All the Failures of Her Being

by Vincent Anioke

First, the video of Adaeze and the faceless man surfaced online. The days afterward possessed the unreality of a life lived underwater, every step hazy and plodding. The original clip amassed 12,000 views before it was taken down at her request; by then, mirror copies had appeared all over the web.

Adaeze’s phone lit up with messages. From her university friends, with whom she had always shared a shallow approximation of intimacy, so that their consolations rang hollow, their questions thinly-veiled excursions in gossip-farming. From strangers online.

Hey girl, how are you doing?

Took it like a pro—you’re a real one.

Oink oink, fat pig!

Ashawo. Satan’s maggots will feast on your rotten pussy.

She deleted her social media accounts; still, texts from unfamiliar numbers poured in. An emoji of a cry-laughing face. A detailed essay about all the ways its author would make her his slut skank bitch. A picture of a noose and a bridge.

Occasional knocks pounded her door.

“Ada, are you there? Let us talk.”

She did not leave her room, not for classes, not for anything. Her locker was full of canned jalapeno tuna and bottled water, and she held in her bowels even when this sent waves rumbling across her stomach.

Two days after the incident, a paper marked in her school’s letterhead slipped under her door. The first few lines read, “Dear Adaeze Obilo, we hope this message finds you well. As one of Nigeria’s premier catholic institutions, Concordat University mandates certain standards of character from its students...”

An hour later, as she stuffed her clothes into a duffel bag, the door rattled again. She only opened it because she heard his voice, somber. “Adaeze, it’s me. Let us talk.”

His gaze narrowly avoided hers, settling somewhere around her neck. It was a wonder, a ludicrous impossibility, that this now-docile face had once filled her most blissful dreams. That she had bought a light-up globe so that when it spun, she stared trance-like at the nettles of white rays it formed on her desk, imagined him and her jetting across continents, over evergreen trees and snow-sliced tundras.

Limply, he said, “The university put out a statement online. I read that they are letting you go.” Letting you go.

He said it as though her parents had freed her from curfew to attend a night party.

“You recorded us,” she said, her voice below a whisper.

“I only sent it to my homeboy, I swear. He wasn’t supposed to share it with anyone. I already talked to him.”

“Fuck you, Ebuka. Fuck you a thousand times.”

“Look, they don’t know who the guy in the video is. You’re not going to say anything, are you? Because I didn’t post it, and you can’t prove that the guy was me anyway. So it’d be just like lying. You get that, right? It’s not like we were official.”

She didn’t trust what she would say next, what she would do, so she slammed the door in his face.

. . .

The turbulent Friday afternoon flight from Ogun to Abuja lasted just over three hours, and she spent most of it drafting and redrafting potential emails. Since you expelled me, you must expel him too. His name is Ebuka Ugwu, and he was my—Lover.

Fuck-buddy.

Accomplice, she decided, the word that best revealed his culpability without divulging the nature of their relationship. Would action against him be more or less likely if Concordat knew all the details? How, on the nights he’d called her over, he’d greeted her with a bag of udaras, the sour fruits plucked under cover of darkness from the Faculty Quarters where no students were allowed. Or how, after sex, he’d sometimes dived for her bellybutton, blowing air into it until she shivered with laughter. That his mere presence had turned his once-alien room into a sort of primal laboratory, where she freely experimented with all the capabilities of her body. She guided his hands to her throat, and rubbed his spit on her skin, and reddened her back with the claws of his fingernails. As the plane landed, the passengers clapping in frenzied relief, she wondered if she could twist the truth ever so slightly: he abused me, struck me against my will, I have the marks to prove it.

She sent no emails.

Outside the airport, taxi drivers swarmed her like vultures, and she chose the oldest-looking one, the man least likely to surf the internet. He asked her how the flight had been and stayed mercifully quiet when she did not respond.

Her parents usually picked her up at the airport, their reception melodramatic. Papa hugged her until the bones of her spine cracked; Mama blew kisses all over her face and then pinched her cheeks, lamenting that she wasn’t eating enough.

“Why are they starving my tomato-jos?” she would say, shaking her head.

“I have egusi soup waiting for you at home, my daughter. Don’t worry!”

But after Adaeze had activated her new SIM card and called Mama to say that she would be coming home, Mama had murmured, “Take a taxi when you arrive. Bye.”

. . .

The front door was unlocked.

Papa was likely still working at Zenith Bank, but Adaeze’s younger brother Chigozie and Mama were in the living room watching a Nollywood movie. On the screen, a young girl turned into a snake, prompting head-clutching screams from the villagers.

“Mama, I am home,” Adaeze said. Mama did not move, stared intently at the women rolling their bodies in the dust. Chigozie rushed up from the couch, screaming “Ada!” but he’d barely taken two steps in her direction before Mama yanked him back down.

“Sit down, joor,” she snarled.

