Page 28 of The Death of Vivek Oji

He pushed deeper, one glorious inch at a time, and I groaned. “I know,” he said, his voice thick. “Just take this for now.”

—

Iknow what they say about men who allow other men to penetrate them. Ugly things; ugly words. Calling them women, as if that’s supposed to be ugly, too.

I’d heard it since secondary school, and I knew what that night was supposed to make me. Less than a man—something disgusting, something weak and shameful. But if that pleasure was supposed to stop me from being a man, then fine. They could have it. I’d take the blinding light of his touch, the blessed peace of having him so close, and I would stop being a man.

I was never one to begin with, anyway.

Fifteen

Juju knew nothing about her half brother until she saw him with her own two eyes.

She’d been all the way over by the post office, which was two buses away from home and heavily crowded thanks to the fish market across the road. Maja had warned Juju never to take an okada there—people drove so recklessly, it wasn’t safe—so when Juju got off the bus, she walked the rest of the way to the post office, dodging speeding motorbikes and tiptoeing along the edge of rank gutters. The air smelled like dead seawater.

Juju was on her way to swap out some of her books and see if she could find something for Elizabeth at the open-air secondhand-book market that happened every Saturday at the post office. “Check if they have any Pacesetters,” Elizabeth had said. She and Juju were in a new relationship, hiding it from all their parents, and Juju had been feeling guilty about not being present enough. She was fairly sure that her father was having an affair and that her parents weren’t telling her about it, whichdidn’t make sense because the secret was too big, too loud. Her mother was always whispering on the phone, then shouting at her father, when they thought Juju was asleep. Her father’s voice would scorch through the night and Juju would hear the familiar thuds of his hands hitting her mother. She was surprised when he actually left—it looked too much like him letting her mother win, and Juju knew him better than that—but she was glad he was gone, glad that the air in their house was calm and they could move a bit more freely. But between her new relationship and what was happening with Vivek, Juju had been distracted. This was her first time dating a girl, and it was easier, in some ways, to focus on other things rather than on Elizabeth and the terrifying feelings Juju had about her. Still, she wanted to get Elizabeth the books. She could at least do that one as her girlfriend.

Juju was looking through the five Pacesetters she’d managed to find, feeling victorious, when she glanced up and saw her father. She fumbled and dropped one of the books, pages fluttering in panic. Charles was standing next to a short woman with wide hips and an auburn weave-on. He was holding the hand of a young boy, maybe five or six. The child resembled Charles so strongly that Juju immediately knew what she was looking at: her father’s other family. She stepped back, merging into the people around her, disappearing. He was supposed to be in Onitsha, she thought. For business. Yet here he was, in their own town, with this woman and this little boy.

Her first thought was to rush home and tell her mother. She’d already started pushing through the crowd, toward thebus stop, when a sick feeling hit her stomach: her mother already knew. No wonder he’d left. He had a whole other family to go home to, and he didn’t even have to leave town to reach them. Juju glanced back at her father and saw the woman smiling up at him, her teeth shining like a Colgate advertisement. That gleaming joy made Juju want to take a stone and smash it into the woman’s face.

Just the other day she’d pressed herself against the bathroom door and watched her mother cry soundlessly while pulling out a discolored molar from her own mouth with a pair of small pliers. Maja’s jaw had been swollen for a while—she’d told Juju it was from an infection, which was true, but it was also from a fight with Charles. She hid the bruising with makeup.

“Mama, why don’t you go and see a dentist?” Juju had asked, wincing as she watched the tooth clatter into the sink.

Her mother gargled with peroxide, spitting a swirl of foam and blood. “You have to travel to see a good dentist. Sometimes even overseas.”

“So why don’t you travel?”

Maja’s eyes glittered with the anger she usually hid from her daughter. “Why don’t you ask your father? Tell him all my teeth are rotting in my head!” She pushed past Juju and slammed her bedroom door, leaving her daughter wavering behind her.

Now, looking at her father in the market, Juju felt a wave of revulsion so strong it made her want to bend over the gutter and vomit everything she’d eaten that day. She wanted to killhim; maybe she would, if he ever came back home. Poison his soup or something. It couldn’t be that hard, and no one could tell her he didn’t deserve it, not with her mother’s broken heart, not with her bloody tooth left in the sink.

