ANDREW
2005
I WAS A Ju-boy that year. My school father was Ricky, the sanitation prefect. Ricky had six other school sons from all three junior classes. Each of us had been assigned specific duties. I washed and ironed all Ricky’s clothes. Every day after lunch, right before siesta, I went to his room to check in his laundry basket for whatever clothes were there. I returned them handwashed, ironed, and folded in twenty-four hours or less.
Ju-boys. This was what we called the younger boys in junior classes 1 to 3. Ju-boys were identifiable by their uniforms, white shirts worn over blue shorts instead of the full-length trousers all boys in the senior classes wore. The Ju-boys were the nobodies.
ORDINARY BOYS. THIS was what we called the older boys in senior classes 1 to 2. The ordinary boys were almost nobodies or nearly somebodies, it depended on how you considered their situation. Ordinary boys were greater than Ju-boys but less than the ordinary men. Ju-boys ran every conceivable errand for ordinary boys, but they were not assigned to serve them.
The ordinary men were the senior boys in class 3 who were not appointed prefects. The prefects were the senior boys in class 3 who ruled Odogolu secondary school.
All ordinary men and prefects had Ju-boys assigned to serve them each year. On the first day of the new term, the head prefect posted a list of Ju-boys and their school fathers on the dormitory’s central notice board. It was normal to see boys, their faces fat, full, and fresh from the joys of vacation, burst out weeping after learning they had been assigned to serve someone with a reputation for cruelty.
We called them our school fathers. A school father was the ordinary man or prefect a ju-boy was assigned to. A school son was the Ju-boy assigned to a school father.
I WAS ONE of the luckier Ju-boys. It would have been beyond me to oversee Ricky’s food, water, or bedding, because most of the time you had to spend your own money doing things for your school father. I would have been terrible at cuddling or singing him to sleep like my school brother Teddy, the round-faced boy with a girl’s voice, who had all the nighttime duties. Fortunately, all I needed was soap, and I had lots of that. My sisters sent us to boarding school with more than a dozen bars of soap; they wanted Peter and me to have more than enough for ourselves and to give away.
Our school was a mixed boarding school. This meant we had girls all around us. There were so many girls, there were even more girls than boys. In our school, girls did everything differently. They served nobody. They had a different set of rules. Girls had their own prefects, called aunties. Our prefects could not punish them. When they got in trouble, they were made to write book reports or apology letters. They did not have to do chores around the school grounds like clearing the lawns or trimming shrubs. They had their own hostels with running water flowing inside their washrooms.
We had chapel with girls. We had classes with girls. We had meals with girls. All the places you would think we needed focus and concentration, girls waddled in, pretty in their purple-and-yellow checkered dresses and white socks with tiny bows.
We were obsessed with girls. All of us were. Ju-boys had games where we wrote down names of girls on pieces of paper, which we then all drew from and dared one another to go ask out. We never did. We were Ju-boys; we knew our place.
Senior boys were obsessed with sex. They all were.
As a matter of fact, I was not even supposed to be a junior boy. When Sister Ariyike got her job and decided we had to go back to school, on account of my age, I was going to be in senior class 1 and Peter in junior class 2. But we had been out of school so long, I had not taken the junior secondary certificate examination. The school principal was only following administrative policy by requiring me to enroll in junior class 3.
“It can’t be helped,” he said to our sister. “I have been a principal for almost eight years. If there was something I could do, surely, I will do it for you. Especially because it’s you.”
Sister Ariyike was some kind of celebrity in those days because of her radio job. Everyone, strangers included, was nice to her. Once in a supermarket, an older man recognized her voice and paid for all the stuff we had in our shopping basket. Our sister did not even have to pretend to be interested in dating him or take his business card. He just said, “I am so proud of the work you do, praising God every day with your pretty voice,” and walked away.
A bagger is what you were called if you could not handle your school father’s business as well as all your chores and schoolwork without falling apart. A bloody bagger is what you were called if your incompetence was so glaringly bad that your school father had to report you to other prefects for reprimand.
Community murder is what a bloody bagger got. A small crowd of ordinary men and prefects made a circle around the erring Ju-boy, shouting punishments.
“Bloody bagger. Roll in the dirt.”
“Dirty stinky bloody bagger. Now let me see you do five hundred frog jumps.”
