New beginnings - Stories of an adolescent Ghanaian girl

'The schools are in,' Phillip, Yaa's little brother bounced into her room screaming. The schools are in! The saying she had been dreading since she had received her results. Her uncle had insisted on cutting their losses before the allocation of the schools since these things, like he liked to put it, were unpredictable. Yaa had convinced him otherwise and made it clear that she wanted no special treatment, that she believed in her hard work and that the school allocated to her is the school she would attend. Which made everything more dramatic as she heard the words 'the schools are in'.

Yaa almost sprung out of the bed after Phillip. 'How do you know?' she asked him, swinging herself into the office seat next to the pregnant monitor that sat before it before pushing the power button in.

'Paa just told me his sister got into Wesley Girls,' he said jittery sitting next to her in anticipation as if he cared. He didn't. He, like Paa, wanted to be able to tell his friends that his sister got into one of the most prestigious schools in Ghana.

Yaa sat nursing in the windows logo that took forever to load and began the sequence of butterflies taking off in her belly diving straight into the pit this anxiety had dug up. She needed to use the bathroom but the rather abrupt and loud yet somehow melodious windows tune distracted her for a minute as she entered in her login details.

This was the moment. This was her break or die moment and even though she didn't understand it then, this was going to be monumental in deciding if she got a good education or not but to Yaa, this was not even on her radar. All she knew was that this was going to be her invitation into the socially approved club. A school that somehow said more about itself than her whenever she utters its name but would always grant her the nod of approval wherever she went. It meant her mother blushing with pride among company. It meant a subtle form of prestige that one couldn't quite explain. It meant belonging in a rather obscure way and to some extent it meant being a 'Dada Bee'.

Dada Bee, a funny term coined up by Ghanaian society which literally translates to 'Daddy's Baby'. A term used to determine who was pampered and/or boujee and who wasn't. Dada Bee! Yaa hated this term but aspired to it and whenever someone would lavish her with this unnecessary compliment, the irony that she was being raised by a single parent, her mom was totally lost on her.

'Archbishop Porter Girls,' she muttered underneath her breath as she read the school GES, the Ghana Education Service had chosen for her.

'What school did you get?' Phillip asked eager for more information.

'Archbishop Porter Girls Secondary School,' she finally said out loud.

'Where is that?' he had just asked the question that she wanted to ask herself. Where in world was that?

'What school did you get?' her mother quickly popped into the room.

'Archbishop Girls,' Phillip said, leaving the room with this new sense of disinterest.

'Huh?' her mother asked again

'Archbishop Porter Girls!' Yaa corrected.

'Where is that?'

Yaa shrugged, a new sense of curiosity spreading over her, the sense of the unknown, of a choice she hadn't been allowed to take. A cemented future building up in a place which remained unknown to her up until this moment.