  After that, all Paapa had to was to show up at university events and have lighthearted intelligent conversations with the senior members and subtly flirt with their wives. Not too much for it to raise eyebrows, but just enough for him to snag the position very easily. His ‘contenders’ didn’t see it coming. University politics could be nasty or a lot of fun, depending on whose side you were on.

The girls came in every shape, size and form. Even the married women hit on him. There was a day when one of the girls in the class he was teaching attached a video of her stripping to her terminal assignment.

She got an A, of course- for gut and thinking outside the box. Those and a nice body got her the marks she needed so that she would not fail the course. Her assignment had many problems and her citations were not well done. It made sense to initiate Plan B, and surprise surprise, it saved the day.

With Ohemaa, it was nothing like that. She never flirted with him and he never hit on her. She was the daughter of the Vice Chancellor- you had to have a death wish to do something like that. She was also the lead soprano singer in the university choir when she was a student. Her O Holy Night solo at the University Carols Service was talked about for the longest time. They got along well, as well as a lecturer and his teaching assistant could.

They worked amicably together for about two months until she broke the ice.

‘You are wearing it wrong.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Your bowtie. You are wearing it wrong.’

He was getting ready to go for another networking cocktail and he had decided to dress up in his office. Ohemaa was sitting there, grading the objective tests the students in his class had written earlier that day.

‘My dad taught me how to tie these things and you look like you could use some help so let me do it.’

‘Okay sure.’

When she was fixing the tie, he noticed several things about her- things he had not allowed himself to notice simply because of who her father was.

Their eyes met and she took off the bowtie that she had just fixed for him.

---

‘Barima, you are going to have to leave right this minute.’

‘No, he is going to have to face me like a man. You left me for a boy? Come on, Joan!’

‘I don’t know how you saw this playing out when you decided to come here, but it won’t end with you leaving with the girl. Get a grip of yourself.’

‘She left me, Joan. She left me two weeks after that conversation she had with you. She is gone with the kids.’

‘That’s not my prob-‘

Nii Okai nudged her so she shut up. It was his turn to speak.

‘Respectfully Sir, you are making a scene. It just takes one person to call campus security and this could go south really fast. I am sorry to hear about your family but I will have to ask you to leave Joan alone. This can end with every party walking away respectfully. It could also end badly. Who wants that?’

‘I do! It is already ending badly.’

‘Have you tried speaking to your wife?’

‘Don’t you dare give me marital advice? You don’t even know the girl you claim you are in love with. You don’t know the things she has done, the things she has made me do to her.’

Barima’s lips curled into a sinister smile.

‘She hasn’t told you how she likes it. Let me tell you what she does just before she has an orgasm. She wraps her legs around your waist and-‘

Nii Okai’s fists found their way to Barima’s face.

It was Joan’s ‘Nii, please stop. He is not worth it.’ that stopped him.

God forgive me. Two sins in one night – first kissing Joan, now letting my anger get the better of me.

Joan’s plea was more insistent.

‘Barima, please leave, I can’t do this right now.’

‘I will be back with a letter from my lawyers. This is battery.’

‘Barima, stop it.’

‘Too late, Joan. You started this with me and we will end it together.’

When Barima finally left, Nii Okai followed shortly afterwards.

He needed air was the excuse he mumbled.

But Joan knew better. The Barima episode had him spooked.

---

Chris hung up and sighed.

Are you going to keep taking care of people’s children?

It was his wife, Grace. She hadn’t called him on her own or been to visit him ever since he moved to school. It was the kids who called him on weekends when he wasn’t home. And yet today out of the blue, she had called him and asked him to come home because she had missed him.

Even her joke about their marital bed not getting enough cardio workouts felt forced.

I can’t continue like this.

He shook his head and looked back at his books. The Sports Psychology elective he had chosen was a clear case of matricki wo. He had thought that they would be discussing Messi’s winning strategy and the effect that games like Fantasy League had on the real time performance of the players. He was so wrong. It was nothing like that. It was pamphlets and fat books that said nothing about Messi or Fantasy League. Who cared about psychosomatic disorders?

PK barged into the room. He was barely here- he was either on the football field praying or scramming the Stats figures into his head.

‘Chale, someone has jumped from the fourth floor oo. Suicide sane. Only problem is he didn’t die. I think his leg is broken. He is yelling in pain. They say he was having a weed party in his room at 10 am in the morning. So this one, what is he going to tell his parents?’

Chris jumped into policeman mode immediately. He grabbed his badge from his locker and headed outside. A crowd had gathered around the boy. They were recording every bit of it on their phones (Snapchat reporters 🙄) but keeping a respectable distance from him because of the moaning and the blood. It was everywhere.

‘Where did he fall from? Someone call 193. The hospital will come with an ambulance.’

He raced up the stairs to the room he fell from. The door was still ajar- it seemed most of the people had left when the guy fell. He knocked and entered anyway. He walked to the balcony and looked down. The paramedics were moving him onto a stretcher. Some of the people had started leaving because the main source of attraction was no longer there.

Chris looked round the room. He could see what looked like cocaine on one of the tables. There were empty vodka bottles on the floor. It looked like something was moving in the top bunk bed on the right. He climbed up and yanked the white duvet off the bed.

It was Stacy. The new girl in Room 1045.

She looked confused. Her hair was all over her face and the velvet shorts she was wearing hid almost nothing. She instinctively grabbed the crucifix that was at the end of the chain she wore everywhere.

‘Don’t scream. It is me, Chris. Policeman from next door. What are you doing here? How long have you been here?’

She still looked confused.

‘Are you high?’

Stacy started laughing. When she spoke, her speech was slurred.

‘Is that a trick question? Yes I am high. I am so high that I can see Jesus and his angels. Did you know that Jesus has a mohawk? And a nose ring! I was like ‘Yo! You deceived us by telling us that it was wrong and yet you are doing same.’I should tell my mother about that next time she tries to give me a lecture about my life choices.’

Chris looked at her face more intently. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hands were twitching.

‘Where am I? Who are you? What is going on?’

‘Get off the bed and wash your face. I will explain. You also have some questions to answer. Something happened to the boy who lives in this room. Who was here with you?’

‘Lexus? Nothing is wrong with him. He said he was going to take a swim. He left us here at the party. Wait, where is everyone? Am I in trouble?’

See you next week! 

*mit gerne– with pleasure (German)