Ordinary men and prefects were fully grown men, unlike the rest of us. They shaved every day, they walked around smelling like cologne and Irish Spring bath soap. When they slapped your face or the center of your back, you wondered how it was possible that something that hurt so bad was not fatal.
There was a hard-won peace between ordinary men and ordinary boys. This was on account of soccer. Before Friday evening soccer became a regular thing at Odogolu Secondary, clashes between ordinary men and ordinary boys were said to have been so frequent, the school sick bay had to get a second full-time nurse in charge of deep wounds.
They brawled about everything; everything escalated easily into fracas. A tussle between a small-for-his-age ordinary man and a bigger-than-normal ordinary boy over seats on the school bus trip to the village market resulted in the Great Destruction of 2003. This was before we arrived, so everything we heard about it was hearsay. There are many versions of the story. The most consistent facts are that the ordinary man tried to take a seat in the bus the ordinary boy had reserved for his girlfriend. The ordinary boy refused to give up the seat. The smaller but older ordinary man, who had a reputation for wild anger—he was overcompensating for what he lacked in height—slashed the ordinary boy’s cheek with a razor. The bleeding boy punched the man, knocking him out. Other ordinary men attacked the bleeding boy in a bid to subdue him. The bleeding boy’s classmates and friends tried to help him. Soon no one cared how it had started, it was ordinary men vs. ordinary boys. According to the legend, the resulting free-for-all lasted hours.
It is, however, unquestioned that the police descended upon the school with antiriot gear, batons, and tear gas. They arrested at least twenty students that day. There was a noticeboard at the entrance of the teachers’ lounge with the names as well as passport photographs of all thirteen boys expelled from school after the incident. We were in awe of all of them. We called them the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Every Saturday, my school father, Ricky, assembled us all, the seven of us school sons, in a straight line at the foot of his single bed in the prefects’ dorm.
They were only six boys in the room, which loomed large, imposing because I shared a room of the same size with about sixty other junior boys. Our walls did not have the same fresh coat of paint nor the full-length posters of Aaliyah and TLC, of Britney Spears. We did not have a wall dedicated to bras, thongs, and whatever else the prefects could produce as proof of conquest.
Every Saturday, Ricky assigned us tasks for the week.
“Andrew, make my whites sparkle, my trousers sharp.”
“Temirin, I need warm water for my bath. Warm, not room temperature.”
“Tarfa, I am the sanitation prefect, not the garbage truck handler. Polish my fucking shoes.”
After the tasks were assigned, Ricky asked about our classes. We were required to show him results from any tests and any written reprimands from teachers or, worse, other prefects.
He certainly could have gotten away with not caring about any aspect of our lives, but Ricky liked the idea that he was fathering us. He enjoyed the neatness of that description. A couple of prefects would walk over to his bed and say something like, “Ricky, your Ju-boys are having a blast. See how freely they are speaking with you.”
When anyone said this, most of the time, right in the middle of him calling one of us a fucking bastard of a bagger for failing a mathematics test, Ricky looked up at his colleagues and smiled in his wide, clueless way.
“My guy, someone has to raise these bastards.”
He called all of us bastards. It hurt me more than most on account of Father leaving me for God knows where, but I learned to hide it. Ricky could smell weakness and despair like a hungry leopard.
ON ONE OF those Saturday mornings when we were gathered together in the prefects’ dorm room, I looked out the window behind Ricky’s bed and noticed a senior girl walking up the courtyard. While Ricky berated someone for something that meant nothing, I nodded intermittently, faking attentiveness. I was watching the senior girl hide behind a tree; she seemed to be waiting for someone. She was crouching behind a stack of recently cut branches, her back to the dorm. From the distance, it appeared as if she had been trying to hold on to something for balance with one hand, and with the other was spreading a crumpled old newspaper so she could sit.
It took me too long to realize that she had actually been hiding behind the tree, unwrapping the newspaper as soundlessly as possible, so she could shit without anyone noticing. By the time I screamed, she had already begun flinging freshly released poop into the prefects’ dorm through the open windows.
“Stupid muthafuckers, smelling bastards, mad men will fuck your mother’s pussy raw,” she was screaming, marching toward Ricky’s window.
“I curse all of you demons,” she said. “Every single one of you spreading lies about me. You will fail your final exams. No universities will accept you. You will die in roadside accidents. No one will claim your rotten bodies.”
