Again

6. Learn from your mistakes. Never make the same mistake two times. Only stupid people do that.

I wrote "two times" because "twice" had not yet arrived in my vocabulary with the confidence it has now. I also wrote "your" instead of "my." It's the only item in the whole plan addressed to someone else, as if the twelve-year-old had stepped outside herself for a moment to wag a finger at the girl she suspected she might become. The last sentence has no capitals and no parenthesis. She didn't think it needed emphasis. She thought it was obvious.

It was obvious. I agreed with it completely. I agreed with it for years, and then I agreed with it in a different way, the way you agree with a judge.

Here is what I believed in my third year at Makerere, and I want you to see it the way I saw it, because it was a reasonable belief. It held together. You could have defended it in a tutorial.

I believed the first time had been an accident of ignorance. I had built a fortress and left the gate open without knowing there was a gate. Fine. Ignorance can be corrected. You read the pamphlets you were too embarrassed to read the first time. You go to the clinic near Wandegeya where nobody from your church would be caught dead, and you sit on the bench with the other girls who are also not looking at each other, and you listen to the nurse with the reading glasses on a chain explain things to you as if you were thirteen. You nod. You take what you're given. You set an alarm on your phone and label it something innocent. (Mine said "Drink water." I was very hydrated that semester. On paper.)

I believed that knowledge plus discipline equalled safety. This was the same equation that had got me into Makerere, the one Mama had fed me with my porridge: work hard and God will do the rest. I had worked hard. I had a system. I had an alarm.

And I believed, because I had survived the first time without anyone knowing, that I was a person who could handle things. That I'd gone through the worst thing I could imagine and come out the other side still attending lectures, still handing in coursework, still laughing at the right moments in the canteen queue. I thought of that silence as competence. I was proud of it the way some people are proud of never having needed glasses.

So I was not frightened, that third year. I was careful, and I was a little smug about being careful, and I was still with him. We were quieter than we'd been. He fixed my desk lamp twice that term, both times without being asked, both times without saying much. We didn't talk about the first time. I took the not-talking as a kind of maturity. Two adults who had dealt with something and moved on. Very grown-up. Very European film.

If you had asked me then what the danger was, I would have said: carelessness. Forgetting. Being the kind of girl who doesn't take things seriously. I would have said it with my whole chest.

I think you can see where this is going. I couldn't.

It was late September. The jacarandas along the road up to the main building had done their purple thing and dropped it all on the tarmac, so that walking to the library felt like walking on a wedding nobody had cleaned up after. I was tired in a way I put down to the semester. I was off rice, which I put down to the Mary Stuart Hall kitchen, which, to be fair, deserved it.

I knew before I knew. That's the only honest way I can say it. The body keeps its own minutes and reads them back to you whether you called the meeting or not.

I bought the test at a pharmacy in Kikoni this time, not the one I'd used before. I'd decided the first pharmacy was unlucky, which tells you how much of my system was science and how much was superstition dressed in a lab coat. I paid with coins. I didn't take a polythene bag. I put the box in the inside pocket of my jacket and walked back with my hand over it, the way you hold a phone in a taxi park.

I took it in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, the one with the broken latch that you held shut with your foot. I held it shut with my foot. I waited.

Two lines.

I looked at them for a long time. Then I wrapped the stick in tissue and then in more tissue and put it at the bottom of the bin under someone's empty Colgate box, and I washed my hands, and I went back to my room, and I sat on my bed and opened my notes for a test I had the next morning on development economics. I read the same paragraph about structural adjustment eleven times. I remember the number because I counted. Counting was something to do.

My roommate came in around eight with chapati from the stage and offered me half. I said I'd eaten. She said, "You're quiet today," and I said, "Test tomorrow," and she said, "Eh, you people of economics," and that was the end of it. She ate her chapati. I read the paragraph a twelfth time.

I want to tell you about the decision, and I'm not going to, not in detail. Partly because it's mine and partly because I've noticed that when women write about these things, the reader's attention goes straight to the decision, like a crowd gathering at an accident, and everything else blurs. People want to know what you chose so they can decide what they think of you. I understand the impulse. I've had it myself, about other women, and I'm not proud of it.

So I'll tell you what I did instead, in the order I did it, and you can watch my hands.

I told him. He listened. He said, "Okay," and then, after a long time, "What do you want to do," and then nothing, because I didn't answer, and he wasn't a man who filled silences. We sat on the low wall behind the hall until the guard told us to move. I made the decision in the week that followed. I made it alone, in my head, mostly at night, and I told him what I'd decided the way you tell someone the date of an exam.

I went back to the clinic near Wandegeya. The nurse with the glasses on a chain was there. She looked at my file, and then at me, and something crossed her face that wasn't judgement but was close enough to it that I felt my neck go hot. She said, "You were here before." I said yes. She didn't say anything else. I've thought about that woman more than I've thought about some of my lecturers. I don't think she meant anything by it. I think she was tired. I made it mean everything.

I didn't call Mama. I spoke to Mama twice that month, both Sunday evenings, both times about my brother's school fees and whether I was eating well. I said I was eating well. I said it in the bright voice, the jovial one, the one I'd been using since I was small to tell adults what they wanted to hear. She said, "Keep praying, nnyabo." I said I would.

I didn't tell my roommate. I didn't tell the girl from my church fellowship who'd once held my hand during a crusade and said, "Anything, anytime." I didn't tell the counselling office, though I walked past its door at least four times, once close enough to read the timetable taped to it. Monday to Friday, nine to four. I was free on Wednesday afternoons. I knew this. I went to the library on Wednesday afternoons.

