The Easy Way Out

Anesu was a good looking kid who knew how to fly under the radar. Watching him cross the street, you wouldn’t think much about him, just another quiet boy. But inside his head, a constant war was being fought. He could be in the middle of a normal conversation, then someone new joined in and his facial expression would shift instantly. He’d go quiet. Withdraw. Freeze up. But why?

It all started in primary school.

Anesu's voice had been the first to drop. It grew deep, too deep for a kid his age. His classmates had a field day.

“Why’s your voice like a man’s?”

“Are you pretending?”

The mockery was relentless. He stopped volunteering in class. Spoke in whispers. Avoided any moment where his voice might fill the room. That shrinking, that slow folding in, would define his life more than he ever expected.

One Wednesday afternoon, after lunch, the class settled into quiet study. This was prime time for fake bathroom trips, a brief escape from the suffocating silence. But their teacher, Mrs. Masvanhise, had grown wise. She’d started saying no. Always no.

For Anesu, being denied in front of everyone wasn't just inconvenient. It was a nightmare. The spotlight. The snickers. The slow walk back to his seat with all those eyes. He couldn't do it.

He’d always been a perfectionist. If there was a risk of failing socially, academically, or physically, he opted out entirely.

That day, with his stomach twisted in pain, he sat frozen. He imagined the laughter, the whispers, the hallway headlines. And so, in a moment he’d replay for the rest of his life, Anesu made a decision: it was safer to pretend to be asleep and soil himself than risk standing up and being rejected.

His deskmate caught the smell first. Matthew glanced sideways, realized who it was, and raised his hand.

“Miss... something’s wrong with Anesu.”

Mrs. Masvanhise didn’t shout. She asked Matthew to fetch Anesu’s older brother, who was two grades up. Michael came running, shook Anesu gently awake, and helped him to the bathroom. He even brought spare gym shorts.

Michael was new to the school himself. And now, he was “the guy whose little brother crapped himself.”

To anyone else, it might seem simple. Just go to the bathroom. Take the risk. Deal with the consequences.

But Anesu’s brain didn’t work that way. If failure was even slightly possible, he retreated. That moment became a map he kept following, again and again. He would avoid. Detour. Disappear. And in doing so, he missed the failures that might have grown him.

Instead, he numbed. With alcohol. With distractions. With anything that kept him from facing reality, even briefly.

Sleep was the one thing Anesu couldn’t perform without alcohol.

He could fake confidence. Fake laughter. Fake focus in a classroom. But he couldn’t force his mind to rest. Not really. Not when it was spinning at 2 a.m., sprinting through memories, failures, fantasies, and invented disasters.

Dreams weren’t a refuge; they were roulette. Some nights he’d be soaring. Eating ice cream, kissing someone he couldn’t remember, winning arguments he lost in real life. But then came the alarms. The waking. And the terrible itch to go back in, hit resume, but never finding the button.

Other nights were darker.

He’d wake up with his shirt damp, heart pounding. Trapped in that split second confusion between nightmare and reality, the memory of being hunted still fresh in his bones.

Anesu wasn’t religious, exactly, but he’d whisper Jesus' name in the dark just to chase the fear away. Sometimes it helped.

And then there were the worst nights. The ones where sleep never really came. He’d lie in bed from midnight to four, eyelids heavy, brain sprinting. Thinking about where he was. Where everyone else was. Why he wasn’t further. Why he couldn’t sleep like other people, just close his eyes and rest.

What he craved wasn’t just rest. It was peace. That soft, unthinking kind. Like babies had. Like people who didn’t question every move, every choice.

He wondered if wealth made people sleep better. If guilt free people dreamed in color. If criminals had nightmares or only the innocent did.

Proverbs haunted him: A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands, and poverty will strike like a thief.

So was sleep a luxury? Or a moral test? He didn’t know.

He just wanted eight hours.

No guilt. No buzzing thoughts. No shame curling into his ribcage like smoke.

Just silence.

And maybe a butterfly or two.

The morning of the Geography exam started off all wrong.

For one thing, Anesu hadn't slept nor studied, not even a little. He kept telling himself tomorrow. Then tomorrow became today. His chest was tight, and his bladder felt like it was holding a storm. That pressure, mixed with nerves, nearly folded him.

He considered just walking into the exam and sitting through it like a martyr, but something more urgent pressed first.

The bathroom.

Mai Gigo, the Geography teacher, was infamous. No excuses. No sympathy. No leeway. She treated lateness like betrayal and bathroom breaks like criminal escape attempts.

But Anesu couldn’t focus. The pressure in his stomach was overwhelming. He grabbed his hallway pass, checked it twice, and bolted toward the toilet block.

The hallway felt like a tunnel. As he passed, he caught sight of Jemba and Maganya, fellow students who looked just as tense. They exchanged a nod, one that said, "We’re all fighting something today."

He reached the bathroom and saw a line, a long, stagnant one. Only two people were being allowed in at a time. Ten were waiting. Anesu was fourth.

Then the line stopped.

He couldn’t wait. He cut ahead without shame. The urgency overpowered any social rule.

The toilets were a disaster. Filthy, wet, like something leftover from a war zone. He hesitated briefly, then moved inside.

While waiting, he slipped a small cheat sheet from his pocket. Nothing major, just some bullet points. But even that made him think of Mai Gigo’s warning:

"No notes. Not one line. If I catch you, you're out."

He folded it back. The risk wasn’t worth it.

Finally, his turn came. But even there, at the urinal, things didn’t cooperate. His body, too anxious, refused to release. Everyone else seemed quick. Anesu just stood there, trying to will it out. Every second was torture.

The irony hit hard. He had run from academic humiliation straight into physical failure. Again.

In that moment, he did what he always did. Bargained with himself. Rationalized.

If I fail this exam, maybe it won’t tank my grade. Maybe it’s not that important. Maybe.

He exhaled, locked in the bathroom, alone with pressure and excuses. One thought lingered in his mind:

How long can you numb what demands to be faced?