Sunny arrived back at home around 11am.
It was Saturday and her parents weren’t home. Ugonna was at his girlfriend’s house. But Chukwu was there sitting on the doorstep as if he’d known she was coming. He had his cell phone in his hands and it buzzed as Sunny walked up to him.
“You all right?” he asked, glancing at the text message he’d just received. He put the phone in his pocket and looked up at Sunny. He was wearing sweatpants, Adidas slippers, and a T-shirt. All clothes their aunt had sent from America, clothes that Chukwu only wore when he was trying to passive-aggressively impress.
“Yeah,” she said.
There was a long pause. Neither of them could speak their thoughts to the other and the cause for this was juju, not reluctance.
“Why are you home?” Sunny asked.
“Came to see Akunna. She’s coming over,” he said. “Of all the girls, she’s the coolest. Otherwise, I’d just ask her to come to the university to see me.”
Sunny smiled, sitting beside him. “Such a gentleman.”
They sat like that for a while. Shoulder to shoulder. Full of questions. But relieved. Relieved to be alive and well and home. When Akunna arrived, Sunny waved at her and got up and went inside.
In her room, Sunny threw her purse on the floor, shut and locked the door, and lay on her bed. She savoured the quiet. The stillness. Her brothers were visiting with girlfriends. Her parents were at work or food shopping. They were okay. Everything was okay. But she couldn’t quite smile. She looked at her barely used computer, her dresser and cabinets, her pile of books, the early edition of the Leopard Knocks newspaper on her bed, and the window. Then she hugged herself. She looked around her room again. The effect remained. Her room didn’t feel the same. This place felt cramped, useless. It felt like it belonged to someone else.
She frowned, trying to hold the tears in. She’d gone out to find herself and in the process lost her home… and in a way, herself. How had that happened? At the same time, she and Chukwu were closer than ever, she and Ugonna, too. And though her parents felt more distant, a sort of understanding had developed between her and them. They had not stayed home and waited for her to return. But maybe they’d gone out because they couldn’t stand the waiting. So much had changed in the last two years.
Something buzzed beside her ear. “Oh,” she said, sitting up. “Della!!” In all the adventure and trouble, she’d forgotten about her wasp artist! Her entire body tensed up. Wasp artists were known to be overly emotional, especially when neglected. Their response to neglect was stinging their owner/audience with a paralysis-inducing compound. The paralysed victim was then forced to watch the wasp artist dramatically commit suicide. Sunny had been gone for over a week and when she’d returned last night, she hadn’t had time to check on Della. She frantically looked around the room.
There was a loud buzzing coming from her closet. She crept up to it and paused before sliding it open. If Della was in there, maybe it was better to keep it trapped. But it clearly could get out, since it had just been right beside her ear. She threw open the closet door. For a moment, Sunny wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Then she wondered if she was seeing correctly. Could wasp artists create things like this? Della had indeed been improving in its artistic skill but… “Is this…” She knelt down and picked it up. “For me?” she whispered. “Is it mine?”
Della buzzed loudly, now hovering above her head, watching Sunny’s reaction closely.
“I was gone for so long,” she said, holding the hair comb. “You knew I was coming back?”
It buzzed again. How did it know that she no longer had the hair comb Mami Wata had given her? Only Chukwu knows, she thought, as she pressed the comb into the side of one of her cornrows. She went to admire herself in the mirror. The comb looked like it was made of tiny shiny multicoloured glass beads, even the teeth. Yet it had a way of sparkling yellow orange when she turned her head just so. She took it out and held it to her eyes. When she looked closely, she saw only shiny sparkling pin-sized dots of light. “What is this made of?” she asked.
Della flew circles around her head until she let her question go and laughed. “Yes,” she said. “I love it. I love it so much. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!”
More loop-the-loops, and then Della zoomed into its mud hive on her ceiling and was quiet. “Wow,” Sunny said, admiring the piece of wasp art. She lay back on her bed, smiling as she tucked it into her hair. There was a flash of red on her dresser. A ghost hopper was walking down the side. As it walked, it slowly disappeared.
Now her room felt more like her room.