The New Student
I vividly remember the day when Vivian, the new girl, walked into our SS2 classroom. Her beauty was the first thing that struck me, but little did I know that she would change my life in ways I couldn't have imagined. She was the type of girl that made heads turn, and soon, she had everyone in class admiring her.
Vivian was incredibly intelligent, and she quickly became the top student in class. She seemed to grasp every subject effortlessly, while I, on the other hand, was often second to the last in class. I was used to being the butt of jokes.
I’ll never forget the day our Maths teacher asked me a question I couldn’t answer. The entire class, including Vivian, was asked to give me one stroke of the cane. It was a day that stung not just physically but emotionally.
But then, Vivian did something unexpected. She approached me and offered to tutor me after school hours. She started staying behind, and she began tutoring me. She was patient, kind, and explained difficult concepts to me with a level of clarity that I had never experienced before. With her guidance, my grades began to improve, and I found myself making it into the top three in class.
Life was beginning to look brighter for me, Vivian and I developed a close friendship. We would spend hours in the empty classroom after school, with her patiently helping me understand the subjects that had once seemed difficult.
However, just when I was starting to believe that I could truly excel in my studies, Vivian stopped coming to school. Her absence worried everyone. Teachers and students were concerned.
Unable to bear her absence, I decided to pay a visit at her house. She had given me her address during one of our tutoring sessions. When I arrived at the address she had provided, I was surprised to find an old, abandoned building. It looked like it had been uninhabited for years.
Confused and disheartened, I approached the security man stationed nearby and asked if he knew where Vivian lived. He looked at me with a mixture of confusion and pity in his eyes. In his pidgin English, he began to narrate a heart-wrenching story.
He told me that the girl I was looking for, Vivian, had passed away eight years ago. She, along with her parents, had tragically died in a fatal plane crash. The house I was standing in front of had been abandoned ever since.
I was in shock. The Vivian I had known, the girl who had transformed my life, was a spirit, who came to shine light into my life. It was a surreal and painful realization that the person who had given me hope, who had been a beacon of light in my life, was gone forever.
