The Death of Vivek Oji(34)

We lay together like that until all the tears had wrung their way out of me, until we both fell asleep, wet with each other’s salt.





Fourteen





Vivek



If I didn’t love Osita already, I would have for that evening alone. For coming to find me, for kissing sense into me. For breaking himself apart, trusting me with his secret.

Later that night, I woke up to him unhurriedly kissing my neck. He was gentle as he pulled up white handfuls of my caftan, gentle when he touched me with spit-wettened hands, when he entered me—you would have thought it was my first time, not his.

The sheets dragged in fractions beneath us. I turned my head to look back at him. “I’m not going to break, you know.”

Osita rocked inside me slowly. “I know.”

“I’m serious.” It was hard to think with that much of his skin all around me. “You don’t have to take it easy.”

He pushed deeper, one glorious inch at a time, and I groaned. “I know,” he said, his voice thick. “Just take this for now.”



* * *



—

    Iknow what they say about men who allow other men to penetrate them. Ugly things; ugly words. Calling them women, as if that’s supposed to be ugly, too.

I’d heard it since secondary school, and I knew what that night was supposed to make me. Less than a man—something disgusting, something weak and shameful. But if that pleasure was supposed to stop me from being a man, then fine. They could have it. I’d take the blinding light of his touch, the blessed peace of having him so close, and I would stop being a man.

I was never one to begin with, anyway.





Fifteen



Juju knew nothing about her half brother until she saw him with her own two eyes.

She’d been all the way over by the post office, which was two buses away from home and heavily crowded thanks to the fish market across the road. Maja had warned Juju never to take an okada there—people drove so recklessly, it wasn’t safe—so when Juju got off the bus, she walked the rest of the way to the post office, dodging speeding motorbikes and tiptoeing along the edge of rank gutters. The air smelled like dead seawater.

Juju was on her way to swap out some of her books and see if she could find something for Elizabeth at the open-air secondhand-book market that happened every Saturday at the post office. “Check if they have any Pacesetters,” Elizabeth had said. She and Juju were in a new relationship, hiding it from all their parents, and Juju had been feeling guilty about not being present enough. She was fairly sure that her father was having an affair and that her parents weren’t telling her about it, which didn’t make sense because the secret was too big, too loud. Her mother was always whispering on the phone, then shouting at her father, when they thought Juju was asleep. Her father’s voice would scorch through the night and Juju would hear the familiar thuds of his hands hitting her mother. She was surprised when he actually left—it looked too much like him letting her mother win, and Juju knew him better than that—but she was glad he was gone, glad that the air in their house was calm and they could move a bit more freely. But between her new relationship and what was happening with Vivek, Juju had been distracted. This was her first time dating a girl, and it was easier, in some ways, to focus on other things rather than on Elizabeth and the terrifying feelings Juju had about her. Still, she wanted to get Elizabeth the books. She could at least do that one as her girlfriend.

Juju was looking through the five Pacesetters she’d managed to find, feeling victorious, when she glanced up and saw her father. She fumbled and dropped one of the books, pages fluttering in panic. Charles was standing next to a short woman with wide hips and an auburn weave-on. He was holding the hand of a young boy, maybe five or six. The child resembled Charles so strongly that Juju immediately knew what she was looking at: her father’s other family. She stepped back, merging into the people around her, disappearing. He was supposed to be in Onitsha, she thought. For business. Yet here he was, in their own town, with this woman and this little boy.

Her first thought was to rush home and tell her mother. She’d already started pushing through the crowd, toward the bus stop, when a sick feeling hit her stomach: her mother already knew. No wonder he’d left. He had a whole other family to go home to, and he didn’t even have to leave town to reach them. Juju glanced back at her father and saw the woman smiling up at him, her teeth shining like a Colgate advertisement. That gleaming joy made Juju want to take a stone and smash it into the woman’s face.

Just the other day she’d pressed herself against the bathroom door and watched her mother cry soundlessly while pulling out a discolored molar from her own mouth with a pair of small pliers. Maja’s jaw had been swollen for a while—she’d told Juju it was from an infection, which was true, but it was also from a fight with Charles. She hid the bruising with makeup.

“Mama, why don’t you go and see a dentist?” Juju had asked, wincing as she watched the tooth clatter into the sink.

Her mother gargled with peroxide, spitting a swirl of foam and blood. “You have to travel to see a good dentist. Sometimes even overseas.”

“So why don’t you travel?”

Maja’s eyes glittered with the anger she usually hid from her daughter. “Why don’t you ask your father? Tell him all my teeth are rotting in my head!” She pushed past Juju and slammed her bedroom door, leaving her daughter wavering behind her.