Adaeze walked up the stairs and into her room. It was unchanged. Its maroon blinds were lifted high so that too much sun shone on her queen-size bed. Rows of Davido posters draped one wall, his many smiles awash in neon concert lighting. On the other wall, framed certificates sparkled, accolades from primary school Spelling Bees and secondary school Essay Contests. The normalcy startled rather than soothed her. This room belonged to the girl who had led soulful teen choirs at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, had cooked egg-filled moi-mois at the Gwarinpa food bank. It revealed nothing of the vampire who’d tasted marijuana in moonlit parks, sometimes from one end of a burning stick, sometimes on a hungry tongue. Who’d filled her mouth with sticks of gum on the return home, tiptoes grazing carpet, who’d breathed a sigh of relief when she slid beneath her blanket, the shadows mercifully still.

Adaeze sat on her bed, lost in memory, and it sank beneath her, swallowed her whole.

. . .

Until Mama finally spoke to her around eight p.m., Adaeze spent the day in her room. She switched her phone off, even though only Mama and Papa had her new number. Thoughts of the video looped. How it lived outside of her in a surely rising tide of views and comments. How Mama and Papa had even happened upon it in the first place. Perhaps one of Mama’s friends had called, barely suppressing their glee at delivering the bombshell. Or perhaps Papa, always active in the political corners of Twitter, perpetually eager to rain abuse on the federal government, had come across the clip as its virality surged.

The thought sickened her that they not only knew but had also played the full video, over and over, unwilling to believe that this wild creature on the screen was their flesh and blood, their tomato-jos.

Darkness fell. Insects flapped against her window, their low buzzing briefly subsumed by the approach of Papa’s car. There was the slamming of doors, the sound of footsteps, and then Mama’s voice, calm, flat: “Come down. Now.” Downstairs, Mama and Papa sat side-by-side on the black leather sofa. Adaeze took the couch opposite them, fingers twisting the hem of her long skirt. Chigozie was nowhere in sight. They’d likely sent him to his room, told him to play his iPad games with the headphones on. Their approach to household trouble had always been of a compartmentalized nature. Even when she’d suspected a rift in their marriage at one time, gleaned it in the way Papa avoided Mama’s gaze, in his uncharacteristically profuse praise of her meals, they’d put on a cadence of affection when they saw her watching, their effort strained by its forcefulness.

Mama’s face was still blank. Papa, wiry, bespectacled, wore a glare.

“Adaeze,” he said. “First of all, welcome home.”

“Thank you, Papa—”

“But your mother and I are deeply disappointed in you. We are disappointed, first of all, by your immoral actions. We watched that video more times than we cared to count, unable to understand who it was we were seeing do such dirty things. It is not how we raised you. It is not what our church taught you. It is not who we know you to be. We are disappointed, second of all, by your lack of protection. If you were starving in spirituality, we did not expect that you would also lack common sense. To let the raw genitals of a strange man inside you like that? We do not know what vile diseases you carry, if you have his baby growing in your belly. You will see Doctor Hassan tomorrow afternoon for tests. That is not up for debate.”

Spit collected in the back of Adaeze’s tongue, but she could not swallow. Part of her wanted to defend herself—we were exclusive, I took the morning after pill, it was mostly anal—but even the unvoiced thoughts flattened her, their fragility of tone.

“Finally,” Papa continued, “we are disappointed in you for disgracing our family name. You have disgraced not just yourself, not just your dear brother Chigozie who looks up to you—and don’t worry, he doesn’t know of this, he never will. You have also disgraced us and your grandparents, and the proud line of Obilos that have marched before you. After tomorrow’s medical exams, you must start applying for transfer to other universities. You will bear every associated expense, including tuition. Indefinite stay under our roof is not an option. You have three months. Good night.”

“Papa—”

“Good night, Adaeze.”

. . .

At midnight, hunger finally struck.

There was a forbidden quality to the world outside of Adaeze’s room, and she tiptoed about the kitchen, warming a bowl of yam porridge and peppered stockfish from the leftovers in the refrigerator. She ate on the veranda. The night’s warm wind licked her face, crickets chirping in the neighboring front lawns of low grass. After dinner, she washed her bowl in the sink, the tap’s rush like a raging waterfall. A sudden sleepless energy churned inside her, and when she returned upstairs, she turned toward Chigozie’s door instead of hers. They had never been especially close, perhaps due to the seven-year age gap, but many Friday nights had bound them to long sessions of Jenga and Scrabble. He’d often invented strange four-letter words, invariably with a z or an x, and she’d allowed them, the triumphant smile on his face too precious to burst.

 Even with his room’s darkness, she caught his motion as she entered—a clumsy diving under the bedsheets, beneath which a square light glowed.

“Does that ever work on Mama?” she said.

He emerged shyly. Then he rushed at her, feet bounding across the bed until he was in her arms, and she lifted him, hugged him more tightly than she ever had. When they parted, she examined him closely. His hairline was thin and crooked, likely a victim of Mama’s deluded beliefs in her barbing prowess. A wide grin lit his face, so dispossessed of the youthful cynicism other thirteen-year-olds learned to weaponize.

“You’re home early,” he said. “It’s not June yet.”

