The dark was warm and cozy and good. She had studying to do, but not right now. She and Chichi had to do what Udide asked, but not right now. She’d been dragged into the water by the river and lake monsters, but she didn’t have to think about that now. She still had flashbacks of Ekwensu, but not right now. She had broken kola nut with the supreme deity Chukwu itself and she’d told no one about it afterward, but she didn’t have to carry that heavy secret right now. And things between her and Anyanwu were . . . weird, but right now, she didn’t worry about it. She sighed, relaxing more into the moment.
“Sunny! Sunny!”
The darkness was warm and cozy and good. Recharging. Sunny rolled over in her bed, the blanket a welcome weight over her head.
“Sunny!”
Her eyes flew open. “Chichi? What?” Before she knew what she was doing, she was on her feet and stumbling to the window. She was sure of it. It was time. Udide had come to demand they go and find what had been stolen from her. “Damn it,” she muttered. She looked down at Chichi. “Is it—”
“Come outside!” Chichi said.
She felt dizzy with foreboding as she put on some jean shorts, a long sleeve T-shirt, and gym shoes. “Not ready, not ready, not ready,” she muttered to herself. But at the same time, she felt a bit relieved. At least the wait was over. Avoiding the scary thing is often just as disturbing as facing it. But, man, she did NOT want to see that giant spider with the breath that smelled like burning houses . . . who wasn’t really a spider. She sprayed herself with mosquito repellent because she was too stressed to remember the juju. She put her juju knife in her pocket, walked back to the window, and looked down. Chichi looked up at her and Sunny couldn’t quite make out her face in the dim light from the side of the house. Were her cheeks wet?
“You all right?”
“Hurry down. It’s important.”
Sunny turned and glided through the keyhole of the front door. When she emerged outside, she was already running to the back of the house.
“What is it?” she asked, her heart slamming in her chest. They were standing near the large tree that grew beside her window.
“Sorry,” Chichi whispered. She wiped her face with a handkerchief she brought from her pocket. “He’s fine now. It was just . . . weird.”
Sunny blinked. “Huh? Who?”
Chichi blew her nose, and when she looked up at Sunny, she was more composed. “Sasha.”
“Ooooh,” Sunny said, understanding flooding her mind. This wasn’t about Udide at all. And this was something . . . good. “Sasha passed Mbawkwa?” Sunny looked back at her house. She hadn’t checked her mobile phone, but she knew it was at least past two a.m. “Where is he?”
“At Orlu’s place.”
“Let’s go.”
It was a hot evening, and all the night creatures were excited by the heat. The crickets, katydids, mosquitos, frogs, and night birds were too loud, something was shaking a nearby bush, and an owl screamed from the treetops. They leapt over a gutter and moved quickly down the street. Just before they reached the gate in front of Orlu’s house, Chichi stopped Sunny and said, “He disappeared. For five minutes, Anatov said. Completely. Poof, gone.”
“What does that mean??” Sunny asked.
“During the test, there’s a moment where you call out, and someone responds. For me, it wasn’t the one Anatov expected to respond, and, well, it wasn’t for Sasha, either.”
“You mean a masquerade responded?” Sunny asked. Immediately, she felt anxious. She remembered what happened with Chichi, and it took days for the effect to stop. Chichi couldn’t cross into Leopard Knocks until her mother was sure she was no longer experiencing it.
“No. Not a masquerade like I had. Let him tell you. He asked me to come get you.”
They knocked on the door and Orlu immediately answered, looking worried. “Good,” he said, when he saw Sunny. “Come in.”
The house was dark and quiet. Orlu’s parents were sitting on the couch in a dark living room with Chichi’s mother. “Sorry, Sunny,” Orlu’s mother said.
“It’s fine,” Sunny said. “He’s in there?”
They nodded.
“Did they call his parents?” Sunny asked Chichi.
“They’ll be here in a few hours.”
Sasha’s parents were coming from Chicago, and Sunny wanted to ask exactly how Leopard People traveled internationally if not by plane. However, she was already stepping into the room where Sasha was staying and everything suddenly began throbbing.
It was as it had been with Chichi, and Sunny wasn’t sure how long she could stand it. Being indoors when it was happening seemed to make everything worse. “Why don’t we go outside?” Sunny asked.