Juju went home and threw the books in a corner of her room, then climbed into bed and listened to her pulse as it galloped through her. She was too angry to cry, too young to save her mother and take her away from this country and the man who had trapped her here. She covered her face with a pillow and screamed into it, and that was when the sobbing started, large and loud, stopping only when she had cried herself into an exhausted sleep.

—

Juju woke up to a faint knocking from downstairs, the sound winding up the stairs in an insistent thread. She groaned and rolled out of bed, then went down to open the door. Vivek was standing outside in jeans and a green T-shirt with butterflies scattered over the front. The wordPhilippineswas embroidered in cursive underneath. Juju recognized the shirt—her mother had passed it over to Vivek after her father refused to wear it. (“We’re in Nigeria,” he’d said. “No one is interested in your country.”)

Vivek walked past Juju into the house. Someone had plaited his hair for him and it hung like a snake between his shoulder blades. “Were you sleeping?” he asked. “It’s still afternoon.”

Juju closed the door behind him. “I took a nap.” Her head felt stuffed and heavy. Vivek jogged up the stairs to herroom and Juju followed, watching as he spun and landed on her bed.

“Wow,” she said, “you really have energy today.”

He eyed her up and down. “Unlike some of us,” he retorted. “What’s disturbing you?”

Juju shook her head. The pain was still too personal, the information too new. Juju wanted to hold it, cup it in her hands a while longer before she uncurled her fingers to expose it to others. She sat on the bed next to Vivek, then flopped back, staring at the ceiling. “Do you think I’m a bad girlfriend?” she asked.

Vivek turned to her, lying on his side and propping up his head with one hand. “To Elizabeth? Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know.” Juju twisted the end of one of her braids between her fingers. “I don’t know if I’m doing it right.” She hadn’t planned any of this; she hadn’t grown up with a crush on Elizabeth, not the way Osita had. Juju had been reluctant to make friends with the Nigerwives’ children, because she didn’t believe in ready-made communities—you couldn’t just throw people together and expect them to become a real support system simply because they had one or two things in common. Their mothers might have been able to do it, but that’s because they were a proper organization. It didn’t mean their children had to follow suit.

But then Vivek came home, and Somto and Olunne showed up for him, and when they brought him to Juju’s house she’d fallen for him, in a way—not like she fell for Elizabeth later, butshe and Vivek had clicked. They fit into each other’s lonely worlds. Everyone could see it; even Somto and Olunne didn’t mind seeing him and Juju grow close so quickly, maybe because as sisters they’d always known what it was like to have a best friend. For Juju it was new; for Vivek, she thought the friendship might have taken some of the sting out of Osita’s absence. But now Osita was back, and now Juju had Elizabeth. She still couldn’t believe she had a girlfriend—hurtled into each other’s lives thanks to the Nigerwives, who apparently never grew tired of shoving their children at one another.

It wasn’t as if Maja and Ruby had meant for their daughters to fall in love, or even knew anything about it. All they’d done was start a jam-making experiment. They had a whole list of jams they were going to make: guava, mango, pawpaw jam. Maybe even some marmalade. Maja had dragged Juju into it, buying a bag of large green guavas—the kind Juju liked, crunchy and white on the inside. But Ruby suggested it might be better to make it with the other kind of guavas, the small, soft ones with pink or yellow insides, so Maja had sent Juju to Ruby’s house to collect a bag of them. “We’ll try it both ways and see which one works better.”

Juju had rolled her eyes, but she loved her mother and the jam experiment was fun, so she went. That was the day she met Elizabeth again, and the thing Juju always remembered about it, that day, was the heat. How it pressed down through the air, wet and insistent, how it forced its way past skin until it felt like even your bones were hot. Juju caught a bus that was almost full, and sat on the conductor’s fold-out seat, the backs of herthighs sticking to the torn vinyl seat cover. The conductor was squatting by the open door, holding on to the frame of the bus as it sputtered down the road. Juju leaned away from the woman next to her, who stank of stockfish and sweat. The heat was cooking the stench, deepening it till it was overpowering, almost choking. By the time Juju reached Aunty Ruby’s house, she was fanning out the hem of her T-shirt to try and get a breeze against her skin. Aunty Ruby’s gate wasn’t locked, so Juju walked into the compound and straight to the back door. It was open, but the mosquito-net door was closed and latched.