The excitement of starting senior secondary lit up everyone’s faces. There was everything to be expectant about – the fact that you can’t be bossed around by seniors anymore, the fact that you now have that unspoken general right to be regarded as senior and boss juniors around, you now intentionally sound more bookish and pretend like you’ve got life all figured out, and the sweetest part, you openly flirt with all the pretty girls who would occasionally throw you side glances, and dare yourself to befriending the wild ones who knowingly play water games after school hours so that the macho boys they play the water games with can have free rein to ogle at their now see-through school uniforms.

That’s a boy’s fantasy. Or a girl’s, if you secretly fancy does over stags. I don’t fantasize, or fancy any of those, in any conceivable way. I was what many would call ‘the weird one’, and it had taken my three years as a junior at Prairie Model Secondary School to investigate and find out why I repel people like it is magic. I now know what magic I have – I care, way too much. It’s like a default setting, and my only goal – my own version of senior secondary school excitement – was that that was surely going to change. I had mapped it all out. Execution remained. The first step was to resist the temptation to always correct Mabel’s grammatical errors. I had helped Mabel pass the Junior WAEC English exam and when I was caught giving her answers in the hall and was punished by being stood up for thirty whole minutes without writing anything, what the entire class did for me was control their giggles. After the paper, outside the hall, a thousand fingers would rise from the air and point at me, until I left the school premises, and some distances after. They laughed.

When our Chemistry teacher asked Mabel to list the first forty elements in the periodic table, when she got to Argon, she said Agron. Then my people-pleasing alarm went off. I cued up my resistance strategy – a piece of bubblegum, an illegal cellphone, and distraction. I made my phone ring, and it took my mind off Mabel. Success. Then I heard Ikechi’s voice all the way from the back of the class, correcting Mabel. “Argon. A-R-G-O-N.” What was Ikechi doing at the back of the class? Why was he paying any mind to Mabel? Mabel was me, but fairer, richer, and taller, but me. Ikechi never talks to the likes of us. It was sarcasm. He was getting better at being mean.

But it wasn’t sarcasm. Ikechi went ahead to shout at the class for laughing at Mabel. Somehow, my name got mixed into his public reprimand. The chemistry teacher was beside herself. She must have wondered what had gotten into him. Ikechi, whose notoriety as the school’s biggest playa was concerned over puny Mabel and me? I stood to have a better look. He was at the back, of the class, and I still couldn’t see him. The chemistry teacher then called him to the front of the class, requesting apology for interrupting her lecture. Seemed she’d just gotten over the dazzle. Then Ikechi wheeled to the front.

His smile, his set jaw line, his tiny eyes, his perfect conditioned hair, his flawless skin tone, fine boy no pimples, his intricately ironed school uniform, his silver-plated wristwatch, his muscular arms, swinging as he walk….

…his muscular arms, pushing the top of the wheels on his wheel chair as he wheeled to the front of the class. Wheeled to the front of the class. When did Ikechi break his legs? Since when did he start using a wheelchair?

As if he knew the question was at the tip of my tongue, the moment he stepped, sorry wheeled – gotta get used to that – to the front of the class, he answered by telling the tale of Ikechi’s 10 Days Before the Start of Senior Secondary.

I’ll paraphrase these, but leave them in quotes for effect:

Day 10 before the start of senior secondary: “I, Ikechi, was riding my bicycle around our neighbourhood and then got a phone call that my girlfriend, I mean, friend that is a girl, was seen in another man’s Camaro. There was no time to borrow my mum’s RX 350, so I disobeyed my mother and rode to save my friend – girl – from the guy. I’m a perfect cyclist, but seeing her kiss this old fart gave me a stop, and in extension, lured me to an oncoming lorry. I thought I died.”

Day 9 before the start of senior secondary school: “I, Ikechi, found myself awake in a hospital. There were drips and stuff, and I couldn’t move. I cried.”

Day 8: “I, Ikechi, did nothing else but cry.”

Days 7 to 1: “I, Ikechi, … still crying.”