I sat the development economics test the morning after the two lines. I got seventy-four.

For a long time, when I let myself think about the second time at all, I thought about it as a verdict on item six. Same mistake, two times. Only stupid people do that. The twelve-year-old had seen it coming and written it down, and I had done it anyway, and therefore the sentence applied. I didn't argue with it. I didn't even appeal.

And I want to be fair to that reading, because it isn't nothing. There were choices. I made them. Some of them I'd make differently. I'm not going to pretend the second time was weather.

I had my ledger open to this item last month, at the small table where I write now, and I filled in the first column without trouble. Planned: Learn from my mistakes. Don't repeat them. The second column took longer, but I got there. Happened: It happened again. Then I started on the third, Paid, and I wrote a list, the way I always do, and I expected it to be a list of what the choice had cost.

It wasn't.

I looked down at what my hand had written and almost none of it was about the decision. Wednesdays in the library. The counselling door. "Test tomorrow." The bright voice on Sundays. The nurse's face, which I decided was disgust. Telling him like a date. Not once saying "I'm scared" out loud, to anyone, for a year.

I put the pen down. I picked it up again, and I added one more line at the bottom, smaller than the rest:

I did know what I was doing. I just did it by myself.

I'll tell you what I did next, before I tell you what I think it meant, because I didn't know what it meant at the time. I closed the book. I went into the kitchen and made tea I didn't drink. I came back and opened it again and read the list aloud, quietly, the way you'd read a list of names. Then I turned to the back cover, where I keep phone numbers, and I found my old roommate's number from Mary Stuart, the one with the chapati, which I'd copied over from three phones ago without ever using it.

I didn't call her. Not that night. But I wrote her name in the margin in pencil. That's as far as I got.

Here is the thing I'd misread, for years. I thought I was ashamed of what I'd chosen. I was, a bit. I still am, some days. But the shame I carried out of that year was older and sneakier than that, and it had a sentence of its own, and the sentence went like this: I am the girl who ruins things.

I don't remember deciding to believe it. It came the way damp comes into a wall. One week I was a third-year student who'd had a hard month. Some months later I was the girl who ruins things, and every piece of evidence after that got filed under her name. A friendship that cooled: ruined. A group presentation that went badly: ruined. A cousin's wedding where I laughed too loudly and an auntie looked at me sideways: ruined, obviously, she knows, they all know. (They did not know. The auntie was looking sideways at the buffet. The goat stew had run out.)

The story felt like honesty. That's what made it so hard to put down. It felt like the one person in the room finally telling the truth about me, and that person was me, and who would know better?

But a story you tell alone never gets checked. Nobody says, "Eh, that's not what happened." Nobody says, "You were twenty and frightened and you sat a test the next morning and got seventy-four, what kind of ruin is that?" Nobody hands you half a chapati and asks the second question. I had arranged my life, carefully, so that nobody could ask the second question. That was the fortress again, the one I'd been so proud of building, and I'd moved inside it without noticing the walls had turned the other way.

If I could sit with that girl now, on the low wall behind Mary Stuart before the guard comes, I wouldn't tell her she did nothing wrong. She wouldn't believe me, and anyway it isn't my place to hand out acquittals; I'm not that kind of court anymore. I think I would just sit there. I'd let her say it, whatever she needed to say, and I wouldn't flinch, and I wouldn't fix it. And then, on Wednesday, I'd walk her to the door with the timetable taped to it, and wait outside.

That's the one I'd change. Of everything.

The cost of believing the old story was not only the years I spent being prosecuted by it. It was what the story stopped me from doing afterwards. If the problem was that I was careless and stupid, the solution was to be more careful and less stupid, more alone, more in control, a tighter fortress. So that's what I built. I came out of my third year with a better system and fewer people in it. I came out of Makerere, eventually, with good grades and a smile I could put on like a uniform, and a habit of handling things that I mistook, for a long time, for strength.

I'm not going to tell you yet what that habit cost me later. You'll see it. It's coming in its own time.

What I can tell you is that last week I did call her. The roommate. I used the number in the pencil margin. It rang for a long time and I nearly put the phone down, and then she answered with "Hello, who is this?" in the suspicious tone we all use for unknown numbers, and I said my name, and there was a pause, and then she screamed.

We talked for forty minutes. Her children, her job at a bank in Ntinda, a mutual friend who'd married a pastor. (Of course she had.) I didn't tell her anything. I wasn't ready, and I don't think a first phone call in nine years is the place to lay down that kind of weight. But near the end, out of nowhere, she said, "You know, that year in Mary Stuart, I always thought something was wrong with you. I used to buy extra chapati in case you wanted. You never wanted."

I didn't know what to say. I said, "I remember the chapati."

She said, "I almost went to the warden once. I thought maybe you were sick. Then I thought, no, she's a private person, leave her."

So someone had been asking the second question, all along, from the next bed, with chapati, and I had answered it every night with "Test tomorrow."

I've written that in the Paid column now, underneath the other things, in pen, because it happened and I can't take it back. In the Revised column I haven't written anything yet. There's just her name, in pencil, in the margin, and a date next to it for when I've said I'll call again.

If this chapter has brushed against something you carry alone, you don't have to keep carrying it that way. In Uganda, Reproductive Health Uganda offers confidential support, and the Mental Health Uganda helpline can connect you with someone to talk to; a university counselling office is a good first door, too. Outside Uganda, your local health service or a trusted clinic can point you toward someone who will listen without judging.