It was the most humiliating and devastating thing Kalu had ever done and would ever do in his life.
He knew it would follow him into his nightmares for years afterward—the feeling of taking his clothes off in a room full of people. Okinosho and his cruel smile, Ahmed’s pained face, Ola’s smooth one, Machi’s expressionless mask of red mouth and lined eyes. She had taken off the robe they had put her in and was standing there naked, as if it was nothing. Her body was barely formed, a small chest, a body that was either shaved or—he was going to believe she’d been shaved. She was seventeen; Ahmed had told him she was seventeen. It didn’t matter if she looked younger; he wasn’t doing what it looked like, not like that. And he was being coerced. If he’d learned anything about consent, it was that if you weren’t safe enough to say no, your yes couldn’t count. This couldn’t count. He would die if he didn’t do it.
Kalu wondered if it was better to die rather than do it.
He had almost fought Ahmed when his friend told him what Okinosho had decided; he’d almost left, but Ahmed had caught him by the shoulders, those familiar grooves.
“He will kill you if you don’t do it,” Ahmed had cried out, his eyes shockingly wet. He had sounded so young, just a boy in secondary school clinging to his friend, terrified. “He will kill you, Kalu! You have no choice.” Ahmed had pressed their foreheads together. “You have no choice.”
Kalu had agreed, if you could call it agreeing. And now he was pulling off his T-shirt, the air-conditioning in the room goose-pimpling his skin.
Okinosho’s eyes were greedy on him. “Lie on the floor,” the pastor commanded the girl, and Kalu winced at her obedience. “Open your legs.”
Ahmed looked away, which Kalu found rich. After all those parties, all those things he’d justified, this was the one he couldn’t watch? What a fucking hypocrite. Ola was watching, though, her eyes unmoving except for an occasional blink. Like a vulture, Kalu thought, waiting for me to rot.
“Hurry up,” the pastor said to him. “My wife is waiting for me and I have service in the morning.”
Kalu took off his trousers and underwear. Okinosho grunted with satisfaction.
“Oya,” he said, gesturing to Machi. “Start your penance. It will end when you spill your seed where we can see it.”
Kalu knelt between the girl’s legs and tried not to look at her face. He wished he’d never gone to Ahmed’s party, never met that woman on the balcony, never heard what she’d said that led him barging into that room.
He’d saved no one, certainly not himself. Okinosho was laughing and telling Kalu he’d better do something to get hard unless he wanted to be paying penance till morning came. Ahmed, the coward, was still looking away. Kalu felt something in him curl and blacken as he reached down and began to stroke himself.
So, he thought, this was what damnation felt like—a corruption he would never recover from, a piece of his soul that would never come back to him, that would never be whole again. Machi didn’t look at him, didn’t move.
Kalu began to push himself inside her.