As though collectively released from a spell, most of the dorm emptied out, running toward the screaming female issuing death curses. We were terrified of the death curse. One of the prefects, the only one brave enough, grabbed her, attempting to restrain her by twisting her hands behind her in a lock. She fought him off successfully, slapping him all over his face with the leftover poop pebbles, wiping her hands on his shirt. A small crowd of laughing boys had gathered. No one tried to do anything, learning quickly the folly of interrupting this strange display of rage. It was easy to imagine what had happened. The senior girl had learned that one or more of the ordinary men and prefects had bragged about sleeping with her. It could have been even more vulgar; they might have included an aborted pregnancy or claimed she was a lesbian.
They were monsters, all of them, ordinary men and boys, iron sharpening iron to destruction. It would be a mistake to try to infer a logic or science to their taunts. They were just boys being teenage boys, drunk on power and lust, unguided and free.
ON THE MORNING of the day the girl, Nadia, the girl whom we really have to talk about, first spoke to me, I had burned Father Ricky’s school uniform trousers while ironing them. Instead of owning up to the accident, I had pulled someone else’s trousers off the clothesline, ironed those ones, and given them to him. Just when I had begun thinking I’d got away with the switch, Father Ricky found me on the class line in the assembly hall and began whipping me with his leather belt.
“You useless Ju-boy. What did you do with my trousers? Can you see what I look like in this trash? They don’t fuckin fit right!” He was screaming and whipping and screaming and whipping.
The other boys in line made no attempts to hide their laughter. The boy nearest to me laughed so loudly, Ricky paused the whipping to shut him up.
“Shut up, you fuckin bastard. Am I now a fuckin clown to you fuckin Ju-boys?”
I could not bear to look at the girls. It would have been too much to turn around and see their disgust, or worse, their pity. When his rage was spent, he walked away. He wore those replacements till the end of the year. For the next week, welts the shape of his leather belt lined my face, neck, and arms like stripes on a flag. I considered it a fair trade.
We were in class, later that day. It was the end of English period. We were waiting for the social studies teacher to arrive. Nadia walked to where I sat by myself at the back of the class and asked to see my stripes.
“No,” I said. I folded my arms across my chest to create a distance between us, realizing too late that it only made my stripes evident to her.
“You think you always have to act so tough, don’t you?” she said, as she tried to unfold my arms.
“I am tough. I do not have to pretend,” I said.
She was standing before me, wearing ankle socks, so when I looked away from her face because it made me feel warm, I was staring instead at her legs, bare and long like prize yams.
“You should report him to the principal. He will get in trouble,” she said.
“I hear you,” I said.
I did not want to talk about it anymore. Nadia did not understand that things in our school worked differently for boys. She could not see the thing that was right under her nose; no girl would ever have been whipped like that. So could she be expected to understand how particularly different things were for me? I was not like the other Ju-boys. I was older, I was taller, I was meaner, and I was convinced that I could have beaten Ricky to a stupor if I had been allowed to fight back.
NADIA WAS THE most beautiful junior girl. It was not because her skin was brown and clear like still water, or because her eyes were huge and bright like a mirror, or that her hair was reddish brown without dyes. Nadia had breasts, full, round, grown woman breasts.
The story the junior boys told about Nadia was that she was full of herself. The story the junior girls told of Nadia was that she was the uglier sister. It was said that her older sister, who graduated the year before I enrolled, was even more beautiful, but I could not imagine a more beautiful girl.
I had seen Nadia’s father walk around the school with her a couple of times. He was an older Anglican reverend, an albino who had married one of his parishioners later in life. This is one of the reasons Nadia had such pale beautiful skin; she was almost an albino, but she wasn’t.
The walls of our classroom were without paint. Nadia reached over my head and sketched a sumo wrestler on the wall, writing below it this caption: ANDREW IS THE MICHELIN MAN.
“That is a terrible drawing. It looks like an amoeba,” I said.
She laughed a loud, hearty laugh, and just like that, my arms stopped hurting.
We were both facing the wall, backs turned to the blackboard, when our social studies teacher walked into the class.
“The two of you standing at the back. Husband and wife,” she screamed, startling us. “Come to the front. Now tell the whole class what is so funny.”
We spent the rest of that class in a corner, standing next to each other, heads bowed in the perfunctory performance of shame. The teacher interrupted her class to mock us. Other times, she asked us pointed questions, trying to show us as ignorant.
