MY JOURNEY TO BECOMING WHOLE

THE NIGHT WE JUMPED

Trigger Warning: This chapter contains references to threats of violence, and a boarding school break-in. Reader discretion advised.

I never had birthdays. In my house, we didn’t celebrate. We survived. School, home, church. That was my life. So when graduation came, I thought maybe — just maybe — I’d finally get a ceremony. A gown. A photo Mom could frame.

I was wrong.

My secondary school was shut down before we could take our final exams. The government said it would “no longer be functioning.” They sent us to another school as boarding students, just to sit for our Senior School Certificate. We were strangers there. External students. No lockers. No names on the register.

That’s where it happened.

One night, a girl from another school a foreigner tied bedsheets into a rope and threw it over the fence. She escaped to a party. We thought that was the scandal.

We were wrong.

Hours later, boys used that same rope to climb into our compound. They came to the girls’ dormitory. They banged on our door. They shouted threats that made my blood turn to ice. The back of our hostel had windows covered with iron nets. Beyond the nets was a fish pond. If you jumped wrong, you wouldn’t come up.

We prayed. We begged them to leave. They didn’t.

Then Love stood up.

Love was her name, and she lived up to it that night. She grabbed a knife from the kitchen corner. She cut the iron net from our window while we held our breath. She tore it open inch by inch while the banging got louder. Then she looked at us and said, “Jump.”

So we did.

One by one, we slipped through that jagged hole, careful not to fall into the pond. We ran through the back gate to the school owner’s house inside the same compound. We raised an alarm. We screamed until lights came on.

They called the police. The boys were gone by the time sirens reached us.

In the morning, they found the girl who escaped. She showed no remorse. She was expelled on the spot. Banned from taking the exam she ran away to avoid.

And us? We got no graduation. No gown. No photo. Because we weren’t their students. We were just bodies filling their exam hall.

I walked out of that school with no certificate ceremony. No celebration. Just a new scar and a promise:

If the world won’t celebrate me, I’ll celebrate myself.