Truly, the first time I saw Jidenna in our first year, I swear, I did not blink my eyes, afraid of losing his image to the perpetual darkness of shut eyes. Even though he was unrepentantly handsome, I failed to see him in the light of a snob.

Today, we are in our third year in the university. The sun is scorching the old man trimming the lawn in front of our department building, but somehow it makes Jidenna glow. His lips are the red of a blister. His skin is caramel; mine is waging a lost war against acne and keloids, and it cannot withstand all that naked sun. Albino. Jidenna is sitting under the awning at the department building. I am under the plumeria tree with my best friend Oluchi. The tree borders the lawn. She has been complaining about the morning lecture, but my attention spins around Jidenna. I want to be there with him.

“Ejike,” Oluchi nudges my forearm. “You remember the paper I didn’t finish last exam?”

She has been dismissed from the hall on account of cheating many times. First, it was the Anatomy paper. Then, Biochemistry. I try to remember which one, and when I finally do, I nod.

“I passed!” She grins. “B plus.”

“What did you do? Whom did you meet?” These questions tumble out of my mouth, and I am sure she can feel them pelting her body like guilt.

A small wind stirs the tree, leaves raining down. She picks one, then says, in Pidgin, “Well, you know as e dey be.” Nothing else. Though the undercurrent in her voice says more. Like, “Well, we are friends, but I do not trust you to explain in detail.”

In any case, I know the hidden meaning of as e dey be. And, we know the ways to cloak our malpractices with codenames: “Microchip” for cheat papers, “Sharp!” though polysemous, principally means “Committing the act unnoticed.” “Sharp move!” Jidenna had hailed me when I slid him the microchip last exam. Before the examiner accosted him, he masticated and swallowed it. To pay for grades, we, the older students, dub it “Runs,” but the freshers still call it “Sorting.” We do these things because, well, that’s how “e dey be.”

Besides, there are things I have not told her. That it was a friend of my father’s friend that helped secure my admission into this university. “Doctors are the new guinea fowl eggs,” my father preached hysterically to me, only repeating what the agent had said to him. “I did what I had to do,” he resigned.

Sometimes, I wonder if Oluchi is also doing what she has to do, and if Jidenna is, too. He plays with his hair every so often, looking like a golden egg you would polish religiously and shelve with a kiss to sparkle under the morning sun.

Even though Oluchi “sorted”, she does not have that sort of body to pay in kind. You would describe her in monosyllables: short. Lean, no, petite, as she put it. And when you reach her mouth, you would wax poetic: lips that amassed flesh at the expense of her body. With it, she spews gossip as sporadically as a triggered AK-47.

***

Some girl is sitting with Jidenna now. I cannot really make out her face. Oluchi’s chattering is impinging my focus. So I tune her voice out and struggle to catch whatever joke Jidenna is telling the girl. Occasionally, she giggles, cupping her mouth coyly. I feel queasy. All of a sudden I am standing up, and when I reach them, I decide, I will tug at her hair and make her teeth crack even harder than Jidenna’s jokes could.

“Isn’t she beautiful,” Oluchi says, looking up at me.

“W-who?” I glare at Oluchi.

“Of course, Nonso.”

True to form, Oluchi leaps to run me down the chronicles of Nonso, but I hold my hand up. “Stop!”

She sucks her teeth, “Well, I noticed how you’ve been looking over there.”

“What do you mean?” My voice disappoints me, quivering in fear of exposure. Before Oluchi says anything else, I blurt out that, yes, I like Nonso. That I cannot approach her for fear of rejection. Oluchi appears convinced. And so, I lie to hide my affection for Jidenna, a fellow boy.

“Finally, you have confessed,” confirms Oluchi. She cracks a joke about me making the Sign of the Cross beforehand. About me reciting “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” except that in place of “Father,” I will call her “Mother.” My Penance, she says, will be paying for her lunch at the sanitized restaurant on campus. And my Act of Contrition, she snickers, will be making a move on Nonso.

“How do you know I like her?” I ask.

She laughs indulgently then points to her eyes. “What are these?”

I play the student. “Eyes.”

There’s something about the way she is laughing that makes me laugh now. 

A gravelly voice joins our laughter. It’s the old man. His smile is tired. But before now, he was a man who possessed in himself the remnants of his youthfulness: ramrod-straight gait softened with a rich laughter. Chances are in his youth, he could have resembled a boy like Tunde, Oluchi’s former boyfriend. A boy with an ill-humored disposition, who blatantly told Oluchi—of course with a smile—that she could pine for all he cares. Oluchi brooded for days and burst into tears. It kept coming, the tears, and my shoulder was a soaked pillow of it. And when she called him over and over, begging, he blocked her number. In any case, she, eventually, became a shell of herself. A shell that this old man is crawling into now.

“Sir, is anything the matter?” Oluchi asks the question that has been pushing my tongue.

He plops down onto the bench, exhales profusely before telling us that Isioma, his daughter in the Humanities, is a victim of the recent school fee drive.

To this, we ask, “You have a daughter in this school?” His reply, after glancing up at the sad surprise on our faces, is affirmative. And she is not just a daughter, he says, but a student who could wither if not watered with knowledge.

While he is still saying all this, I cannot fight the urge to peek at Jidenna once more. Finally, he is sitting alone again. He digs out a drawing board from his bag, balances it flat on his lap. Soon, the pencils, eraser, and colors make their way out, now neatly stacked in a container beside him. He is looking in the direction of the plumeria tree. Something shifts in my chest. Will he draw me?

