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However, instead of her tall, bony presence, his Housemaster and some junior boys had shown up with an order. She wanted him present at Principal Ifeanyi's office, dead or alive.

And so, they carried him. The same way they'd lifted him from that quadrangle. Like a corpse but without the protection of a comfortable coffin.

At the office, they placed him in a chair.

By then, his surroundings had begun floating in and out of his consciousness.

His mother's chest being the only concrete thing creeping through the edges of his vision.

If he could reach it before the rank darkness claimed him, his chance at survival could step up several notches.

So, he pushed forward even though his body had become a pain conservatory.

Straining. Reaching. So close. Nearly there.

Then, her words gored through.

“Yes, Principal, I know they beat him. But maybe…maybe it was better this way. Now, he will never repeat the nonsense again. His wounds will heal, and his brain will repair. I should even—”

He, thankfully, didn't get to hear the remaining words.

Timi's face was buried in that same chest now. Fleshy now bony. Soft now hard. He stayed rigid where he knelt by her hospital bed in the private ward Agu had apparently paid for, waiting for their tears to end.

When sobs became sniffles, he rose to his feet. Lara pushed a chair close, and he settled into it. There was a moment of awkward silence, before he chose the most comfortable topic.

“What are the doctors saying?”

“CAD. Coronary Artery Disease,” Tola, his eldest sister said while blowing her nose into a handkerchief.

“We didn't detect it on time. She’s been managing it, until it started getting worse recently. Her heart rate is too slow, drugs aren’t helping anymore, and because of her age, the doctors are already thinking the worst.

Timi stared at the emaciated figure on the bed, connected to syringes and drips, and pity stirred faintly. After barging through life like a tornado, destroying everything on her path, this was how she finally ended.

He turned to Tola–who had become his mother with her tall, slim body, bony shoulders, puffy netty blouse and a misshapen skirt, moon-rimmed glasses perched on an aquiline nose–and said as politely as the words allowed.

“So, why did you want to see me? You want money?”

Her eyes widened. “Eyi.”

“Tola,” Ma called from the bed. “We agreed not to call him that.”

Tola moved towards her. “I seriously don't understand why we shouldn't. He's your son, our brother. He can give himself a long list of names, but the fact won't change. Should he have abandoned us because he was mad at you?”

“He didn't know better,” Ma said. “We didn't know any better either. And now we know, we have to find a way to be a family again, so I can rest in peace.”

“Ma, Lara and I are allowed to be mad at him, okay?

He couldn't have known better as a boy, but didn't he become a man?

He left us, for thirteen years. And then, we see him on TV, calling that…

doctor his one and true father. Did Pa hurt him too?

There's a difference between being genuinely hurt and just being ashamed of us. Even Agu knew how to treat fam—”

“Don't bring up that man's name here,” Ma hissed.

“Oh, for God's sake, let it go, Ma. Do you think any of us would have survived without him? We'd have been dead just as Eyi wanted.”

“Have you forgotten what he said he'll do to me? What sick person would say that to another human being?”

“What sick person would accept a sick person's money…”

The words grew distorted, as the faces arguing at the hospital bed glitched.

Normal, ugly, contorted, fighting for control.

A familiar heaviness began growing in Timi's chest, pressing and burning up his lungs.

He could never escape. No matter how far he ran, he would always end up here. His one true north.

He couldn't look away from their faces as they snarled at each other. Ugly and distorted now left fighting for the number one spot. He should stand, leave, but he couldn't move. He'd begun shrinking.

“Everybody, shut the fuck up!”

The voice reverberated through walls and beds and frail bodies, rescuing Timi in the last minute before he reverted to fifteen.

A mountainous figure sat at the edge of a seat, round fists curled on a gargantuan lap, wobbly mouth still open from a residual scream that had shaken the hospital floor.

“Have you both lost it? While you argued and pointed fingers, I went to him, and I brought him here. After thirteen years of not seeing my brother, how dare you try to take this one happiness away from us? ”

And Timi immediately latched on to her face. Drinking in her features like they were poison neutralizers. Faces could change, but he'd assumed in only one direction. Lara's face, which used to be grotesquely timid, glowed so differently as she dared them to utter one more word.