“I know, Chigo. I just missed everyone so much. I will be around for a while. Is that okay with you?”

Chigozie glanced at the door, his smile fading slightly. “Mama said I shouldn’t talk to you.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“She said that you had a hard semester at school, that you’re very tired.

But I know it’s because of the video.” Adaeze gaped at him.

He was no longer smiling.

“I heard her yelling,” he said, whispering now, as if Mama might have pressed one ear to the other side of his door. “It was late, and she probably thought I was sleeping. But I was on this—” He motioned at his iPad, still aglow under the sheets. “Playing Sudoku. I remember to check the diagonals now! I bet I’m even faster than you.”

“Her yelling—what did she say?”

He mimicked Mama’s voice. “‘Adaeze has killed me; what kind of video is this?’ Papa was trying to hush her. I didn’t hear much after that because they started talking so low.”

“Chigo, did you see the video?”

“No. But I figured it must be bad. What did you do?”

His expression was grim, tightly drawn, and in it, she saw the glimmer of a much older boy. “Listen, Chigo, you can’t tell Mama I told you, or I swear I’ll beat your brains out with the Jenga blocks, okay? It was...just a video of me having sex—”

He leaned back in disgust. “Eww! Ada, who would have sex with you?”

His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Are you pregnant then? Who’s the daddy?”

She draped his blanket over his head and pinned him until his wild wriggling turned into raucous laughter. When he resurfaced, inhaling deeply, she flicked his nose and said, “No. I’m not pregnant. Won’t be till I’m forty and gray-haired, and you’re taking care of me.”

He scoffed. “My friend Chuka says forty-year-old women have cobwebs in their vaginas. And spiders.”

“Chuka sounds very wise.”

“Mama calls him a charlatan and thinks we don’t talk anymore, but he’s my best friend.”

“Well, I won’t mention him,” Adaeze replied. They pinky-swore on their promises, and when he showed her what he’d been playing on his iPad, a new game full of lasers and spinning basketballs, she watched him, his gyrating fingers, the focused intensity with which he explained the rules. She marveled at how easily it bloomed within her, overwhelming, the love she held for him.

. . .

While drawing her blood, a stern and unsmiling Doctor Hassan said, “Make better decisions next time, okay? It’s a miracle you’re not pregnant.” Her father watched from a corner of the room, silent as a statue. She wondered if Doctor Hassan had seen the video too or had merely heard about it from Papa. A lurid image arose unbidden, Doctor Hassan masturbating to her silent moans in the privacy of his office.

The ride to the clinic and back was strained, stuffy. Papa tapped on the steering wheel, his fingers matching the tempo of the radio’s gospel songs. Adaeze wanted him to speak. She wanted to tell him that his words from last night had hurt, but not nearly as much as he thought, that she remembered how he’d always chided her softly in Mama’s absence and forcefully in her presence. But when they arrived home, and he exited his car without a glance at her, a new wound opened in her chest.

It worsened that evening as she showered, running her soapy hands over her skin in a daze. Ebuka’s presence loomed against steamed glass, the initial coyness of their first time, how she’d stayed mostly clothed, her stomach tucked in, while he stripped bare with fervent speed. He was handsome, but his stomach was bloated with flaps of flesh. His nipples drooped. The confidence of his easy motion had enticed and boggled, and she’d found herself reciprocating his swagger in their second encounter. Dancing around his room while shaking her pants. Teasing the buttons of her top apart until it dropped, coiled by her feet like snakeskin. His face had slackened with such longing, and the delicious high of that look had lingered for days afterward. The thick, pockmarked body she inhabited was hers, not some defective, temporary vessel on the slow march to slimness. It was capable of hypnosis.

It felt less capable in the intervals between their encounters, as little as a day or as long as two months. He was a final-year Electrical Engineering student, and the demands of his projects were volatile. When the days apart became weeks, she turned her bedside mirror so that her reflection no longer startled, and when she was his again, she took him facing the dust-speckled glass lining the doors of his wardrobe. On, the cycle went, his renewed silence stirring loose the voices in her head, trained to highlight all the failures of her being.

She wondered if his secret camera had rolled only once. If he possessed a mosaic of every gasp and moan and position, a collection routinely shared with his closest buddies.

This is us doggy-style, and this is my favorite, when she rides me like a horse, and I yank her fake brown hair, it’s a wig, you know, and she moans like a slut skank bitch.

Perhaps they’d gathered around his phone like children at a campfire, pointing at the misshapen contours of her body, muttering things she already knew to be true. Things now echoed by newly-birthed voices, whose words slipped into her cereal at breakfast, pressed against her pillows at sundown, followed her into the gray hues of dreamscape.

Adaeze turned the shower valve so that the water burned at its highest. It cooked her skin in vapor clouds.

. . .

On Sunday morning, she awoke before the sun.

She changed into her usual church outfit, a droopy, formal dress, and waited by the dining room table. Mama was down shortly afterward and blinked in surprise upon seeing Adaeze. Just as quickly, she moved on, boiling water for Papa’s favorite green tea. Chigozie followed in a creased black suit, and Mama asked if he’d slept well. She led him to the living room, where they watched cartoons until Papa appeared.

