Item 5: Graduate With Good Grades

5. Be the first in the family to have a masters.

(But first graduate from Makerere with GOOD GRADES. First Class if God allows. Second Upper if He is busy.)

The second line sits under the first in slightly smaller writing, as if twelve-year-old me realised you cannot have a master's without a bachelor's and went back to fill in the prerequisite. I admire the contingency planning. I admire even more the theology: a God with a calendar, Who might be tied up the week my results came out, and a girl prepared to accept the consolation prize without complaint.

He was busy, as it turned out. I got the Second Upper.

I want to tell you about the day I collected it, because it was a good day. I have spent a lot of this book on days that were not good, and I don't want you to think I've forgotten how to describe the other kind. This one had sun, and tents, and aunties.

Graduation at Makerere is less a ceremony than a migration. Families come from Mbarara and Gulu and Masaka in hired Noahs and borrowed Premios. They park wherever a car will physically fit, and some places where it won't. By seven in the morning the roads around the Main Building were a single slow animal of traffic and hawkers. Men sold plastic flowers, bottled water, gowns for hire and framed certificates with no names on them yet, which I have always thought was a bold business model.

My family came in two vehicles and three moods. Mama had been awake since four. She wore a gomesi the colour of ripe passion fruit, ironed so stiff the shoulders stood up on their own, like a second, more confident woman standing just behind her. My aunt Florence wore gold. Not a gold outfit. Gold, as a concept, on every available surface. My uncle wore the same grey suit he has worn to every wedding, burial and introduction since 2009, and he told everyone who would listen that it still fitted. It did not.

My younger cousins had been dressed by their mothers and were therefore furious.

I wore the gown. If you haven't worn a Makerere gown, imagine a black polyester tent that has been designed to trap heat for scientific purposes, with a hood in your faculty colour that will not lie flat no matter what you do with it. I had paid for mine to be pressed. It came back looking pressed for about forty minutes. By the time we had walked from the car to Freedom Square it had a crease down the back like a spine.

The ceremony itself was four hours long. There were speeches about the youth being the future, speeches about the youth being the present, and one speech I am fairly certain was about roads. The Chancellor conferred degrees on faculties in batches, and when ours was called we all stood up at once. A small cheer went up from somewhere in the crowd that I knew, without looking, belonged to my aunt Florence, who cheers the way other people sound fire alarms.

That was it. You stand, you are conferred, you sit back down. Sixteen years of school compressed into perhaps nine seconds of standing.

I remember feeling enormous. That's the word. As if I had grown a few centimetres while I was upright and would now have to duck through doors.

Afterwards there were photos. There are always photos.

If you are Ugandan you already know the choreography. Photo with Mama. Photo with Mama and the aunties. Photo with the aunties but not that auntie, because of the thing at the funeral. Photo with the uncle, who must be holding the certificate folder even though the certificate isn't in it, because the actual certificate comes months later from an office that is closed. Photo with the cousins, who are no longer furious because someone has bought them sodas. Photo in front of the Main Building's clock tower, which every graduate in the country has, so that if you stacked all of Uganda's graduation albums you would get a flipbook of that tower, unchanging, with a different nervous face in front of it every frame.

My uncle had hired a photographer, a young man called Isaac with a Canon and a waistcoat and the energy of someone being paid per click. Isaac had opinions. "Madam, chin up. More. Now lift the folder. Now look at your mother like she is the one who passed."

I did all of it. I looked at Mama like she was the one who passed. In a way she had.

Then he arranged us for the big one, the one for the wall. Mama on my left with her hand on my shoulder, Florence on my right shining like a dowry, my uncle behind us in the suit, cousins kneeling in front. Isaac squinted through the viewfinder and said, "The graduate! You are not happy? Smile, it's your day!"

So I smiled harder.

I can tell you exactly what I was doing with my face, because I remember deciding to do it. I pulled everything up. Cheeks, eyebrows, the corners of my mouth, my shoulders under Mama's hand. I showed teeth I don't normally show. I held it while he took four, five, six shots. My jaw began to ache somewhere around the fifth.

Here is the other thing I was doing, at the same time, under the gown.

I was counting. Two dates, both from my second and third years, both of which I had stopped writing down anywhere but kept anyway, the way your tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth was. I had done the arithmetic in the car on the way in, without meaning to, in the traffic near Wandegeya. I did it again in Freedom Square while a man spoke about roads. One of them would have been walking by now. That was as far as I let it go.