It all sounded like a sordid mixture of an American Kindergarten ego-driven show and tell and the saddest story I’d ever heard. The toughest of them all, Ikechi – whose name is Igbo for The Strength of God – was before me, weak and crushed, and shedding tears. I wanted to help him, give him something to soothe his pain. He would never walk again, that is a worse fate than, well, than the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I didn’t know when I had begun walking towards him. It was like superconduction—perfect magnetism, and right before I reached him, an encore of my Junior WAEC experience happened, but not to me this time. It was meant for Ikechi, the one who had initiated it on me, and it was hurled towards him by his friends. This is where I remember one of my mom’s quotations from the bible, he who kills by the sword shall die by the sword. It was just cruel that the dying had to come from his compadres.

That day started for me the strangest journey of life any girl—especially socially inept ones like me—could wish for. When I found myself wheeling Ikechi into his mother’s RX 350 – he wasn’t lying about that – and introducing myself to his mom, and explaining why none of his friends were offering help—the explanation, in case you don’t know, is that Ikechi hadn’t any friend, no true one at least, and I guess this is why he let me wipe his snort, tie up his shoes, pack up his uneaten lunch, take his notes, and attempt to make him laugh all the time—I wondered what it all meant. Ikechi was a catch, any girl with an eye in that school could see it, but since his accident, it seemed only I could, and it felt like life had opened up a large window for me to jump through and claim the house bearing the window. But I wasn’t sure of anything, so, I altered the story of that day a little bit. “Mrs. Opara, Ikechi’s friends had a mandatory assignment the principal told them to do, so they forced me into taking him to you.” His mother looked relieved, especially at the mention of the word ‘forced’. “I should get back now.” “You do that,” she replied, and before the door closed shut, I swear I heard Ikechi use that same voice he used on the class on his mom, “That was uncalled for, Mother. You were rude.” My lips stretched cheek to cheek and my stomach tickled.

One thing I learnt about Ikechi’s life is that people are slow. Honestly. Okay, well, he had gone through a very traumatic experience over something so trivial it is as laughable as it is horrifying, true. But come on, it took a well-calculated, measured, experimentally-biased-though-ridiculously-favourable set of well-thought psychological procedures over the entire school year to get Ikechi to have his first, sincere, heartfelt laughter. Ikechi was crushed throughout SS1, no matter what I tried, until he laughed. He laughed at the silliest thing. You see, I know you can tell—I hope you can tell—at least by my narrative tone and by the names of the characters and settings used in this tale, that Ikechi, myself, Mabel, and the Chemistry teacher all converge in the most ajebo school you may imagine in Nigeria. There is not one kpako bone in any of us. We no wèrè at all. That said, you shouldn’t find it ridiculous when I tell you that at SS1, we all had read volumes, as school projects and reading assignments, from the following authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, Gustave Flaubert, Anne Bronte, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, William Golding, Hans Christian Andersen, H.G. Wells, Lewis Carrol, J.R.R. Tolkien, even Homer and Aesop. Notice how not even one single African writer is there? They didn’t even allow us the courtesy of Alexandre Duma, at least he was black. I’ve gone off-track. The silly thing that made Ikechi laugh was the most infamous question from Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “why is the raven like a writing desk?”

He had answered it. He said, “because you can imagine it. And when you do, it becomes true for you. Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not in the world? Why does a crippled boy have to be sad? He doesn’t. He may laugh.” And so he did.

The deepness of that reply left me on my toes. That was the kind of thing I’d say, perhaps not as deep, but certainly as queer. I had begun rubbing off on him. True. At entry into SS2, he had transformed into the male version of me— no celebratory wristwatches, no obligatory unfolding of the shirt collar or sagging of the trousers or wearing of the ankle socks just to piss class teachers off and gain unnecessary, oft-unrequited attention, no posse, not one, ‘cept me. Someone had thrown a snide sneer from a distance once asking him what garbage can he got his new girlfriend from. Don’t take a genius to know I was the garbage girlfriend.

The comments from classmates and strangers alike grew and grew until it became uncontrollable. We didn’t know how..
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