We all ran and gathered at the senior five block. Teachers, cooks, students, neighbours of the school...everyone abandoned their duties and came. Our heads were bent back as we looked up at the girl standing on the fifth floor of a building under construction. She was threatening to jump. It was dreadful, amusing and scandalous all at once.

Intercessors held hands. They cried out to God and they cursed the devil. The rest of us just stood there murmuring, laughing, pointing, backbiting, speculating, crying, heckling...you get the picture.

The school counsellor finally had a chance to be useful. On other days, she sat in her office all day long, yawning and staring at blank walls and nobody came. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she was a motormouth or maybe it was because she looked severe with her heavy, dark and unsmiling face.

But even now that Susan Magembe was still deciding on whether or not she wanted to stay alive, the counsellor didn’t get her chance to shine.

The girl, who had clearly watched quite a number of movies, kept borrowing a few lines. "If anyone comes close, I will jump.”

In case you’re wondering if she jumped, she didn’t. She said things like: "My life is over.” But no, she didn’t jump. As it turned out, taking life, even your own, requires much more courage (I think I have just misused the meaning of the word courage), than she anticipated.

How did Susan end standing on top of a building, threatening to end her life, you ask? Well, our school was keen on sex education. And by that, I mean that our headmistress would, at the end of each term, say different phrases: go straight home; boys are bad; sugar daddies will give you AIDS. These phrases became anthems.

Susan and her group of friends refused to go straight home, assured themselves that boys were necessary, and removed one letter from the acronym AIDS so that the phrase now stated, "Sugar daddies will give you aid.”

It was true, Susan and her clique always had fully stocked suitcases. And they certainly didn’t have to compete with weevils over posho and beans like the rest of us. It was all fun and games until the school organised for us to do HIV tests. Unlike, pregnancy tests, HIV tests were done voluntarily. Regardless, no one dared to miss for fear of raising eyebrows and being the target of outrageous rumours.

When her results were ready, Susan saw the school matron, the chaplain and counsellor walking towards her and right in that moment, she felt it. She felt that it was bad news. She figured that her sugar daddy had infected her with HIV. 

Standing a safe distance away, the school counsellor shouted, "You are safe! It’s not you we were coming to talk to.” Susan stepped away from the edge. Intercessors sang praises to God. On the other hand, her friend Amanda, wasn’t as lucky.

For months to come, the headmistress stood at the assembly and said, "Just because you behave the same way as your friends doesn’t mean the end result will be the same for you. Sometimes, consequences are discriminative.” We now understood it.