For the next three hours, Adaeze tested her skill of singular focus—she chose the road’s gloomy silver for the drive to and fro, and the cross of Jesus Christ for the endless sermon. She no longer believed, hadn’t in years, but she found herself drawn to the bronze statue now, its theater of suffering. His nailed hands. His grotesquely bloody scalp. The mournful face. She considered his saying. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. She wouldn’t have—she’d have boiled their skins until it flayed from the bone.

Once home, Chigozie dashed up the stairs to change into casual clothing.

Before Adaeze could follow, Mama said, “Wait.”

Adaeze and Papa turned.

“Nwunye mu,” Papa said, touching Mama’s shoulder. “Is everything okay?”

She ignored him. “Adaeze, did you see them looking at us in church? Even the priests.”

“Dear—” Papa started.

“Next week, find another church. Better yet, stay home. It is not my church you will go to. Do you hear me?”

Without waiting for a response, Mama walked past her, bounding up the stairs, muttering under her breath. Soon, it was just Papa and Adaeze. She turned her gaze to a shiny white wall, the plaster unblemished.

“You were her world, you know?” Papa said, a softness in his voice. “She celebrated your intellect and grace with friends and strangers alike, with anything that had ears. Adaeze, you broke my wife’s heart. She cries her eyes red every night. Please, please, find a way to fix it, whatever it takes, or her grave will bear your name.”

. . .

For most of the next week, she left her room only to use the bathroom and eat, and only if the world outside was free of sound.

There was a box in her closet full of Chinua Achebe novels, frayed notebooks, and Daily Trust newspapers from years ago, their pages mottled with soda stains. Before Papa had fully committed to a digital library, “reluctantly relinquishing the past,” as he’d called it, the papers had been delivered to their front door each morning. Adaeze had collected them from Papa, at first to fill out the daily Sudoku puzzles, and soon afterward, to marvel at the clean font of small letters, the sharp names of strangers beneath looming headlines. There were tales of corrupt politicians and masquerade festivals and dead soldiers, much like the Nigerian works of fiction she loved, except that these were steeped in reality, and therefore inexorably more potent.

“I want to become a journalist,” she’d told Mama and Papa the evening of a secondary school career fair.

Mama had grinned. “Journalist keh? Why not sell bread under the bridge too?”

“Adaeze mu,” Papa had said, “it is very respectable, but we thrive by following the smell of opportunity. Nigeria is full of crude oil, you know? It is what God has blessed us with.”

Adaeze had hoped that the box, with its scent of nostalgia, could fully occupy her. She sat by her desk, absent-mindedly flipping through the pages, looking up whenever she detected motion outside. She watched Papa leave for work in his SUV. Watched Chigozie dash into the school bus, his friends waving at him from behind small, square windows. The first morning she saw him run like that, a strange twinge of jealousy took hold. She’d thought the moment special, his delighted leaping into her arms on the night of her return, but it seemed that he was often joyous, always leaping into things. Mama left on long walks at noon but was otherwise home. Adaeze did not know if she had quit her job at the upscale advertising agency in Maitama or if she was merely taking time off.

When Adaeze wasn’t half-reading words, she was on her laptop, the internet turned off for fear of what might pop up. She knew that she wanted out of this house, with its endlessly humming air-conditioners and soft-clanking overhead pipes. That she needed to research potential new universities in the country’s farthest reaches. That someday, well before her three months were up, Mama’s grace would vanish, and Mama would press against Papa in their shared bedroom, would whisper direly, “It is time; she must go.” Worst of all, she knew that she stayed paralyzed because Ebuka persisted. She relived the slamming of her door in his face, and then the many nights beforehand passed beneath his duvet. Even when its thickness had choked them with sweat, she’d relished the enclosed suffocation, the smell of him, the “I love you”s never said, saved for the right moment.

“What are we?” she’d asked once, hating the infantile sound of the words in her throat, wishing she could take them back.

He’d kissed the bridge of her nose. “You’re the only woman I’m fucking, you know that. What’s in a name anyway? It’s all in the doing.”

What if she called him, really heard him out, because there was something he hadn’t gotten the chance to explain, one small, simple, magical line that would fix them, if not her world?

Her petroleum engineering classes had bored her, and her friends had existed by virtue of proximity, and her own thoughts had turned toward dark places left to their own devices. Ebuka’s presence had always been a fiery sort of peaceful, the messy calm in subdued storms.

She imagined life would now always be this—an eternal stretch of languishing in her prison of a room, pathetic and immobilized, while several Davidos watched leering from her walls. Then, on Friday afternoon, precisely one week after her return, Papa came home early, knocked on her door, entered anyway.

“Doctor Hassan called me,” he said. “Your test results came back.”

. . .

That evening, Adaeze turned on her laptop’s WiFi. She created a new Facebook profile, its picture a stock result from a “black woman” Web image search, its name an impulsively generated Missy Davis. In the Facebook search bar, she typed Ebuka Ugwu. Hovered over the enter key.