“No,” Sasha breathed. He was sitting on a wicker chair, his arms on the armrests, looking casual as could be . . . except for his face. His eyes were squeezed shut, his lips pressed together, his nostrils flared, his brow deeply furrowed. “Being outside makes everything seem too . . . vast.” He didn’t have an Nsibidi sign below his neck as Chichi did.
Orlu sat on the bed and Chichi was on the stool beside Sasha. Sunny dropped to the floor in front of Sasha with her long legs to her chest.
“Anatov was here,” Chichi said, “and he agreed that Sasha should stay indoors for the next few hours. It should get better. Sasha, ask Sunny what you wanted to ask her.”
He squeezed his face tighter as if something was causing him fresh pain, and everything in the room pulsed again. Chichi grunted, Orlu pressed his face with the palms of his hands, and Sunny pressed her chest. She could feel the vibration roll down the center of her bones.
“Shit . . .” Sasha hissed. “Shit’s out of control.”
“It’ll get better,” Chichi said.
Sunny took his hand. “What do you need to tell me?”
“Don’t try to pass Mbawkwa until you’re actually sixteen,” he said.
They all laughed, even Sasha.
“I’m telling you, this shit makes passing Ekpiri easy like passing kindergarten. First level is nothing, man.” He paused. “So Anatov said I disappeared. I was in his hut, facing the flames, and then I felt funny, and I remember saying, ‘Oh man’ . . . then I was gone. Anatov said I was gone for five minutes. When you . . . when you slipped into the wilderness . . .”
“You couldn’t have done that,” Chichi said. “You’d be dead.”
“I know,” he said. He cracked open his eyes. The room throbbed. “But I went somewhere and . . . Udide was there.”
“Eh?” Orlu exclaimed.
Sunny’s belly dropped. “No,” she whispered. She glanced at Chichi, but she was staring at Sasha.
“Have you ever seen Udide in the wilderness?” Sasha asked.
Sunny slowly shook her head and rubbed her face. Oh man, she thought, feeling the inevitable. Oh man. Because Sunny knew. It lived in the back of her mind. It lingered like a large spider in the corner, observing, expecting, biding. Udide’s request when she’d met Sunny and Chichi behind that restaurant they’d stopped at on their return drive from Lagos over a year ago: Written as a ghazal on a tablet-shaped Möbius band made of the same material as your juju knife, albino girl of Nimm, so you will recognize it. It will call to you. It cannot be broken. It is mine. One of my greatest masterpieces. It belongs to me. Go there, get it, and bring it back to me.
Sunny had looked up what a ghazal was; it was a type of poetry. And a Möbius band was a sort of infinity-shaped thing. Why did Udide suddenly need the thing if it had been stolen back in the nineties? And . . . if they failed to find the object, what would Udide do to them? Chichi knew more, but Sunny just didn’t want to talk about it. To talk about it made it real, solid, soon.
All things considered, the fact was demands like that didn’t just go away. Not when they were made by Udide. But one could be in denial and hope they would, no matter how many hints there were that the opposite was true. And so, though Sunny certainly hadn’t forgotten the request, she’d hoped Udide had forgotten about her . . . and Chichi . . . and whatever stolen object Udide expected the two of them to retrieve from God knew where. And yet here Udide was, telling Sasha things during his Mbawkwa test.
Sunny didn’t want to ask, but she knew she had to. “What’d she tell you?” Everything in the room pulsed and she shivered, a strong sense of foreboding cooling her skin. She held her breath.
He shook his head. “She . . . It doesn’t matter. Not right now.” He held his head in his hands for a moment and shut his eyes. He took a deep breath as everything throbbed again. It was such a resonant sensation that Sunny felt it in the pit of her belly. He opened his eyes and looked so intensely at her that she almost recoiled. “Sunny!” he said.
“What?” she asked, her voice higher than she wanted it to be.
“Anatov told me you would be able to do something for me.”
“Okay.”
“Bring me a blade of that grass you always see in the wilderness,” he said.
“Why?” Orlu asked.
“Ah, it’ll absorb the wilderness dust,” Chichi said.
Sasha nodded. “The wilderness dust is like metal and the blade of grass will be like a powerful magnet. I’ll have to . . . eat it.”
