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Episode 1


“… You’re beginning to add weight, you know?”


At this, I cringed inwardly; “There she goes again” I thought to myself and pretended not to hear what my mum had just said. This was supposed to be a happy Sunday; couldn’t there be a respite from this continuous shredding of my spirit and unpleasantness?

“Mummy please don’t start now” My younger sister, Sweet said; she and her husband had come with their 6month old baby (Anita) for the Sunday early dinner which is a weekly ritual. She didn’t like situations like this especially with her husband present.

“Don’t start what, tell me? Honestly your sister has become a great disappointment to me and your father. Take our lane for example: How many girls her age are not married? Let’s say they misbehaved, at least, they have kids to show for their sluttish behaviour”



“Mum!” Sweet screeched;

“Don’t ‘mum’ me, I’m sick of seeing your sister’s face. What has she done without getting in to a situation which your father and I have had to wade in and pull her out before she drowned both herself and us?”

Several emotions had begun to brew inside of me, ranging from shame, sadness, melancholy, frustration and then anger. I have never been one to trade insults with my parents; wasn’t the way we were brought up. The appetite I had worked up had all but disappeared. I looked to my dad to put a rein on mother but the way he kept quiet showed he was in support of the way she was slicing me up with no regard for my dignity in front of my sister’s husband Kola and our family friend, Uncle Jay. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I opened my mouth and began to speak:

Mummy, Daddy, tell me where I went wrong; I’ve always listened to you, obeyed you, walked the steps you insisted I take. I gave up my love for Engineering and instead went in for Medicine; when my colleagues and friends started getting married, it was you daddy who stopped me from attending weddings, which according to you, ‘they’d distract me’ and so I listened to you. I drove my suitors away in the name of completing my studies and specializing; why do you hate me this much? Why can’t you let me feel safe and happy being a part of this family? Look at Sweet; you allowed her get married while still in school and not only that, she studied English Literature, her first love without any objections from you; where exactly have I gone wrong?”



Despite the outburst, it wasn’t enough, I could barely keep it in, my chest heaved; I almost burst in to tears but didn’t want to give my mum that satisfaction. Uncle Jay lowered his eyes in embarrassment. At that time, I didn’t even care what anyone thought and to hell with dinner!

Daddy cleared his throat and declared that we pray for the meal before us, whether out of a desperate attempt at humour or relish that the words mum had uttered had reduced me to a bag of tumbled emotions, he cynically smiled and asked what all the ‘noise’ was for while everyone else tried to settle into a semblance of normalcy.

I looked at him in astonishment; all this had happened in his presence and he wasn’t even bothered, like I didn’t even exist. My heart shattered to pieces. I mean, this was too much! Just too much for even me to bear.
“This isn’t over!”

I blurted out angrily.

“You can’t keep doing this to me, I’m also a member of this family, look at me mummy, daddy, tell me what it is that

Read full episode 1..….
https://ugobestiky.com/unforgiven-invasion

EPISODE 10

As I stood in line, waiting for my turn, I heard someone yell:



“E-N-I-T-A-N!”

Without turning around, I had a very good idea who the name yeller was.

Tina.



She was the only girl in my class who lived in the same neighborhood, about three streets from mine.

Now, Tina was not my friend by any means. In fact, I made a conscious effort to avoid her. My reluctance to talk to her and my general body language should have made it clear to anyone with eyes that befriending Tina was not on my to-do list.

Either Tina had eyes and used them for decoration, or else she deliberately turned a blind eye to all my efforts to discourage her from being friendly towards me because she refused to let me be. She constantly thrust herself into my social circle, and it just baffled me.

Without leaving the queue, to avoid losing my place, I poked my head out of the line and towards the direction of the voice. The person I saw standing about five people behind me confirmed to my eyes what my ears had heard: tall, plain faced with bright, twinkling eyes.



It was indeed Tina, waving enthusiastically at me, as if we were long lost friends.

What happened next was not a figment of my imagination. In fact, it is best narrated in stages.

Stage One was initiated when I made eye contact with Tina. Instead of speaking audibly, Tina held her tongue and decided that it would be best to proceed with non-verbal cues. So, she began to gesticulate wildly, letting her hands do all the talking for her.



The puzzled look on my face was an outward display of the confusing questions that Tina’s actions had triggered in my head. If there was anyone who did not know the meaning of the words, “shy,” “quiet,” or “timid,” it was Tina. So why on earth was she motioning to me like this? Stage Two provided the answer to this very question.

Stage Two commenced with Tina pointing at me, and then later, she switched it up and began pointing at herself and mouthing words that apparently only she understood. After doing this back-and-forth pointing about four times, a miracle happened: the power of speech returned to Tina and she shouted from where she stood.

“You said? I should come abi? Okay, I’m coming!”

As I looked in utter confusion, wondering if perhaps my shadow had just carried on a conversation with Tina without my knowledge, it suddenly dawned on me that Stage Three was already under way.