“Which deposed king was allowed to return from exile when the British annexed Lagos?” she asked.
“King Kosoko,” Nadia said.
“What year did this take place?” she asked me.
I did not know. I was bad with dates. I was terrible with all things involving the remembering and reorganizing of numbers.
“In 1840,” I said.
“Wrong as expected. It was 1861. Keep playing with the beautiful girls instead of facing your studies. I am sure you can get a job as her driver when she marries a rich man,” the teacher said.
Everyone in our class laughed out loud. My ears burned. I imagined running into the crowd of them with Ricky’s two-pronged whip, slashing this way and that all over their smiling faces.
It was exactly the kind of day that made me wish I could go back home, but Nadia saved me. She was the kind of girl to make you smile on the worst day of your life. For a long time after that, we sat next to each other at the back of the class, never getting in trouble but barely participating. She was always smiling, always happy, shiny and bright in the way a few girls are, like a pink lollipop.
THERE IS A little Valentine’s Day card with petals of a dried rose I still have somewhere in the house. It says:
To Andrew, who will grow up to be badder
than Tuface and Shaggy combined.
Never forget me.
The card does not tell the story of Nadia. Her face was round and pleasant from having a father who stopped by every other weekend to visit her, who loaded her with cookies, fruits, noodles in a care package. Her family had built her up with good fruitful words like:
“You are God’s example to the world of godliness.”
“You are the salt of the earth.”
“You are the light of the world.”
Her father visited her regularly without fail. Even in the bad weeks, those last two weeks when all the students had run out of provisions and no parents were visiting because it was almost time for the school term to end.
THE DAY NADIA asked me to meet her in the shade of the trees beside the girls’ dorm to exchange Valentine’s Day gifts, I showered twice. The first time, I thought I was ready to leave but then Father Ricky appeared in my dorm room, handing over to me his brown pair of boots to shine because he wanted to look good for his own Valentine’s Day plans.
The second time, after I was done polishing and shining those shoes, I got dressed in the boys’ bathroom and ran all the way to the girls’ dorm, where Nadia waited. When I stepped outside, I could see several girls emerging from their dormitories with gift bags and identical white teddy bears with tiny red hearts. I held the single rose and the single bar of Kit Kat I had purchased with two weeks’ allowance and ran to her.
My feet were fast and fluid and free. It felt like I was floating in the air. Nadia was there waiting. She was my dream, sitting on an abandoned granite heap, sipping from a can of Sprite and looking in the direction of the boys’ dorm as though she wondered whether I was coming.
When I got to her side, I called Nadia the most beautiful girl in the world. Even though her hair was braided back in S-shaped cornrows and I could see the shine of her scalp, she was beautiful.
I TOLD NADIA that her mouth was the warmest mouth in the world, that inside it was soft and cozy like a nest, that I was settling in there. I said she smelled like lilies in the springtime field, and she laughed because she knew I had never smelled lilies or seen them spring. She made words fill my mouth and I poured them out and over her, without thinking.
We heard the last bell for the night ring, but we did not leave for our dorm room. Every time I tried to pull away, she asked for five more minutes.
“Kiss me again,” she said.
I kissed her again.
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. It’s from the Bible, words of Jesus, one of my father’s favorite scriptures,” she said.
EVERY TIME SHE spoke of her father, I tried to change the subject. She did not like her father. He pressured her to be the perfect Christian girl. He was stern, demanding, and overprotective. He was brutal in his discipline. His regular visits were really inspections, as he looked over her class notes, her clothes, nails, hairdo. Her hatred of him was like black soot over her shiny soul, like a scar on her face, swallowing up her beauty.
“Do you know what my father will do if he finds out I have a boyfriend?” she asked me once.
I had almost smiled, because it appeared to me that she had formalized our relationship.
“What?” I asked instead. “Who is telling him anything, anyway?”
“He will beat me worse than Ricky beat you, a lot worse, then burn my feet with fire so I imagine the terrors of hell anytime I am tempted to fornicate,” she said.
Even though I was thinking about the terrors of hell and her father’s words, I let my hands travel down to her breasts and she did not stop me. Instead, she wrapped her hands around my neck and drew me closer to her. The school was as quiet as a cemetery when we finally decided to pull away and head back to our dorms.