There was a bubbling in her chest, as if the ventricles of her heart were melting into stew. Only hours ago, Papa had said with great relief, “You have no STDs.” She’d understood that he’d clung to the outcome of those results, that, in some small way, her lack of disease redeemed her.

The bubbling had started then. Worsened now. She waited until the feel of her chest turned unbearable before lowering her finger into the key.

She found his profile easily. He had a post from yesterday, a trite, “With God, we command the universe.” Beneath that, with hundreds of likes and dozens of comments, a picture of him and a stranger, his lips on her cheek. She was smooth-faced and beautiful, her radiant dress complementing a figure of perfect proportions. White teeth glimmered in her smile. Sand stretched behind them, its fine edge meeting the frozen rush of deep blue waves. He’d captioned this photo: “Fellas, I think I found the one: A True Queen.” Adaeze scrolled through the comments. Heart-eye emojis.

“Omalicha Nwa!”

“Heavenly God, I am begging you. When will it be my turn?”

The woman, Ifechiluru Okafor, was tagged in the post. Her page was bare, close-up selfies in non-descript rooms, two-sentence reviews of British TV Shows, and a video of stewed chicken she’d cooked three years ago. This video marked the end of her page. Her new relationship status with Ebuka marked the beginning.

Four days ago.

Adaeze felt a surreal awe. How Ebuka, with his ungodly gut and oversized front teeth, could have ended up with someone like her. How a man who panted like a dog in bed, saliva dripping from the sides of his mouth, and pronounced Baby like Bay-Bay, and winked before he left a room, like a bad lead in a telenovela, could have gotten close enough to a woman like Ifechiluru, enough to taste her skin, and smell her strawberry-scented hair, and share her with the world, A True Queen.

Adaeze inhaled deeply, her body shuddering from the effort. She clicked on the message button above Ifechiluru’s brazen smile. Her fingers flashed across the keyboard, the words forming in the milliseconds before each strike.

I see you’re with Ebuka, and sister to sister, I just thought you should know. He gave me herpes and chlamydia. Don’t trust him.

She sent the message, and when it did little to calm her rising rage, she slammed the laptop shut and paced around her room, moving in unsteady circles until her knees touched the carpet. Still, she continued, dotting the circumference of the same brown patch until friction’s force burned the skin at each point of contact, sliced it red, and she lay by the side of her bed, wishing him death. She pictured his head severed from his blood-spurting neck, the rest of him blindly flailing about.

. . .

The three weeks that followed were manic. Adaeze committed herself to the constant motion of her body. Whenever Ebuka hovered in the forefront of her thoughts, she strained concentration toward whatever task lay at hand until his presence was like an armpit sore, a background pain.

She compiled a list of universities currently accepting transfer applications, all of them in the South, away from Abuja. She ranked them by earliest potential start dates. The first, University of Nkanu, Enugu, was attainable in two months. Because home’s sole printer sat in Mama and Papa’s room, she walked to the nearest cyber cafe instead, a twenty-minute walk turned thirty by her deliberate pace. At the cafe, she printed out the UNE application form and her West African Examination Council score report. Then, she emailed Student Services at Concordat University for a copy of her transcript. She returned the next day to print another form to the Ebonyi State University of Arts and Sciences and the following week for more forms to universities in Lagos. She filled out the questions in the cafe, pausing over Reason For Transfer before scrawling, “More robust petroleum engineering program desired.” Where they asked for a university contact number, she wrote hers instead. Sometimes, the cafe owner turned in her direction, and she stared back. His look was always one of idle curiosity, rather than familiarity, and after a while, she stopped returning his gaze.

She looked up apartments in the cities under consideration, made calls to landlords, refreshed her bank account to make sure that her 185,000 naira was still there, and cooked her own meals. Sometimes, Mama drew near while Adaeze stirred the pot. Aside from the occasional, dispassionate “Move, I can’t reach the kettle,” or “Turn down the flame; it’s too much,” Mama said little else.

Papa was slightly more vocal, especially if Mama was out of earshot. He asked Adaeze to plate him some of her achicha and frowned on the first bite. “Use less salt next time,” he said. While she sat on the veranda one night, watching moths fling themselves at the bulbs, he stood over her.

“Which universities are you applying to?”

She told him, and he stared at the clouds. “Take away ESUAS,” he said. “They have too many strikes. The rest are good.” When she went up to the room, she crumpled her ESUAS form and tossed it into a wastebasket.

Chigozie also maintained his distance to her in Mama’s presence, but she snuck into his room on late Friday nights, and he giggled at the exaggerated way she scampered in. They took turns playing his iPad game of lasers—she was quite bad at it, routinely losing in the first forty-five seconds—and talked about the newest girl Chuka had fallen in love with.

“Today, it was Maryam,” he said, his head on her lap. “When we play football, he says her breasts waggle.”

She chuckled. “Waggle. That’s his word?”

“Yes. But I don’t like Maryam. She’s mean. Sometimes, she tries to trip me on the grass.”