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Stage Three saw Tina walking over briskly to where I stood, clutching a basket with a plastic bowl with a metal handle and lid similar to the one I was holding. I concluded that she had come to grind something. Whether it was pepper or beans, was still a mystery. I did not have to wonder long and in fact, did not have to say anything at all. Tina did the talking for both of us with enviable ease.

“Ah! Enitan! Babe, you just jabborred me that time. It’s not fair o!” she started, rolling her eyes.

I recalled the incident she was complaining about because it had taken place the day before. We were both standing at the bus-top, and she had been talking my ear off about a party she had attended. We were supposed to take the same bus, but I could not endure the thought of sitting through a bus ride with Tina for company, talking about things that did not interest me.

So, the moment a Danfo bus pulled close and I heard the conductor shout the name of our destination, coupled with “One Chance!” I leapt onto the bus with all the strength I could gather and gratefully sank into the last available seat, even though it was so close to the conductor’s armpit, I could count the tangled hairs if he would let me.



Tina was left at the bus-stop, standing there, flabbergasted.

I could tell she had neither forgotten the incident nor forgiven me, but I didn’t care. If I had not left when I did, I would never have made it back home in time to meet Tokunbo’s father and receive his letter.

Even though that meeting had left me with the burden of delivering a letter, there was also a positive effect: I had met Tokunbo’s father who had somehow humanized Tokunbo in my eyes.

Tina did not even wait for me to say anything, but immediately continued at neck breaking speed.

“But I forgive you sha!”



Ah! Forgiveness! Sweet forgiveness from Tina! I was indeed very grateful. So grateful in fact that the expression of aloofness that I wore on my face pre-forgiveness still remained post-forgiveness.

But as I have already mentioned, Tina had a knack for ignoring my facial expressions and proceeded guided by her own internal compass.

Opening her mouth and pouring out unsolicited information into my ears, Tina explained.

“See ehn, my mother just woke up this morning and said, ‘It’s akara and pap we’re going to eat.’ I don’t even know what her problem is. Who even likes akara sef? With pap again? Anyway sha, I told her, ‘Mummy, you know I don’t like akara. Moi-moi is better and we can eat it for our night food.’ Thank God she saw eye-to-eye with me. That’s how we ate yam and egg this morning and she said we will eat moi-moi and garri this night. And you know, Helen that my stupid sister, just used corner-corner to say she’s going to her friend’s house. Next thing, my mother now said, ‘Ehen, Tina. It’s you that will go and grind this beans for me.’ Can you imagine? And I’m the older one,” she finally concluded with a... CONTINUE READING: https://ugobestiky.com/falling-in-love-with-my-best-friend-10/

EPISODE 9


But that evening, the call was not for Mr. Ekanem. The breezy female voice on the other end made this clear.



Instead, the phone call was for Mr. Ladoja, and it was from, of all people, Mrs. Williams, our neighbor.

The old handset my father kept in the parlor lacked speakerphone capabilities, so we were forced to listen to the one-sided conversation between Mrs. Williams and my father, hoping that he would fill in the missing details later.

By the time he dropped the receiver about five minutes later, it was clear that my father’s task at the dining table had exponentially increased beyond simply downloading the details of his discussion with Mrs. Williams.



Judging from the look of growing irritation on my mother’s face the minute she heard the name of the caller from Yemi who had initially answered the phone, my father knew that upon his return to the dinner table, his next words had to be uttered with care.

“And what did she want?” said my mother, who had cleared her plate of amala, gbegiri and ewedu with red beef stew, and had started licking the remnants of her meal which clung to each finger, one by one. The rest of us – Yemi and I really – kept quiet and watched.

“Nothing my dear,” said my father, downing the glass of cold water in front of him with such speed that I wondered if he would not get a brain freeze there and then.

Either his brain did not freeze or else it thawed pretty quickly because when my mother re-phrased and re-fired her question by asking “So why did she call?” my father responded with:



“The boy is coming home this weekend, Asake. She said I should greet you.”

He said all this without grabbing his head with both hands and grimacing, the way people do when they experience early stage brain freeze.

“Which boy?” my mother asked, washing her hand in the basin of water I had brought at her request. After wiping her mouth clean and dipping her hand in water for the last time, she told Yemi to go and bring her a toothpick.



Once he had disappeared into the kitchen to run this errand, my father said:

“Asake, Iya Tokunbo is called ‘Iya Tokunbo’ for a reason. Tokunbo is her son, and you know that’s the boy I am referring to.”

“Yes, we all know that,” said my mother, leaning back and wielding the toothpick between her teeth like a pro. “But what did she really want?”

At this point, she put her quest to dislodge stray shreds of meat from between her teeth on pause, and began to suck her teeth instead. Seeing that it was not as effective as the toothpick, she resumed picking her teeth with renewed gusto.



My father who watched her with tired eyes said:

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“Yes, I know. You know I’m mentoring this boy. She wants me to start when he gets back.”

My mother didn’t say a word. She simply got up from the table and asked me to join her in the kitchen to cut some pawpaw for dessert.

The look of bewilderment on my father’s face was priceless.



