“Your friend called me,” she said. “Told me you didn’t want her to call 911 and I told her to call them. I told her, ‘Do you want Ada to be mad at you or do you want her to be dead?’ I’m coming with you.”

I kept a smile stuck on Ada’s face as they both climbed into the back of the ambulance. I had failed. Already, I knew that a second chance would be much harder to come by. But for now I had to handle the crisis I’d thrown us into. I did it with that same smile, joking with the nurses till they got irritated. One of them was Nigerian, and she scolded Ada without sympathy, forcing her to drink liquid charcoal. I watched Ada vomit it up into a white toilet bowl. I watched as she became delirious, as she panicked, as her other friends came and sat on her hospital bed. They sent a psychiatrist to come and evaluate her, but he didn’t like our attitude and I could tell that he wanted to lock us up. That sobered me up faster than anything else would have. There was no way I was ever letting someone commit us, not after that night in the ward the year before.

“Let me handle it,” I told Ada, even though we were both exhausted.

Donyen had gotten Hassan’s number from someone else and called him behind Ada’s back, yelling at him for not being there. I was furious when Hassan told us.

“You had no right to call him,” I told Donyen, Ada’s hospital gown crinkling at our shoulders. “It’s none of your business.”

“Are you serious?” she said. “You were calling his name, did you know? When you were delirious. You were calling his name and he can’t even fucking come and see you?”

I took a deep breath. It was so fucking inconvenient to be dealing with this right when the doctors were trying to decide whether to discharge Ada or dump her in a psych ward. I wanted to slap Donyen. “You’re my ex!” I snapped. “You can’t be calling the person I’m seeing now to shout at him. And now I have to handle this shit in the middle of everything else because you can’t mind your fucking business.”

Hassan had been upset on the phone when he finally got through to Ada. “I can’t do this shit,” he said. “Your ex is fucking crazy.”

“Dude,” I told him, “you don’t have to come to the hospital.” The last time he’d been in one was when his mother had died. He’d been avoiding them since.

He showed up anyway, to tell Ada that he wanted to break up. I almost laughed. She was in a hospital bed after my suicide attempt and now she was getting dumped. Wonderful.

“Can you meet the doctor with me?” I asked him. “You were the last person I was with before it happened. I need someone to vouch for me.”

So Hassan sat next to Ada across from the doctor, and he and I both turned on the charm, smiling and downplaying everything.

“I’ve had eight friends come in over the past twelve hours,” I told the doctor. “Do you really think it’s in my best interests to be separated from my support system and admitted into a ward without any form of outside communication instead of being released into their custody?”

She tapped on her desk. “The doctor who evaluated you felt you might be a risk to yourself,” she said.

I smiled, and it was broad and confident. “I was a little groggy when he was asking me questions and he seemed a bit irritated, I don’t know why. But you can see for yourself that I’m in good hands.”

Hassan stepped in with his bright teeth and assured her that yes, Ada was in good hands, she’d been fine when he saw her the night before, and it was all just a rough morning. “She’ll be okay, we’ll take care of her,” he lied.

Donyen had already walked out in a temper before he arrived. “I know I abandoned you,” she said later. “I was angry. I’m sorry.”

The doctor discharged Ada, to my collapsing relief. Saachi had been calling but I wouldn’t take her calls or Chima’s. She called one of Ada’s friends instead. “She needs to stay in the hospital,” Saachi said. “Let me talk to her doctors.”

She couldn’t. I’d had Ada revoke all Saachi’s access back when she started calling us unstable, so she wasn’t Ada’s emergency contact anymore, and since this was America, the doctors refused to talk to her. “We don’t have the patient’s permission,” they said. Later in the evening, Ada spoke to A?uli.

“Are you okay now?” A?uli asked.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Ada lied.

“Okay. Good.”

That was it. Just like that, I had lost.

Chapter Seventeen

How many days are we going to use to count the teeth of the devil?

We

Tell a child to wash her body and she washes her stomach. As?ghara was a fool for what she tried. Of all the paths she could have chosen, she went and picked the one that was taboo to Ala, as if she would be allowed to complete it, as if she forgot whose child the Ada was. Life does not belong to us to take. And on top of that, she should have remembered that we are ?gbanje; none of us die like this.

It had been a good gamble nonetheless, having the little beastself out in the world, allowing her to leap from bed to bed and shake hearts between her pointed teeth. When she failed at returning through the gates, we felt the sting of it strongly. If Ala did not want us to return yet, then we had been disobedient by trying. The brothersisters were no excuse, even though they had commanded us to come back—between them and her, the choice of who to obey shouldn’t have been a choice.