Nadia stood at the top of the heap, buttoning her shirt, muttering the words to “Lucky” by Britney Spears. She was facing me and therefore did not see in good enough time to run away the bright flashlight and the two people who walked toward us.
“The two of you, stop right there,” screamed one.
“Ju-boy and junior girl, I can see who you are. Run and get expelled,” the other screamed.
They kept their flashlights in our faces, blinding us. I could hear Nadia’s heart beating wildly. She tried to hold my hand, but I let the grip wane; I did not want to give the teachers who had just caught us together after our bedtime more to be angry about.
“We are really sorry,” Nadia said. “We just slept off. We did not hear the lights-out bell ring.”
One of the men laughed a loud laugh that reverberated in the emptiness around us.
“So what were you doing before you slept off?” the other man asked.
“We were just talking. About classwork. That is all. I swear to God,” I said.
The man who asked me a question slapped me so hard I fell forward. That was how I was sure that he was not a student. It was one of the teachers; his palm was as large as my entire head.
Nadia began to cry. I sat back on the heap rubbing my face. The men stood at our sides, shouting at us, calling us disgusting perverts, telling us how we had to stand before the whole school and be punished for our crimes. It was hard to tell how long we stayed there, the night getting colder around us, when the man closest to Nadia, the man who had slapped me, pulled her to him, hugging her like a father would.
“It is okay. Stop crying. It will be okay, come with me,” he said.
I tried to turn my neck to watch as they walked a little distance away from me, but the man standing before me screamed vile words at me.
“No looking. You will wish you were dead when we are done with you tonight, stupid boy,” he screamed.
“Please, sir, I cannot do that, sir,” I heard Nadia plead in the distance.
“Well, I am not going to force you. No one wants you to scream and bring the whole school here,” the man replied.
“Please stop this. I beg you in the name of God,” I heard Nadia say.
She soon began gagging and choking. Every time it sounded like she was about to stop, it started over again. I turned to look in spite of myself. Nadia was on her knees before the man, and he was leaning over her and moving his hips back and forth. Nadia was pulling her head away and he was pushing her head back onto him.
The contents of my stomach rushed out of my mouth with the speed of running water. It was a lumpy mess of chocolate and bread and sardines. In that instant, the man by my side forgot to shine his torch in my face. Instead, he pointed it downward, checking to see if any of my vomit had spilled on his shoes. As my eyes traveled to those shoes, I realized that they were the same ones I had cleaned and shined earlier. I stilled my stomach, but another rush of vomit exploded all over the place.
It was past midnight. The clouds over us had merged into one big lump of gray, covering the moon. The air was dry and there was nothing to be heard but Nadia’s gagging and my retching. The smell traveled far. The smell of that night, vomit and shoe polish and fear, surrounded the school.
Ricky, my school father, hunched over. I flinched because I had assumed he was about to hit me again.
“Run and don’t look back,” he said instead. I ran. My legs ran before my head could convince them to stay. The smell of sorrow stayed with me. I took my shirt off and wiped my mouth as I ran. I was crying like a little boy. I turned around as soon as I could hide in the cover of the night. The shape of two bodies huddled over one lying-down girl swelled over the granite heap like the orange of a large traffic cone. Then their hold broke. I watched her try and fail to pull herself up. Her legs were kicking up granite dust, writhing weakly like an injured snake.
“Andrew, please, please, help me.”
I turned toward the path. I continued running. The door to my dorm seemed like a faraway mirage, like a gateway to another world.
Everyone was asleep like it was any other night. I ran on. I found my brother half asleep in his own bed. He made space for me and asked no questions, even though we were both in trouble if we got caught sharing a bed. I could not sleep. Around me, several cone shadows danced. My ears were ringing from being slapped so hard. My mouth tasted of blood and granite. Then my heart began to rise to meet the shadows, to demand they cease their dancing and move away from my brother’s bed. But it was a shadow of fathers. My father and Nadia’s father and Ricky were all dancing in the room. I opened my mouth, but no sound poured out. I had forgotten how to talk to fathers. The dancing fathers stared me down, and the angrier I was, the better they danced. I shooed them away with my hands, but they did not leave. They danced and laughed and danced some more, and no matter what I did, no matter how angry I got, the fathers did not stop dancing and I could not bring my mouth to say the words, “Go away, fathers.”