“I don’t know,” Sunny said, looking skeptical. “That grass isn’t really . . . grass.”
“I know,” Sasha moaned. “But Anatov said this would work. I’ll do anything that works.” Everything pulsed again and he sat back, closing his eyes.
“Shit,” he whispered. “Come on, Sunny. Come ooooooon.”
“Right now?”
“Yeeeeesssss,” he groaned.
She looked at Orlu and Chichi, who both shrugged. It wasn’t unsafe for her to go there. It was easy. But could she bring the grass from the wilderness? She was about to find out. She turned away from them all.
“Okay,” she said. “Be right back.”
She glided right into the field she always went to when she glided just to glide. It was the field Ekwensu had pulled her to and tried to make her face Death. She’d first returned to this place months after the incident upon Sugar Cream’s insistence. “Anyone who’s been through what you’ve been through will suffer some form of PTSD,” Sugar Cream said, “even if you feel fine.” Sunny had had nightmares of the incident ever since, so she couldn’t argue. “If you feel ready, revisit that place where you faced Ekwensu. When you didn’t turn around to look it in the face.”
She’d gone there expecting the experience to bombard her with bad memories. Instead, she’d found an empty, vast field of tall, swaying grass beneath a light purple sky. And so she’d begun going there when she needed to think. There was rarely anything there except the occasional energy that would pop up from the grass like grasshoppers. And that was exactly how it was now. She stood in the field for a moment, savoring the quiet, the only sound that of the grass waving this way and that. No chest-vibrating thumping that felt and sounded like the beginning of cardiac arrest.
“Okay,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. She looked around again, hoping to see Anyanwu. Nope. Nowhere in sight. “Always wherever she must be. Which is too often not with me. Like I don’t matter.” She grunted, looking down at the grass. Under her gaze it seemed to wave slower, as if it wanted her to stop noticing it. She knelt down.
Up close it looked just like grass, except . . . tougher. And softer. Like it would stretch if she tried to pull it out. She grabbed a small handful and pulled. And it did stretch. Not much. But enough. And it didn’t break or uproot. She pulled harder. It wouldn’t come up. “Hmm,” she said.
She brought out her juju knife. When she took her knife’s green, glass-like blade to the grass she held, she felt an electric-like zap rush up her wrist, and the smell of crushed leaves permeated the air. She sneezed and fanned the smell away. She held up the two blades of grass. They swayed in her grasp. “You better not have worked some kind of juju on me,” she said. She sneezed again, feeling her nose filling with snot. “Oh, come on.” She glided back.
Everyone was exactly where they’d been when she left. Except Sasha, who was pacing the room, pounding his head with the heels of his hands. “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!” THOOM! This time the room pulsed so hard that the entire house shook, a book falling from the shelf.
“I’m here,” Sunny said, rushing to him.
“Do you need anything?” Orlu’s father called from outside the room.
“No, Papa,” Orlu said, “we’re fine.”
“Okay, o,” his father said. “Sasha, your parents will be here soon.”
Sunny gave him the blades of grass. They’d turned a dark green and become limp like seaweed. “Ugh,” Sasha said. “Couldn’t you get some that was . . . fresh?”
“It was fresh when I grabbed it. I’m just glad that I was able to bring it with me.”
“Just eat it,” Chichi said, “before you shake down the whole house.”
“Think of it like eating spinach,” Orlu said. “You ever seen that old cartoon Popeye?”
This made Sasha laugh hard and the whole house shook again.
“Eat it!” the three of them shouted.
He ate it. And grimaced immediately. “Blah! It’s bitter.”
“Of course it is,” Orlu said.
They watched him chew and then swallow. “Whoa,” he said. “Dizzy . . . but I think . . .” The house rumbled, but that was better than shaking. “I think it’s working.”
They all stood and waited. They could hear the door downstairs open and then the adults all talking at the same time. “Your parents are here,” Chichi said.
But Sasha was already asleep. They tucked him in and left the room. Not once did anything pulse or vibrate.
“He’s right,” Chichi said to Sunny. “Wait until you’re sixteen.”
Sunny nodded. “I might even wait until I’m twenty.”
“What do you think . . . Udide said to him?”
Sunny shrugged. They stared at each other, neither of them wanting to bring it up. Then they turned away from each other in silence.