When Zuri returned at eight that evening, she found Asha in the same position, except the main light was off and the laptop glow divided her face in two. Zuri dropped her bag by the desk. “How did the interview go?”
Asha did not answer immediately. She had zoomed into the screenshot so many times that the text was becoming blocks of pixels. She was no longer staring at her own name. She was looking for structure: which columns seemed copied from public notices, which looked manually entered, and which could only have come from someone with particular knowledge.
“You okay?” Zuri asked.
“Yeah. Tired.” Asha lowered the laptop lid halfway.
Zuri went to shower. Asha watched the bathroom door close and wondered why she had instinctively hidden the screenshot. Perhaps because other students’ names appeared in it. Perhaps because she did not want to defend her privacy by spreading theirs.
When she opened the laptop again, she noticed a column she had missed: **Bursary Status**. Asha’s row said N/A. Another student’s row contained an application number and the words *pending documents*.
That disturbed her more than the absence. Attendance might travel informally through a class list or a student chat. An individual bursary application number was narrower information.
She called Mariam.
“Who owns this spreadsheet?”
“I don’t know who owns it technically. The group administrator is Mrs. Mwaka. There are others.”
“Did you give them my information?”
“Asha—”
“I am asking directly. Did you enter my marks, attendance, bursary details, anything?”
“No.”
“But you are in the group.”
“Yes.”
“What have you ever sent?”
“A notice about parents’ day when someone asked, and a picture of a safety notice you students had already received. That is all.”
“Why are you in the group?”
“Because a link went around after orientation.”
“From the university?”
“Another parent. I do not think the university sent it officially. It just circulated. But the group used university colors, and people shared real notices there. Most of us assumed it was connected somehow.”
Mariam sent another screenshot, this time of the chat itself. The administrator had written: *Parents, let us help each other notice when our young people begin to struggle. A small signal early can save a semester.* Hearts, thumbs-up signs, and prayers filled the replies.
Asha hated that she understood the sentence. Anyone could read it as care.
“Were my marks ever requested?”
“Twice.”
“And you gave them?”
“No.”
Mariam later sent three redacted screenshots from her own message history. In one, a parent asked what score Asha had received in her first assessment so they could “compare how the children were doing.” Mariam replied: *The marks belong to Asha. She will share them if she wants.* In another, someone asked for the week’s attendance. Mariam said she did not have it and saw no reason to seek it without Asha knowing. In the third, the administrator posted that there had been several absences that day and asked the relevant parents to “follow up gently.” Asha’s name appeared on the list.
The screenshots changed the shape of the conflict. Asha had prepared herself to fight her mother as if Mariam stood on the other side of the wall. Instead, the messages showed that Mariam had quietly defended the same boundary at least twice.
“I’m sorry I assumed you entered my grades,” Asha said when she called again.
“You had a reason to ask,” Mariam replied. “Not a reason to decide before asking.”
Asha accepted that.
She drew the spreadsheet structure on paper without copying anyone’s identity. Public club posters could explain some entries. Student conversations could explain others. Individual attendance required another route. Bursary status might come from a student, a parent helping with documents, a peer guide, or a staff source. Marks were harder.
Rehema, looking at the drawing over a video call, said, “Maybe none of those pieces feels huge alone. Put them together and you have a portrait of someone’s life.”
That sentence stayed with Asha.
Mariam also told her that the parent group had slowly begun adding comments such as *quiet this week* or *active in club*. Asha asked her not to delete her messages yet, because the history might help reconstruct how the system grew, but also not to forward whole conversations. She did not want to build a second archive of other people’s information in the name of proving the first one existed.
She kept only the screenshots directly related to herself and deleted a download that contained full rows for others.
Then she returned to the original screenshot and shifted it farther right.
A cell she had not seen clearly before contained another student’s bursary application number, a date, and initials beside it.
The problem was larger than one missed lecture.
There was a column with a bursary number in it.