Girls and Pepsi

I remember in my high school days, most times in the third year, many of the boys start to develop sensual feelings for girls and girls for boys and it was always easy for the boys to express their feelings for the girls according to the ancient dictates of the society.

The boy who has feelings for a girl would devise different means to communicate this. One of the popular devise, especially if the boy was in a senior class, is what I named the 'Savior Mechanism'.

With the savior mechanism, the boy would connive with his friend(s) to pick on the girl. This included punishing her for just and unjust causes, including her name in the list of offenders, giving her larger portions of grass to cut during manual labor and harder beatings during the usual once in a week belting, slapping, 'whozzing' or 'raking' (these are some of the forms of corporal punishment that existed in my high school) sessions.

During the girls' travail, the boy suddenly shows up from out of the blues, like a superman pleading on behalf of the girl and even offering to help her with her loads of added responsibility indirectly inflicted by this same boy unknowingly or knowingly to the girl.

After a while (mostly when the boy tells his friends to end the scheme), the friend(s) will claim to be releasing the girl only based on the boy's pleadings and the girl will have to go and say thank you to the boy and I think that automatically puts her in a vulnerable position. Whao!, see the use of psychology by these small boys.

From there, the boy develops an interaction with girl, popping into her class during class hours, afternoon preps and night preps to chat in the course of which he will toast her (ask her out). If the girl accedes and falls in love with this 'Voltron, Defender of her Universe', you will begin to see the duo together always gisting around the school premises if they are innocent and otherwise, around dark corners and class inner rooms doing more than just gisting.

What amuses me most is that this mechanism has been in use by for a long time and girls have never ceased to fall for the method.

Now to the girls' side.

As stated earlier, it has always been easier for a boy to express his feelings for the girl, but going the other way round could be really funny. Like I remember a classmate who had a non-mutual feelings for a guy in our class and she just didn't know how to communicate the feelings, but we would giggle about it among other girlfriends and tease her about the guy.

We would occasionally code our words because none of us could openly agree or discuss having a crush on a guy or falling in love. So, instead of saying crush, which is also the name of a popular branded orange soft drink in Nigeria, we would substitute the word for Pepsi. Which means, if any girl had a crush on a boy, she would say, I have a Pepsi for ........... .

As a teenager, growing up was somewhat a funny experience, i guess this is courtesy of my too serious nature. Whenever, I was asked by my girlfriends if I had a Pepsi for any guy, my natural answer was No (which was the absolute truth), they would try to attach me to a guy they know is probably getting close to me and I would automatically from there cut all strings with the guy and return all of his greetings or pet talks with cold shoulders. This definitely kept the guys at arms length.

Well, in my over twenty-something years of existent, I think my girlfriends can have a good laugh as I can finally accept and say Yes, I have had a Pepsi for a guy and this happened not too long ago.

I am very happy I am experiencing this at my present age because I didn't go the way of my girlfriends at their vulnerable age when they would do anything to be around the guy or connect him to themselves, even going to the extent of saying he is their cousin and this usually made them the laughing stock of the whole school.

As a big girl, I guess I handled my Pepsi perfectly well, since nobody, not even the guy has the slightest clue that I had (or is it have) a Pepsi for him.