Once, he made a charcoal painting of the hematology lecturer. He delivered it in class, and so there was an abrupt break in between for the whole class to gush over it. How intricate the piece of art, he could as well varnish me with such false beauty.

“If our government deprives us of quality education,” the old man mutters, ruining my reverie, “who then shall the poor turn to?” We remain mute. But to our lecturers, it will be the same nihilistic response: “If you can’t afford this degree, go and learn a trade!”

He takes us far back to the old Nigeria, and all I could imagine instead was a world of a gray sun, because that’s what the black-and-white photos of my parents’ childhood suggest. Good old eighties.

Glancing at Jidenna, I feel thirsty as he pulls a bottle of water out of his bag. Twisting the bottle open, he guzzles its content, his Adam’s apple rippling, the sun shooting glints at the stray drops trickling down his muscled neck. For a moment, I imagine myself as the water bottle, gripped with those firm hands, kissed with those fiery lips.

As the old man continues to moan in Ogba, a language that endows his distress with a profound helplessness and a raw fierceness, I wish my father were him, a man who loves his family for the sake of it, not because it is what he has to do.

The last time we quarreled, he wielded a different kind of weapon, an awkward silence. He had returned home unexpectedly to the sight of our houseboy touching me. The silence ballooned, filling me with impatience. And so one morning, I spat out: “No wonder the recent statistics says only 10% of African parents truly understand their children!”

I had read it somewhere, parental negligence. Although the article was not racist, I did not mind being dramatic.

He was inserting his key into the ignition when I said this. He paused, rolled down the window, the expression on his face stoic. “I hope you make the 10%, Ejike,” he said.

I stood wounded. He knew in this part of the world, homosexuality is criminalized; and in the other half, adoption is controversial, and even though surrogacy is feasible, it’s outrageous. To escape his quiet hostility, I took a job washing bottles in a bottling plant down the street, where the manager watched on as expired drinks were re-embossed with a new date.

The old man coughs again. I offer him the water I am about to drink.

“Thank you, my son.”

I ignore the fact he just called me his son, what Dad has never done with pride. Had he been a graduate, he could have been skulking behind those air-conditioned offices like our bespectacled professors, who falsify their age to thwart retirement. Apparently, he knows no one who knows someone at the top.

***

The old man has no sooner left our company than the sun sinks gradually. It will not rain today. The radio presenter said so last night: “My beautiful country people,” she cheered,“sun go shine nyafu-nyafu tomorrow!”

Even if it rains today, I am unafraid Jidenna will leave the awning, because it is sturdy. Last semester, the previous one caved in on some students during a storm. No casualties, but for mild bruises and scratches.

“So when will you tell Nonso?” inquires Oluchi.

I palm my forehead in frustration, mildly annoyed. Like the night I allowed a nameless ashawo somewhere on campus to take me in her hands. Try as she might, I remained flaccid and livid that I could not get it up.

“I can give you Nonso’s number,” Oluchi teases. “Who knows, it could lead to tying the knot.”

I smack her head playfully.

“Speak the truth, don’t you like her?”

I allow a long silence to slide in. The truth is a friction against every construct of life we have invented. We must live to bury it.

I look at Jidenna wistfully.

Soon, he will pack his bag, board a shuttle bus and alight outside the campus. Then weaving through the traffic in the city, he will be nothing but an indistinguishable light in the blur of people, cars, and houses. Meanwhile, I will trek down to the dormitory cramped with scholars  and discover the poem Yusuf, the Hausa boy in literature, has tucked under my mattress. I will read it, as I did the mushy ones. He is far from home, like his love from my heart.

“What do you know about Yusuf?” I ask Oluchi, hoping to get a chronicle.

She grabs a packet of Wafers, tearing it open. She does this thing whenever she is strangely uninvested in a new gossip: bite, crunch, crunch. She is doing it now.

My phone tinkles with a text. I whip it out of my pocket.

“The evening class has been cancelled,” I inform Oluchi. Her face bears a small portion of the roar this announcement would have elicited in the classroom. Now, our joy is a private experience. It makes me relive that brief moment after the exam when Jidenna shook my hand in a manly way, said, “You be sharp guy o,” then sauntered away. Afterwards, my hand shivered rapidly. But after all these years, he only regards me the way a father rooster regards his chicks.

***

My heartbeat quickens haphazardly as I can no longer see Jidenna drawing under the awning. 

“Are you looking for Nonso?” Oluchi staggers to her feet, slings her bag on her shoulder. I follow suit. “She left a long while ago,” says Oluchi.

We hit the paved path snaking through the trimmed lawn to the department building. We are near the awning when Oluchi suddenly remembers she has to retrieve her calculator from Tunde.

“Tunde again?”

She sizes me up as if to say, What do you know? then skips to the Faculty of Engineering.

Finally, I am almost alone under the awning. An out-of-school hawker has picked up Jidenna’s water bottle. I corner him and snatch it from him. He curses me, scampering away. 

Now, as I run my fingers over the plastic water bottle, the sound a soft crinkle in my ear, I envision a whole new world where Jidenna likes me.

Should I keep it?

Even though I am indecisive, my fingers are not. They are slipping the bottle into my bag, the only piece of him that can truly be mine.

Author’s Biography

Chimezie Okoro, a medical laboratory scientist in training, is a Nigerian writer. He has works published or forthcoming in African Writer Magazine, Afrocritik, Afrihill Press, Akpata Magazine, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere. He divides his time between writing fiction and medical exams, but you can also find him on Instagram @okoro.cletus.5.