Ana w hu - 1

Our first summer

Recap: Found an e-mail, got an idea.

After this splendid idea of ours, we decided to create a faux e-mail, in order to add contacts, boys, including the e-mail we just found, from our school. This was our idea of, what we thought to be at the time at least, a scandalous prank, lol. Anyhow, an e-mail we created, and boys we added. Bear in mind, we were , well, children, and honestly truly had the most innocent of intentions, this really was to us a 'prank' haha. Anyhow, we logged on to this fake e-mail whenever we had a chance, free/computer lessons, etc, and from this I first met M, the owner of that address we so coincidentally found on the computer.

M and I used to talk on MSN only, until just before the exams, when I called him from the school phone.

'Aloo, Ashraf, wain inteh?’

‘Umm, fl ma7a6a?’

‘OK, ta3al el mderseh, w dsh mn elbab el ra2eesy’.

And so did M. That was funny. I wasn’t actually hinting at him to come to school, I was truly pretending it was the driver because of the students and teachers around hehe. So yeah, lol.

We had more of these few-minute phone calls, we talked about the lamest of things, and even though they were short and choppy, they were thoroughly enjoyable, at least I thought so. Before I knew it, it was the last day of the school year, and this was meant to be the end of our mischievous scheme lol. So I called to say goodbye, as it was supposed to be the last phone call.

It’s kind of weird, you know, it was just MSN, but then he gave me his number, and then there were phone calls and what not. All this time in my mind this was just a prank or whatever, nothing serious, and by the end of the year it’ll all end.

Anyways. After school has ended, a week into the summer holiday, I sent a text to him. It said ‘M’. He replied, not very nicely, demanding to know who it was. So I just ignored the whole thing for perhaps a week. Then, I sent a text again,this time owning up to who I was, or who he knew me to be. I remember this with utmost detail. It was 4 AM. I was in bed. Bored, can't sleep. So I typed a message. For M. Stared at it for ages, contemplating whether to send it or not. I even came up with a list of what could go wrong, advantages and disadvantages, if you will. At the end, I decided to send it, since in my mind, nothing could go wrong, he didn't know who I really was after all.

I hadn’t told M my real name, instead I was ‘N’, from grade 9, not 7. And from there I spent every night talking to him on the phone, for hours and hours, as N. I would tell myself, ‘tomorrow, I’ll tell him the truth, and then all this would end’. I was feeling so guilty, both for lying to him and for ‘wrong-doing’. I know that’s what they all say, but I really felt like ‘ana mb chy’. I always thought that once he knows all this is a big lie, joke, whatever you call it, this will end. However, it did not. Quite the contrary.