“Who do you like?”

“Miss Kate, our mathematics teacher. She calls me Einstein. I want to marry her.”

He fell asleep shortly afterward. She watched him for a bit, listening to his light breathing. She thought of all the things he told her and all the things he didn’t. Of how his secrets would grow with time until who he was and who her parents saw were entirely different beings.

. . .

On a Saturday morning, one month after the return, Student Services responded with a pdf attachment of her transcript, the body of their email stating simply, “Stay blessed.”

“Eat shit,” Adaeze typed back and surprised herself by sending it. At the cyber cafe, she printed the transcript, tracing her fingers over the unexpected “Dean’s Honor List Year 1” annotation still present at the bottom of the document. As she paid the cyber cafe owner, the ordinarily quiet man chuckled.

“You like my cafe, ehn?” he said, a thick accent obscuring some of the words.

She granted him a thin smile and looked away as he fished in his register for her change.

“Shy, shy girl,” he leered, singing the words. A sudden cold look filled his eyes, and his fingers hooked onto her shoulder. “You were not shy in that video. Not shy at all. I have palm wine in the back. After we finish there today, no need to pay me anymore.”

She jammed her elbow into his bony chest; he was a slight man, and the force of her contact sent him staggering backward. Her printed pages scattered on the ground, and she left them there, ran onto the street as he screamed after her:

“Harlot! Never come back here again!”

. . .

It took her ten minutes to get home, her legs sliced by aching throbs. She grabbed her laptop from her desk and, for the first time since her return, walked into Mama and Papa’s room. It was dimly lit, icy with cold air. Mama sat upright on her bed, gaping at the powered-off television, and then at Adaeze’s entrance.

“I just want to use your printer,” Adaeze said. “And then I’ll get out, okay?”

The printer was loud and slow, paper crawling from its lip like a whiteskinned slug. Adaeze could have easily missed Mama’s words, whispered gently then, except that Mama’s words had never lacked for clarity.

“Why are you breathing so hard? Adaeze, what is wrong?”

The question was willful in its feigned ignorance, as if all had been right before now. Yet, Adaeze found herself thinking of when she, not Chigozie, would sit by Mama’s legs watching rural Nollywood movies. The first time Adaeze had seen a dibia on screen, his bare chest chalk-lined with occult symbols, his calabash of cow’s blood offered to the skies, she’d shrunk back in fear. Mama had hugged her then, saying, “God protects us, nwa mu. Don’t be afraid.” Her hugs had always been of that sort, a relief to toothless things— make-believe pagans in low-budget flicks or class grades one mark shy of an A. Confronted now with the possibility of a true embrace, Mama’s shoulder laid bare for the sinking of tears, Adaeze’s anger softened into the deep blue of sadness. Her words trembled.

“I was at the Diamond Cyber Cafe on Bello Way. The man there, the owner, he grabbed me.”

“That small idiot that smells like crayfish? Him?”

“Yes. I ran.”

Mama sighed, her exhale prolonged. “Adaeze, when you show the world who you are, the world responds in kind.”

Adaeze’s transcript, fully-formed now, hung off the table’s edge as if preparing for a dive. In the printer’s sudden silence, Mama’s words sounded louder, seemed to echo.

“Did you open your legs for him?” she said. “Tell him to suck the milk from your nipples in exchange for twenty minutes on his computer? It will not surprise me, Adaeze; nothing will surprise me because I do not know who you are.”

Tears stung Adaeze’s cheeks, and they drained her—their heat, the unvarying tickle of their crawl down her face. She tore the paper off the printer and headed toward the door. She almost made it out. It was her mother’s defeated mutter of, “My daughter is a harlot,” that made her spin around. It was that word at the very end, and her mother’s effortless dispatching of it, and the way it unfurled from her tongue.

Adaeze took long strides across the room. She bent over her mother’s face, and her mother flinched, shifting backward.

“Adaeze, do you want to fight me? Is that what this is? Will you slap your mother for speaking the truth?”

“Fuck you.”

Mama laughed, raised her hands to the ceiling. “Father God, see the kind of daughter you have given me. Have I not served you well? Have I not given you my heart?” She turned to Adaeze, and her age showed on her face in brutal transparency, the whites of her ruffled hair, the carved wrinkles like lines on a map. “I bore you for nine months, and wiped your dirty anus when you shit, and kept your belly full. When the milky pap upset your tummy, and you poured your vomit all over my skin, I said, this is it. This is the dress of motherhood. I will wear it proudly. And for what? For what, Adaeze? I am a failure.”

“Do you want to know all the ways you have failed?” Adaeze snarled, waving the paper in the air, brandishing it like a weapon. “Do you want to know the names of all the boys I kissed in secondary school, and all the girls too, and which ones put their fingers inside me? Or should I stand here and tell you that the devil made me do it, and I can be your tomato-jos again? For once, I will be honest with you. I will let you know. Not just this month. Not just this year. You have always been the mother of a dick-sucking harlot. That is your dress.”