And the dawning realisation of the patheticness of his sickness equally glowed as bright as her face.

In his hunger for acceptance, he'd created monsters who didn't align with his perception of himself.

He'd known who he was all along. Then, hinged his worth on the approval of everyone but himself.

“Would you like to eat now?”

It took some time to realise the question was aimed at him.

He blinked up at the different face in front of him. “Huh?”

Lara smiled. “I made your favourite. Pounded yam and Egusi. You used to love it so much.”

He opened his mouth to tell her the last time he ate that was in Iya Fati's kitchen backyard, but he snapped it shut. What else had he loved but had convinced himself he hated because of the people he'd associated it with?

As she opened the neatly packed dishes on the stool she'd placed before him, she chuckled. “Every time you had to eat it; a novel must be present. Like reading added its own flavour. Do you still write?”

Timi risked a glance at the women at the bed. Their faces were normal again, with blushes of chagrin dotting their fair skin. They watched as Lara arranged the food and held out a washing bowl.

“Sorry,” she said, wincing. “The tap here is useless. I know you're a celebrity and all, but share a simple meal with your sister, ehn?”

Her smile expanded when he dipped his hands in, washed up and took a morsel.

For all her talkativeness, she allowed him eat in silence, and a calmness he hadn't felt since he decided to pay them a visit slowly settled over him like his cashmere blanket. Soft, warm, safe.

The food was good. Too good without the soured bite of his memories. Timi didn't exactly know what eating it without breaking out in hives signified, but it had to be something healing and freeing .

Tola and Ma behaved afterwards, taking turns to apologise. Then, they narrated how the years had been for them.

Tola had stopped working as a nurse when Ma fell sick, and she'd been managing the provision store. Lara was a bank manager, which surprised Timi.

She laughed at his expression. When did she start laughing so freely? “Don't look at this my size o. Your sister is not sitting on her butt and consuming everything that resembles food.”

Tola scoffed. “It's that your husband. He spoils you.

That ushered in a gazillion of new people they insisted Timi must know. Tola had a divorced husband and five kids. Lara had a husband and four kids. And they spent the next few hours, showing him hundreds of pictures with backstories attached to every single one.

And at some point, Timi began to think maybe, just maybe, his family could be larger than he'd imagined.

Then, Ma pulled up to rest her back against the hospital bed and asked. “What about you? Any wife?”

Timi, who had been smiling at his youngest nephew blowing raspberries, felt his cashmere blanket slowly lift.

He met her gaze. “No.”

“Why? You're thirty. You're not young anymore. And this your hair? Don't you think it's time you cut it?”

Lara must have seen something on his face because she warned. “Ma…”

“What? Can't a mother ask questions again?” A faux mildness dripping from her words.

They all must have heard and seen. The battle he'd fought for months. Like the one she'd fought those long years. The battle that had torn them apart.

“I'm not…” he cleared his throat. “I'm not married.”

“Tell us about your first movie.” Tola was the one who saved him this time. “It was so good. How did you learn to act?”

He clung to the rope she threw him. “I don't know about that one. The ones after acting school were bett— ”

“The news says you have so many women,” Ma cut in. “Can't you pick one and start your own family so you can share pictures too?”

The room grew quiet.

“If you're having trouble making a choice, I can contact the Prophet so he can pray for you. You remember him, don't you? He's in Lagos now. Very close to you. He doesn't know you're Eyi, and I'm sure he'll be pleased to see how well you've turned out. You can even...”

Something within him loosened. As though her words had barged into that dark, dead place and blown up the steel door he'd locked himself in.

The him before his hell. The him during his hell. The him after his hell.

Bits of him he'd lived as though they were his whole.

He was the one beaten, and still the same one who had beaten back.

He was the one who had forgotten how to laugh, and the same one whose laughter rang out in deafening decibels.

He was the living corpse, and still the one who had lived the shit out of life.

He was the one who hid behind monster faces to cope with rejection, and still the one who faced millions of faces and commanded their attention.

He was the one who had regretted loving a boy, and still the one who happily loved a man.

When the words came, they gave him a satisfaction he'd never experienced and placed his feet for the first time on solid ground.