The Death of Vivek Oji(29)

The girls dragged me out. I don’t think they meant to. I knew my mother was behind their visit; it was one of the few times a plan of hers actually worked.

I was drowning. Not quickly, not enough for panic, but a slow and inexorable sinking, when you know where you’re going to end up, so you stop fighting and you wait for it to all be over. I had looked for ways to break out of it—sleeping outside, trying to tap life from other things, from the bright rambunctiousness of the dogs, from the air at the top of the plumeria tree—but none of it had really made any difference. So I was giving up; I had decided to give up. That afternoon, Somto and Olunne burst into my room and spoiled my whole plan.

They knocked first, but I ignored it. Then they knocked again and I heard a flutter of quick conversation before one of them turned the handle and opened the door. It would have been Somto; she always made the decisions because she was older, because she was never afraid. I sat up in bed as they came in, in time to see Olunne close the door, a slight sorry across her face. I’d drawn the curtains, but Somto switched on the light. She looked at me, shirtless in pyjama trousers, lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon.

“So,” she said, tilting her head so her ponytail swung behind her shoulders. “What’s wrong with you?” Her sister nudged her but Somto ignored it.

I blinked at the intrusion of the light. “Many things,” I said.

“I can see that,” said Somto, making a face. She put the cupcakes on my desk and plopped herself on my bed. “You look terrible.”

I drew back with a frown. They were acting entirely too familiar, entering my room and sitting on my bed as if they knew me. Whatever had happened a childhood ago didn’t make us friends now; we hadn’t even seen each other since secondary school. Olunne glanced at her sister, then sat on the bed with me.

“I think you look pretty,” she said, and that surprised me enough to knock the frown off my face.

“What?” I said.

Olunne reached out and pulled at my hair gently, just enough to make it stretch and spring back, then touched her fingers to the silver Ganesh I wore around my neck. “I said, I think you look pretty. Your hair is beautiful. You’ve lost too much weight—that’s why Somto is saying you look bad. But you don’t, not really.”

I looked from one of them to the other.

“You must be tired of them talking about you,” Olunne added.

“Everyone is talking about you,” her sister said. “They’re saying you’ve gone mad.”

“Yet here you are, entering my room to talk about it,” I snapped.

Somto shrugged. “I think there’s probably something more interesting going on,” she said. “Why not just come and ask you?”

“It’s none of your business,” I said. I didn’t know why their kindness was making me so spiky.

Olunne put a hand on my knee. “Don’t mind her,” she said. “You don’t have to tell us anything if you don’t want. We just thought that maybe, if you felt like talking, it would be nice to have someone who was ready to listen. Actually listen. Not like how they like to say they’re listening.”

Somto scoffed in agreement.

I was, I must admit, taken aback. Alone is a feeling you can get used to, and it’s hard to believe in a better alternative. Besides, it was true that all of us used to be friends, even though it was years ago, when we and our lives were simpler. And now they were being nicer to me than anyone had bothered to be in a while, so I tried to relax.

“Are those cupcakes?” I asked, and Olunne smiled, hopping off the bed to get the tray. I picked up one and peeled back the wrapper, biting into it mostly out of politeness. True to form, it was sickly-sweet, as Aunty Rhatha’s cupcakes always were. “Jesus,” I said, making a face.

Somto swiped a fingerful of icing from another and licked it. “You don’t have to eat the whole thing,” she said. “She still hasn’t learned how to put a normal amount of sugar in them.”

I put the cupcake down and shook my head. “I can feel my teeth rotting already.”

Olunne leaned over and picked the sugar dragonfly off the cupcake, popping it into her mouth. That was how we found each other again, in a blocked-off room filled with yellowing light: two bubblegum fairies there to drag me out of my cave, carrying oversweet wands. I don’t know how deep I would have sunk if not for them. I wish I’d told them more often how much that mattered to me.

I wish I’d told Tobechukwu, too, how often I thought about how he stepped in for me. We’d fought a lot when we were younger, but that was nothing special: I fought with almost everyone because I was slim and some suspicion of delicacy clung to me and it made boys aggressive, for whatever reason. Some people can’t see softness without wanting to hurt it. But after I came back, after growing out my hair, Tobechukwu didn’t react like other guys in the area did—calling out insults and sometimes hurling empty bottles my way so they could laugh and watch me dance to avoid the spray of broken glass. It couldn’t be because we were neighbors, because our mothers liked to have tea together. Aunty Osinachi always came, brought some biscuits, stayed for about forty-five minutes chatting, then left, but this hadn’t stopped me and Tobechukwu from fighting back when we were in secondary school.

I didn’t understand him, not until one night when he showed up at the boys’ quarters, where I was smoking out on the landing, and sat down next to me.