Nobody in that photo knew. Mama's hand was resting on the shoulder of a girl she believed had come through university untouched, exactly as specified. Florence was standing beside the niece she pointed to at family meetings. My uncle's hand was on the back of my chair. They were not wrong to be proud. I had earned the Second Upper in the same years, in the same body, sometimes in the same week. Both things had happened to one person. They just hadn't happened in the same photo.

"Perfect!" said Isaac. "That one is the one."

There is a moment I didn't put in any version of this story for a long time, because it seemed too small to count.

When Isaac had finished the family shots and was packing up, I asked him for one more. Just me. He started arranging me against the tower and I said, "No, here is fine." I stood near the tent poles, by a bin, with the folder down at my side.

"Smile," he said.

"Don't tell me to smile," I said. "Just take it."

I'm not sure I had ever said a sentence like that to anyone in my life. I was raised to smile at photographers, pastors, traffic officers and men who call you "sister" at the taxi park. Florence heard me from three metres away and turned her whole head, gold and all, the way you turn when you hear a plate break in someone else's kitchen.

Isaac shrugged and took it. One shot. He didn't check the screen.

When the prints came back two weeks later, Mama chose the family one for the sitting room. Of course she did. It's a beautiful photograph, and I am smiling in it the hardest I have ever smiled in my life, and it has hung above the television ever since, between a calendar from a hardware shop and a picture of the Last Supper in which Jesus appears to be eating posho.

The other one, the one by the bin, came in the same envelope. Mama looked at it and said, "Eh, what were you thinking about?" and put it to one side. I took it to my room and slid it inside the back cover of the blue Picfare book, where it still is. I am not frowning in it. I am not smiling either. I look like someone waiting for a taxi she knows will be full.

I didn't know why I kept it. I'm still not completely sure I do.

So I have done the Ledger on this one. You know how it works by now.

Planned: Graduate from Makerere with good grades. First Class if God allows. Second Upper if He is busy.

Happened: Graduated from Makerere with a Second Upper. Gown, tent, aunties, Isaac, the clock tower. Mama in passion fruit.

You will notice that the first two columns match. This is only the second time in the whole exercise book that they do, the first being the day I got into Makerere, and I remember feeling, the first time I filled them in, that I should get a certificate for the ledger itself. Planned equals Happened. The child was right. Tick.

Then I got to the third column, and sat there with the pen for a long time.

Because if the plan was right, and the girl followed the plan, and the plan delivered exactly what it promised, I should have been whole on that day. I should have walked out of Freedom Square into the life the exercise book had described. And I wasn't whole, and I hadn't been for a while, and nothing in items one to five had anything to say about why. The plan had been precise about the grades. It had been silent about everything that happened to me while I was earning them.

Paid: The four years, all of them, including the ones I spent on the bed by the window saying "Test tomorrow." A jaw that ached for an hour after the photos. Two dates I counted in the traffic at Wandegeya. The particular loneliness of being congratulated for the part of your life that was easiest to see.

I wrote that in pen, because those are facts.

It took me another week to write the last column. I kept starting it in my head and making it into a sermon. Eventually I just wrote down what I'd actually like to be true next time, in pencil, in handwriting nobody would mistake for a twelve-year-old's:

Revised: Good grades are allowed to be good news. They are not allowed to be the whole news. Next time something goes well, tell one person the other half.

I haven't managed it fully yet. But I have stopped asking photographers to make me smile. That much I can promise.

If you have a photo like mine, and most women I know do, I'd like you to try something before you read on. You don't need a frame or a therapist, just paper.

Find the picture. Look at it long enough to remember what was going on outside the edges. Then take a page and draw the four columns. In Planned, write what you had been working towards on that day, in the words you would have used then. In Happened, write what the photo shows. Let those two match if they match; you earned that.

Then, in Paid, write one thing the camera didn't catch. Just one. Use a pen, because it's true, and don't explain it or soften it. If you don't want anyone to see it, fold the page in half afterwards.

Leave Revised empty for now. Or, if you're braver than I was, write the name of one person you might eventually tell the other half to, in pencil, small, in the margin.

Then put the photo back where it was. You don't have to take it down off the wall. Mine is still up, above the television, next to the hardware-shop calendar, and Mama still dusts it every Saturday. I just know now which of the two pictures is in the back of the exercise book, and what is in the margin beside it, and I am working my way towards the day I take it out.