The first time we saw our new religious education teacher, she was wearing a multi-purpose piece of clothing; a skirt so long that it swept the ground spotless with each step.

And when she was asked to introduce herself to us, she mumbled a few inaudible words into the microphone and sat down. 

We shouted, "Pardon!” but she wouldn’t get up again. We shouted louder and louder but she was so unbothered that she didn’t even blink. She just sat there stiff as dry wood, her skirt blocking a large amount of the ground around her sitting area from accessing the morning sun. 

We didn’t take kindly to new staff refusing to give us information on which we could base our rumours. So we refused to be defeated and we kept shouting. Efforts to quiet us down were futile because if someone tried to speak into the microphone, we would just start wailing.

Eventually, the headmistress grew weary of our incivility and waved us off to our respective classrooms.

Feeling uneasy about our new teacher being without a name, we decided to come up with one. We chose to call her Virgin Mary. This was based on her conservative choice of clothing and her timidity. 

Virgin Mary was assigned to our class. It was unsurprising because our old teachers always placed the burden that was us, on new teachers’ shoulders. Nobody could blame them. S3D was a problem class. 

According to intercessors, our class had a demon of stubbornness that was stubbornly refusing to leave us alone. This was despite the fact that the intercessors had laid hands on us and prayed for us.

On that day, some of us had shaken profusely and others had fallen to the ground. We had all repented of our sins and promised to turn away from our wicked ways.

We were new creatures but only for a week because when the whole school started shouting, "Pardon!” we felt uneasy about being uncooperative. So we joined in.

After that it didn’t make sense to go back to being good because God, we had been told, doesn’t like inconsistency. And anyway, being good was going to be impossibly hard since we had backslidden and therefore invited the spirit of stubbornness back into our lives.

Regardless, we got along really well with Virgin Mary. She didn’t want to teach. And since she knew that we didn’t want to learn, she gave us space to be ignorant. On days we didn’t want to learn, all we had to do was say the word and she would sit idly till the end of the lesson.

We therefore weren’t surprised when Virgin Mary started to gain weight. She was eating too much and doing too little and so it was only natural, we thought.

But then weight started collecting around her abdomen and we became very concerned. Was she pregnant? But how? How could a virgin be with child? Was this the coming of a second Messiah? We wrote these questions on a piece of paper and put them on her desk.

Not only were our questions and concerns unanswered, they were met with fury and punishment. So of course now we’ll never know how our Virgin Mary conceived.