The Girls of First Middle School

The Girls of First Middle School are a feared and resourceful school cohort whose rebellion tests the authority of their teachers, especially Aaron, a Peace Corps volunteer. Their mischief is not a single prank but a collective practice: they ridicule, swarm, and unsettle the adults around them, while their shared humor turns discipline into a public contest. By the time Aaron encounters them at a celebration after chasing a shadow through the night, the girls’ reputation has become part of the scene itself: he appears to them as a frightening stranger, and their mockery gathers them into a united group.

Reputation and School Life

At Butula Girls' School, the girls’ reputation precedes them. Teachers trade stories of earlier disruptions: the class once locked a teacher in the boys’ bathroom for a whole night, led a school strike after being served githeri for ten consecutive days, and was associated with an incident involving a goat in the pantry. These stories present their defiance as familiar and institutionalized, not as an isolated response to Aaron. When he is assigned to teach them, colleagues meet him with pity; one young teacher is so distressed by his supposed misfortune that she cries while recounting it to colleagues in the cafeteria.

The advice Aaron receives makes the school’s response to the girls stark. When he asks how to interact with them, a teacher says they cannot be interacted with and recommends hitting them. The recommendation reflects a disciplinary culture in which physical punishment is treated as the obvious remedy, even though Aaron is afraid to drag the girls from class and cane their tender calves. His reluctance leaves him unable to turn away even briefly to write on the blackboard without their lively teasing tipping toward chaos. Their reputation thus works in two directions: the girls use it as a source of power, while the adults’ expectation of disorder shapes every attempt to manage them.

Collective Defiance in the Classroom

The girls imitate Aaron’s voice in a shrill, nasal register and throw objects at him. The missiles include chalk, spit-soaked wads of paper, corn kernels, hairpins, and greenish balls of mucus. The catalogue makes their harassment physical as well as theatrical: the classroom becomes a space in which ordinary school materials and scraps alike can be turned against the teacher.

Roda Kudondo’s encounter with Aaron concentrates that defiance into a deliberate humiliation. After he returns a set of corrected exercises, she calmly approaches his desk and throws her notebook into his face, imitating his Texan pronunciation with indistinct sounds. The class laughs; Aaron, unable to understand what she is doing, orders her back to her seat. She repeats the performance, then presses a finger into her mouth and cheek in an unmistakable sexual proposition, offering oral sex for a higher grade. Aaron is left stunned and flushed while Roda returns to her seat amid applause. The episode reverses the expected roles of teacher and student: he holds formal authority, but she controls the meaning of the encounter and the class’s response to it.

Linnet Oduori’s prank grows from a different imbalance. She is the smallest girl in the class, and Aaron has treated her almost like a pet, praising her and holding up her mediocre work as an example for the others. One hot December afternoon, Linnet follows him from the school gates to his home, meowing like a cat throughout the journey. Other girls they pass join in, until Aaron is surrounded by a band of children making high-pitched, mocking meows. The episode turns his favoritism into the occasion for a collective joke: a girl he had singled out answers the attention with a prank, and the surrounding girls enlarge it into a public chorus.

The Cat Taunt and Aaron’s Attempt at Discipline

Aaron later tells Grace about Linnet’s prank and the girls who joined it. Grace explains that his eyes resemble a cat’s because of their color. Aaron thinks her own eyes resemble a cat’s more: although brown, they are slightly prominent and turn upward at the corners, with a pale crescent of iris visible when he sees her in profile. The exchange gives the girls’ mockery an image that persists beyond the prank itself. Their cat imitation has attached itself to how Aaron is seen, while Grace’s observation helps him understand the taunt without dissolving its sting.

After the headmaster urges him to discipline the class, Aaron returns to find the girls sitting unusually still, ankles pressed together and hands clasped on their desks. A hundred eyes follow him as he walks to the front. He briefly hopes that the quiet means their behavior has changed. When the class rises together to greet him, the greeting gives way to a massed meow. Aaron grabs the first girl within reach, Mercy Akinyi, known as the girl who loves Moses Ojou, and pulls her toward the door. Mercy screams and digs her nails into his hand. The others converge, surrounding Aaron in a shouting whirl as spit, paper, and shoes fly around him.

The rest of the pupils pour into the courtyard, and the teachers watch without trying to stop what is happening. Following the school’s customary punishment, Aaron drags Mercy face-down to the flagpole, raises her arms above her head, and places her hands on the pole. The plaid skirt rides above her knees; dozens of canes, remnants of previous punishments, lie scattered on the grass. Aaron presses one against her calf. He feels cold and sick, afraid he may lose control of his bowels, yet raises the cane to strike. Mercy bends her head and gives him a weak smile. The girls’ resistance has brought him to the point of carrying out a punishment he had feared, but the scene offers no easy victory: his physical control of Mercy coexists with his visible distress and her unsettling composure.

The Night Runner and the Girls’ Solidarity

Later, Aaron chases a girl along dark roads, barefoot and in his underwear, consumed by anger. Her outline seems to change size as he pursues it past closed shops, through wet bushes and trees, beyond a church and a dump, and into a field of grain. When he climbs over a wall, he lands in a brightly lit school compound where the girls have gathered around a fire to celebrate the end of the semester. Girls from other classes are there too, many holding cans of Coca or Fanta and eating goat roasted over the fire.

At first, the girls see Aaron as a terrifying apparition. Some of the younger ones cry, but Roda calls him the night runner, and their fear gives way to jeering. Aaron sees himself as they see him: pale, filthy, in torn boxer shorts, with leaves and twigs stuck to his legs. The girls’ laughter makes his shame visible, but it also changes his understanding of them. He suddenly thinks of them as courageous, their taunts rising around him protectively. Their power is not simply the capacity to disrupt lessons or evade punishment; in this final encounter, their shared response turns fear into a group defense. The episode leaves their defiance unresolved, but recasts it as solidarity: the girls who have tormented Aaron can also stand together against what frightens them.