Mama smiled bitterly. She sounded tired, on the verge of sleep, when she said, “You will burn in hell, Adaeze, at the lord’s appointed time, and I will not waste my spit on you to put the fire out.” She looked at her watch. “Chigozie’s father will be back from his morning jog in less than fifteen minutes. By then, I want you out of this house. Do you hear me, Adaeze? You will never come back.”

But Adaeze had already left the room.

. . .

It took Adaeze all of two minutes to pack. From her closet, she grabbed a random assortment of clothes, the running sneakers that never ran, all the old newspapers. She ignored the filled-out application forms in the drawers, reached beneath a tangle of old cables and half-working earphones for an envelope of naira notes.

Mama watched from nearby, impassive, and when Adaeze reached for Chigozie’s door, Mama ran toward her.

“Where do you think you’re going? Leave my son alone.” Adaeze pushed in.

Chigozie was deep asleep. A film of snot clung to his nose. She bent low and kissed his forehead, while Mama watched pensively from the doorway. She thought of parting words, something to whisper in his ear and leave buried in his subconscious, something to bind them until the next time, but nothing emerged, so she kissed him again and hoped it was enough.

. . .

At the nearest major intersection, she flagged a taxi.

The driver rolled down his window, his car reeking of excess cologne. “Where are you going?” he asked with brusque impatience, and when for a moment she failed to speak, he sucked his teeth and drove off cursing. The next taxi pulled up only a minute later, and quickly she said, “Wuse Motel.”

It was a three-story building with zinc awnings and a large central fountain that hadn’t worked in years. She knew next to nothing about it, only that Papa sometimes drove past it on their Christmas Week visits to his parents in Lagos, that its appearance signified the state’s edge, a “Leaving Abuja” sign mere minutes ahead.

The receptionist smacked gum bubbles and clacked away on his phone until she cleared her throat. Upon looking up, he smiled apologetically.

“Welcome, madam. How many nights are you staying?”

“Just one. But I may extend it by a few days if that’s okay.”

When he offered to help with her bag, she shook her head. “No, thank you.”

He stepped around the front desk. “It’s no problem, ma; plenty of stairs to your room.”

“I said no.”

He raised his hands, annoyed. “Okay, ma. Calm down.”

Room 304 smelled like stale soup. The sunlight that slanted in through its windows was a dull and dusty kind. She fell on the bed, which creaked beneath her weight, and closed her eyes, and prayed to the pillows for relief. But there was none. No sadness either, or anger. It was as if all the emotions had been wrung out of her body, leaving behind a numb shell.

She had lunch at a nearby kiosk, cold garri with milk and sugar, and returned to the motel. All day, there was an odd sense of waiting for something. Only when her phone buzzed, an automatic text from her telecom network about weekend bonus rates, did she realize what it was.

Papa.

She was waiting for his call. He would say, “Mama is angry, but please, come home.”

When midnight passed, and her phone remained silent, she wondered if he had begun to call on his return from jogging, if Mama had put her hand over his in disapproval. But Papa was a willful man, wasn’t he? He had never really done anything he didn’t want to. She pictured Mama and Papa tangled in their bed at that very moment, sound asleep.

. . .

Adaeze connected her laptop to the WiFi. First, she logged into the Missy Davis Facebook account, untouched since the night of its creation. There were no new notifications, no indication that Ifechiluru had even read her message. Next, she moved onto Twitter, created a new account, and typed into the search bar.

Dozens of results loaded. In some, the clip was even grainier so that her face was badly pixelated, nearly unrecognizable. Others had been edited in various ways. An upbeat circus-clown tune played over the last ten seconds of one. It had 70,000 likes. In another, the moment before Ebuka’s ejaculation, only visible from the waist down, morphed into an image of a muscular and disapproving Jesus Christ.

Most of the associated comments were from two weeks ago or earlier, but the most recent was only a half-hour old: “I just know his dick tastes nasty.” She found lustful fantasies, commentary on the generation’s failed women, half-baked jokes, size comparisons to Ebuka’s penis, disgust at the video’s very existence, the assurance of hell’s unbearable temperatures, remarks about the unflattering excess of her various body parts.

“My ex did this shit after we broke up,” said a user named Eniola Akande in a video response. She was short and thin, her hair laid in a field of cornrows. “And I slit my wrists with broken glass. Y’all are foul.”

There was only one reply to Eniola, its account owner faceless: “Sounds like sex ain’t the only thing you’re whack at. Cut harder next time.”

A linked thread led to Concordat’s official statement on her expulsion, and the replies there varied too: support, confusion, anger, amusement. Dawn tore holes in the sky, lifting shadows from Room 304. Adaeze kept scrolling. A strained weight pulled at her eyes. Her neck hurt from the bend of its angle. But even when there were no new comments left, even after the latest entries of the night had been processed and discarded, she returned to the video, played it on a loop, waited for oversaturation to yield some kindling of solace. There was none to be found, not in the relentless watching, not in home’s absence. She longed for her room, its oversized posters and her sea-soft bed and Mama’s familiar silence. She would do anything to get it back, would prostrate before Mama, would lick the floor clean beneath her feet. And once inside, she would dash upstairs, press Chigozie into her chest. He would ask where she had gone yesterday; she would smile and say, “Nowhere, Chigo, I am here to stay, remember?”

