I reached around her neck and unfastened her silver chain, the Ganesh pendant still warm against my palm. I clenched my fingers into a fist around it.

“I love you,” I said to her silent eyes. Then I got up and ran, bent in half so I couldn’t be seen through the windows. I ran away, through the back, through the side gate, pausing only to close it behind me. I ran down the side road and picked up the dress from the ground, shaking off the orange and yellow petals that had accumulated on it. I ran down to the main road, past the hospital gates, and people stared at me, but the grief on my face must have looked familiar this close to the hospital, as if I had lost somebody there. I asked a woman selling oranges at the side of the road for a polythene bag. She stared at the blood on my clothes in alarm, but she gave me a black-and-yellow bag and handed me a sachet of pure water.

“Clean your face,” she said. “G?n? mere g??”

“I was in an accident,” I said, as I rinsed myself, pale red water in my hands.

“Chineke! Are you okay?”

“Yes, Ma. I’m just trying to reach home.”

“There’s plenty blood on your shirt.”

“It’s not my own.”

“It’s not good to be walking around looking like that.” She called out to a woman selling clothes in a kiosk next to her, gaudy bedazzled T-shirts and ankara dresses hanging off bone-white headless mannequins. “Vero! Biko, nyem shirt for this boy.”

The woman stuck her head out of her kiosk. “Fifty naira!” she called back. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a hundred, handing it to the orange-seller. She looked at me in surprise, then waved it at the other woman, who nodded and came out with a black T-shirt that had a bedazzled crown on it. “This one will enter him,” she said. The orange-seller gave her the hundred naira and received fifty back. She tried to give it to me but I shook my head. “It’s okay, Ma.” I put the bag between my knees and took off my shirt right there on the road, pulling on the black one. It was a little tight but it fit. I put my bloody shirt and Nnemdi’s dress into the bag, and when I looked up, both women were staring at me.

“That’s how you just naked yourself outside your house?” said the clothes-seller.

“Mind your business,” the orange-seller told her. “Get home safe, you hear?” she said to me, and I nodded.

“Daal?, Ma.”

There was still blood drying on my jeans, but they were dark, so they didn’t show much. I went straight to the bus stop and took a bus to Owerri. When I paid the conductor, some of the notes were stained with blood, but he didn’t even blink.

My parents weren’t home when I reached the house, so I took the key from under the mat and let myself in. I had enough time to take a bath and burn my bloodied clothes with the rubbish in the backyard, which I was supposed to burn anyway. I don’t know why I kept the dress, knotting it into that bag and putting it under my bed. I rinsed the necklace and kept it under my mattress, even though I risked my mother finding it if she came into my room. It was unlikely that she would. I couldn’t bury it—I just couldn’t.

I still remember the blood washing down the drain of the bathtub as I poured containers of water over my body, scrubbing myself until the water was clear and then pouring and scrubbing even more, going through buckets and buckets, until I had used all the water in the bathroom drum. I dried myself with a white towel, to make sure that not a drop of my cousin was left on me, then fetched water to refill the drum. Then I left the house, knowing it was only a matter of time before Uncle Chika would call to tell my father what had happened, and I didn’t want to be there to pick the call.

When I came home late that night, my parents were weeping in the sitting room. When they told me, I wept with them as if it was my first time.

I have pretended every day since then. I pretended with the girls and at the burial and with everyone. It was why I didn’t go to see anyone, why I stayed in Owerri. I needed to learn how to behave with this secret dropping petals inside me like this. I helped Aunty Kavita look for the necklace after she got me from Port Harcourt, as if I wouldn’t go home and pull it out, press it against my mouth, and choke back my sobs so that my parents wouldn’t hear.

When we told Aunty Kavita our theory that Vivek had gone out as Nnemdi and someone must have killed him during the riot, I could barely talk, my throat was swelling up so much. They thought it was grief. “The boys were very close,” my aunt said afterward, finally allowing other people the right to mourn her child. I listened to them wonder what had happened to the dress, knowing the whole time that it was hidden under my bed, soft and stiff. I watched my aunt cry as she imagined the suffering her Vivek had endured. I wanted to tell her that Nnemdi didn’t feel anything from the moment she fell, that she was asleep in my arms when she died, that there wasn’t pain like that, but I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. We had told her as much truth as she could handle. I was keeping the rest for myself.

So there I was with the dress, at the grave, sitting there as the sun washed up in diluted yellow. I didn’t know what time my aunt and uncle would arrive. I felt like I was always running just a few steps ahead of them, holding secrets they couldn’t catch up to. I picked up a hoe that was lying by the back door and dug carefully at the base of the little star fruit tree, deep enough so that rain wouldn’t wash it open, trying to hack the roots apart. I used my hands to dig the rest, around the roots, making small excavations, pouring water into it to soften the soil. When it was deep enough, I took the dress out of the bag. I held it to my face, trying to smell my cousin’s skin, trying not to smell the dried blood. It smelled like nothing much. I put it inside the hole and buried it, then shifted sand and leaves on top so they wouldn’t see that something had been buried there.

“I’m so sorry,” I told the grave. “It was an accident. I would never have hurt you, not in a thousand years. I swear to God. You were my brother and I loved you. I only wanted to protect you.”

I put my hand on the cement and it was cold. “I miss you every single day.”

My voice broke and the grave said nothing back. I knelt there for a long time, and finally I stood up and dusted the dirt off my knees. The sun was stronger in the sky now. I wiped my eyes and picked up the polythene bag. Holding it tight in my hand, I pulled the photograph of us out of my back pocket. I had considered burying it as well, but I couldn’t; I couldn’t let everything rot in that grave with my cousin. I stroked my thumb across the glossed surface before putting it back in my pocket with the necklace. Then I walked away, knowing that I would be leaving, going far away, to somewhere I could put his charm around my neck and wear it every day, and maybe then it would feel like he hadn’t left me after all.

Twenty-four

Nnemdi

Ioften wonder if I died in the best possible way—in the arms of the one who loved me the most, wearing a skin that was true. I watch him grieve and I want to tell him he’s already been forgiven for everything and anything he could ever do to me. I want to tell him that I knew I was dancing with death every day, especially when I walked outside like that. I knew it, and I made my choices anyway. It wasn’t right or fair, what happened, but it wasn’t his fault. I want to thank him for loving me.

My mother has changed the inscription on my grave. She could smell that it was a lie. Love and guilt sometimes taste the same, you know. Now it says:

VIVEK NNEMDI OJI

BELOVED CHILD

I wonder if anyone is pleased that I finally got my Igbo name. If my grandmother, floating somewhere here with me, is happy to be acknowledged at last. I would say it was too late, but time has stopped meaning what it used to.

I don’t mind anymore. I see how things work now, from this side. I was born and I died. I will come back.

Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.