“Maybe she thinks she’s too janded to be here,” Olunne said, shrugging. Juju had been born overseas, even attended school there for a few years before her parents moved back to Nigeria. She’d been very young at the time, but her voice still kept an accent that was different from ours. It was too easy to gossip about her, especially when she avoided the rest of us.

“Don’t mind her, she’s there forming fine girl because of her hair,” Somto said, her lip curling. I bit my tongue; this hair thing was a sore point for Somto, who’d had to cut hers the year before when she started secondary school. Juju’s mother had enrolled her in a private school that didn’t require mixed girls to cut their hair, so Juju got to keep hers long, curling down her back. Vivek frowned, but he knew not to push Somto or defend Juju too hard. It wasn’t until we were on the way home that he lowered his voice to complain to me.

“The girls don’t give Juju a chance because they’re so jealous. It’s not fair.”

I nodded, knowing how it had cut at him to hear them talking about her. “It’s not,” I agreed, mostly for his sake. He just liked that girl too much. She lived down the road from De Chika’s bungalow, at the end of a quiet street near Anyangwe Hospital. We used to ride our bicycles up the street all the time, slowing down when we passed Juju’s house. Aunty Maja loved flowers, so their fence was covered with piles of pink and white bougainvillea.

“Go and knock on the door,” I told Vivek. “See if she’s home.”

“And say what?” he replied, pedaling in slow loops in the middle of the road.

I shrugged, confounded by the intricacies of wooing a girl in her father’s house. We pedaled home, leaving our bikes next to the swing set in the backyard. There was a cluster of bitterleaf bushes in front of the boys’ quarters, fighting with an ixora hedge for space. Aunty Kavita and De Chika used to have a househelp who lived there, but she returned to the village after a year or two—a death in the family, I think—and they never replaced her. Vivek and I took over the housework; we would sweep her old room in the boys’ quarters as if someone still lived there, dragging the broom under the metal frame of the bed. We stayed there when we wanted to be away from the grown-ups, our bodies sprawled over dusty-pink bedsheets, eating boiled groundnuts and throwing the shells at each other. Aunty Kavita left us alone there, only shouting from the back door of the main house if she needed anything. De Chika never even set foot inside. All of this made it a little easier for me to hide Vivek’s thing from them when it started.

* * *

—

Idon’t know how long it had been happening before I noticed. Maybe someone else noticed first and just didn’t say anything, or maybe no one did. The first time I saw it with my own two eyes was the year after he chipped my tooth, on a Sunday after I had gone to Mass with them. It was afternoon, and Vivek and I hadn’t even changed out of our church clothes. We’d eaten lunch, cleared the table, then escaped to the boys’ quarters with a small stack of Archie comics that Aunty Eloise had brought back from her nephews on her last trip to London. I had one splayed out on the cement floor, my head and one arm dangling off the edge of the bed, my feet propped against the flaking wall. Vivek was sitting cross-legged on the mattress beside me, his comic in his lap, spine curving forward as he bent his head over the pages. The day was hot and quiet, the only sound the rustling of thin paper and an occasional cluck from the chickens outside.

Vivek’s voice broke into the silence, low and rusty. “The wall is falling down.”

I lifted my head. “What?”

“The wall is falling down,” he repeated. “I knew we should have fixed the roof after it rained last time. And we just brought the yams inside.”

I closed my comic and sat up. His head was still bent but his hand was unmoving, resting on a half-turned page. His fingernails were oval, cut short down to the beds. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

He raised his head and looked right through me. “You don’t hear the rain?” he said. “It’s so loud.”

There was nothing but sun pouring through the glass louvers and old cotton curtains. I stared at Vivek and reached my hand out to his shoulder. “There’s no rain,” I started to say, but when I touched the cotton of his shirt and the bone of his joint underneath, his eyes rolled up into white and his body flopped sideways, falling against the mattress. When his cheek hit the foam, he jerked as if he was waking and scrabbled his arms and legs, pushing himself back up and gasping loudly. “What? What happened?”

“Shh! You’re shouting,” I said. I didn’t touch him because I was afraid of setting him off again.

His eyes were wide and jittery. He looked around the room, his gaze brushing past me as his breath settled. “Oh,” he said, and dropped his shoulders. Then, almost to himself, “This thing again.”

I frowned. “Again? Which thing?”

Vivek rubbed the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable. “It’s nothing. Just small-small blackouts. Forget it.”

I kept looking at him but he wouldn’t look back at me. “You were talking about rain,” I said. “And yams.”

“Ehn?” he replied, cramming an is-that-so into one sound. “I don’t remember. Biko, fashi the whole thing.” He picked up his comic and lay on his side, turning away from me. I didn’t say anything, because that’s how he was: when he wanted to stop talking about something, he stopped talking about it, shutting down like metal protectors had fallen around him. But I watched him, after that—I watched him to see if it would happen again.

There were moments when he would become very, very still, just stop moving while the world continued around him. I saw it happen when we were leaving class one evening: Vivek stopped walking and our classmates jostled and pushed him as they filed past. I was a few people behind him but he still hadn’t moved by the time I caught up. The others were glaring at him, sucking their teeth as they shoved past. He was walking as if he was drunk, staggering and stumbling, his lips moving slowly and soundlessly. I grabbed his elbow and propelled him forward, pulling him against me so he wouldn’t fall. As the stream of people continued out of the compound—JAMB exams were coming up, and the test center was full of students—I got Vivek through the gate and pushed him out of the way, up against a fence by the roadside gutters. Finally, he shuddered and came back.

“Are you all right?” I asked, letting go of his elbow.

He looked at me and the protectors fell over his face. “I’m fine. Let’s go.” I followed as he strode toward the bus stop, wary but silent.

Somehow it became like that whenever he was back from school, even when we went to the village house over the holidays, me watching him close and intervening when I could and Vivek never really telling me what was going on. If I stepped in like I had at the prep center, he just thanked me and we’d continue as if nothing had happened. I got used to it.

None of our parents noticed, maybe because he was always so controlled around them, never as relaxed as he’d been in the boys’ quarters. To them, it just looked like he had quiet spells. Aunty Kavita would assume he was tired and tell him to go and sleep. My mother told her to check if he was anemic, and Aunty Kavita fed him large portions of ugu for a while, just to be on the safe side. He and I still read our comics and ate boiled groundnuts in the boys’ quarters of his house when I was in town; we still rode our bikes down the street; we still knocked down guavas and mangoes with a hollow bamboo stick, then lay on the bonnet of De Chika’s car to eat them.

We were young, we were boys, the years rolled by in the heat. Later, much later, I wondered if I should have told his parents what was going on, if that would have helped him, or saved him a little.

* * *

—

Two years before I finished secondary school, I finally gathered enough courage to approach Elizabeth. She was taking the SAT classes with us and I toasted her the same way we all toasted the girls we liked—I bought her FanYogo after class and escorted her to the gate when her driver came to pick her up.

Vivek watched me and laughed. “You’re finally chyking this girl?” he said. “Thank God. At least you didn’t wait until graduation.”

After a week of sending her letters and carefully writing down the lyrics to the hottest love songs for her, Elizabeth finally agreed to be my girlfriend. She saved the letters, all written on sheets of foolscap paper torn out of my exercise books, and wrote me notes telling me how romantic I was. I visited her house in Ngwa a few times—I already knew I could never bring her to Owerri.

One weekend, she suggested traveling down with me when I was going home.