It was a simple knowing, the impossibility of it all.

She returned to the Facebook tab, clicked around. She began typing a new message.

. . .

Adaeze checked out of the motel before noon, stopped at the kiosk to buy an assortment of drinks, and took a second taxi to Gwagwalada Transit. On a plain of dusty road, buses arrived and departed, their conductors hanging onto rooftops and screaming out destinations, hawkers weaving through the open gaps with their sun-relief yogurts and bags of shelled groundnuts. The bus Adaeze took managed to fit fifty into its thirty seats. She sat in the back row, squashed between a bare-toothed elderly woman and a loud-snoring man, his head lolling like a rag doll’s.

It was just past two when she arrived at Lafia Stop, outside which a bevy of taxis waited. She entered the nearest one and lapsed into an unsettled half-hour nap. Her destination loomed ahead when she woke up, cracked and brittle grass flanking the Nasarawa University of Keffi’s entrance.

The central quad of campus was chaotic with life. Students crunched gravel while chasing after battered footballs. Others leaned against tree bark, lost in the clamor of conversation or flipping through textbook pages. In one corner, a kaftan-draped man wrapped sticks of peppered beef suya in folded paper cones, selling them to the line growing before him. It was on the other side of the line’s tail that Adaeze spotted Eniola Akande.

They approached each other with the awkwardness of strangers, and when Adaeze stretched out her hand, Eniola backed away slightly.

“Jesus, you look like shit,” Eniola said.

Adaeze chuckled. “Yeah, I don’t know the last time I had a good night’s sleep.”

A prickly silence lingered as Eniola led them into a row of paint-peeled buildings. She unlocked a door at the end of one corridor. Her room was tiny and overheated, its twin-size bed overflowing with rumpled clothes. In a corner sink, oily paper plates gathered.

“Pardon me if I didn’t feel like cleaning up,” Eniola said, sitting on the edge of her bed while Adaeze settled into a low chair, its metal back taut on her spine.

“It’s fine,” she said, and when Eniola didn’t reply, Adaeze reached into her bag and pulled out bottles of water, zobo juice, Sprite, and vodka. “They’re all warm now, but I hope there’s something here you—”

Eniola reached for the Sprite. “I’m trying to cut down on my sugar, but fuck it, I’ve been good.” She took a steady chug, closed her eyes as she swallowed. “So, I’m still not sure what to make of you, Adaeze. Being here, I mean.

Wanting to meet.”

Adaeze drank from the vodka bottle, grimacing at the taste. “I’m not here for money or anything like that. To be honest, I don’t even know why I came. I know I need to find a job soon and figure out where I’m staying and what I’m doing with my wretched life. But it’s hard to even breathe when there’s so much tired trapped in my chest. I’m tired, Eniola. I’m tired of the hate; I’m tired of the anger; I’m tired of the tears; I’m tired of remembering; every bone in my body is just tired.”

Eniola finished the rest of the Sprite and tossed the slightly-crushed bottle. It landed near one leg of the metal chair. She raised her right arm, pockmarked from wrist to elbow with scabs of different sizes.

“It used to feel like my blood was dirty,” Eniola said slowly, “so I cut my skin to let it out. Wore long-sleeved shirts on the days I left my room. Came back trembling and sat right here on this bed. Pen, blade, glass from a shattered mirror, it didn’t matter. It was all about seeing the dark red leak. Like if I did it enough times, I’d be clean again. Till I cut too deep one day, and a good friend found me passed out on the sheets. Some days, my blood still feels like mud, and there’s this itch that festers in my head. Some nights, there are nightmares. Vivid.” She ran her fingers over the ridges where flesh changed color. “There’s been none of this, though, not for a while. I’d like to think that’s something. I guess we’ll see.”

Adaeze looked down, her thumbs straddling the straps of her luggage bag. She didn’t want Eniola to see her face, too sleep-deprived to properly mask its disappointment.

“I checked his profile last night,” Adaeze said. “Ebuka Ugwu. He’s been with this girl for a while now. Pretty thing. They seem happy.”

“Think she knows? About the video.”

“Probably. Not sure it matters much.” She rose. “I’ll get going before I pass out on your floor.”

Eniola leaned over her bed, a hesitant motion across the small space of their separation. She placed a hand on Adaeze’s side. “This should have never happened to you. I’m sorry that it did.”

Adaeze stared at her, sat back down. “Oh. Yeah. Thank you.” She shifted on the chair, scratched her neck. “Thank you, Eniola.”

Vincent Anioke is a software engineer at Google. He was born and raised in Nigeria but now lives in Canada. His short stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Carve, Pithead Chapel, and Fractured Lit, among others. He is the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize Winner and was also shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Find him on Twitter at @AniokeVincent.