Even without saying a word, I knew what he was thinking. His philosophy was that if a person was angry, it was better for that anger to find expression in spoken words. That way, you could tell what was in that person’s heart, instead of keeping everything bottled inside. But when a person was angry and said nothing, in his words:

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Silent volcanoes, he called them.

But my mother did not fall into this category. She would speak out. Just not then.

I could tell that my father was considering pursuing the matter to try to get her to speak out, but judging from his silence, he thought better of it.



As we sat down to feast on orange slices of pawpaw, it was a wonder that my mother did not erupt when she heard my father’s last sentence on Tokunbo. If there was anything I knew about my mother, it was that her silence was more fearsome that her verbal outbursts.

“They’ll sort themselves out,” I reasoned as I retreated to my room to devour the Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon novels I had borrowed from a classmate, exclusively for the post-exam, pre-report card period.

But the moment I stepped into my room, the same old question came back to haunt me:

How would I deliver this letter to Tokunbo?



Now that I knew that Tokunbo would be coming home that weekend, it was clear to me that I could not postpone this event any further. Surely, I couldn’t hold onto this letter for a year without telling him.

Should I send Yemi?

No, that wouldn’t work. The possibility of Yemi ignoring my strict instructions and handing the letter to the wrong person was very high because he only fully obeyed my parents. To me, he gave “occasional obedience” almost out of pity.

The fear of Yemi giving the letter to the meyguard, who would probably read it and maybe even burn it, deterred me from turning him into an emissary.

I had to find another way to get this letter into Tokunbo’s hands.

By the end of the day, I had come to one conclusion, the one I dreaded and sincerely did not look forward to: I would have to deliver the letter directly to Tokunbo, and it had to be that weekend.

The thought of postponing it appealed to me somewhat, but my desire to procrastinate was overridden by my desire to put this episode behind me. So, I decided that come Sunday afternoon, Tokunbo would get his letter.



On Saturday morning, as I went to buy a loaf of bread from Iya Kafilat’s shop, I was startled to see the gate of the Williams’ residence flung wide open. As I walked by, I saw a car parked behind one of the other two cars in the... CONTINUE READING: https://ugobestiky.com/falling-in-love-with-my-best-friend-9/

EPISODE 8

There were no ink stains on Mr. Williams’ person. However, he held that brown envelope so delicately that it seemed like it was really his own heart that was wrapped in paper, tucked away in that envelope.

“You know Tokunbo, don’t you? Tokunbo Williams?” he said, although it sounded less like a question and more like the affirmation of a fact.

“Yes, sir. I do,” I replied. I should have added that I knew Tokunbo’s face and not his person but that would have been irrelevant.

“Can you please give this to him for me? It’s very important,” he said, pushing the envelope towards me.

I stood there, considering his offer, not wanting to get mixed up in what appeared to be a messy family affair. But the sorry state of this man moved me and against my better judgment, I agreed to help him.

As I stretched out my hand to collect the envelope from him, he withdrew his hand and said in a very serious tone:

“Please, this is very important. See to it that only Tokunbo gets it. No one else.”

“But sir,” I protested, “Tokunbo is not back from school. Can’t I just give it to your daughter, Yele, instead?”

He laughed a dry laugh and then said to me:

“So you too think she’s my daughter, abi? No way! Yele is not my daughter, though a lovely girl like that would make any father proud.”

I was confused.

Yele and Tokunbo had different fathers?

Unbelievable!

So, Yele is not Mr. Williams’ daughter? Is she even Tokunbo’s biological sister? Are they even related?

One thing was certain: the person who knew the answers to these questions was Mrs. Williams.

“Oh, I didn’t know, sir,” I said apologetically. “I just assumed–”

“That’s okay. Most people do. But don’t give this letter to Yele. Only Tokunbo.”

“But, sir–”

“Please promise me you’ll do it,” he said, grabbing my shoulders. For a moment, he had this wild look in his eyes that utterly terrified me. There was no way I could refuse him.

I nodded vigorously and that was when he released me.

A smile softened his haggard features and for a moment, I saw Tokunbo as a child in his face. I recalled the ball incident and how Tokunbo had told me that his father had traveled.

Was he back for good?

As he turned to leave, he whipped around suddenly and said:

“By the way, what’s your name?”

“Enitan, sir,” I replied.

“What a lovely name! If I had a daughter, I would name her Enitan,” he said, sealing the compliment with a smile.

As he turned to walk away, I called out after him:

“Sir, what if I can’t give it to Tokunbo?”

“Then, you’re free of your promise. I trust you to keep your word.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, as he turned and left.

As he disappeared down the street, I gazed at the letter in my hand. In the man’s firm, impish handwriting were written two words:

For Tokunbo

And as I looked at it, the burden of the task ahead weighed me down. I had to deliver this letter, which contained Lord-knows-what to a boy I had barely spoken to, from his estranged father.

What on earth had I gotten myself into?

There was no doubt in my mind that two people existed on..... CONTINUE READING: https://ugobestiky.com/falling-in-love-with-my-best-friend-8/