[The ọgbanje are] creatures of God with powers over mortals…. They are not subject to the laws of justice and have no moral scruples, causing harm without justification.
—C. Chukwuemeka Mbaegbu,
The Ultimate Being in Igbo Ontology
After those days and nights of the boy fucking Ada’s body, that summer in Georgia was my first embodied one, when I had Ada cut her hair in the sticky heat and wet air. Ada had gone down to stay with Itohan and her family like she always did every summer. Itohan’s father used to work with Saachi, at the military hospitals they both got posted to. When Ada moved to America, Saachi asked if his family in Georgia could host Ada because she had nowhere else to go. It was too expensive to fly back to Nigeria and Saachi was still living overseas. Itohan’s family agreed, and so Ada flew down and turned seventeen in their house. The mother and brothers lived out in the suburbs while Itohan, who Ada called her big sister, lived in an apartment complex that was more central, with hedges outside, carpet inside, and humidity pouring through the walls. I’m saying all of this to explain that these people were like family to Ada, so that when I tell you the kind of things I did after I arrived, you can understand the level of damage I caused.
I don’t regret any of it, sha. I did what made me happy, whatever filled me up inside. I even remember one time, before I arrived, when Ada was talking to some friends in Virginia and she said, “You know, I’m glad that I haven’t started having sex yet.”
Her friends had laughed. “How come?” they asked, and Ada shrugged.
“It’s just that if I start, I know how I’ll get,” she said. It’s like she knew what kind of hunger I would arrive with, the way I would release it on an unprepared world if I ever made it past the veil. I don’t know if she would have ever let me out, or if she had, if that would have been me, or something else. But I came into the world the way I did because of Soren, and whatever chance I had of being anything else was lost in that. I was a child of trauma; my birth was on top of a scream and I was baptized in blood. By the time Ada brought me to Georgia, I was ready to consume everything I touched.
I started with Itohan’s younger brother. He was tall and beautiful, with smooth dark skin wrapped over muscle, but more importantly, he was there and it was easy. This was the first lesson I had learned from the third birth, about human men. I knew what they valued, I knew where they wanted to be, and I knew what price they would pay for a small death. So I fucked him on the short carpet of Itohan’s apartment, a few feet away from the kitchenette where Ada ate frozen Tampico that she had mashed up in a plastic cup. I could almost see her standing aside as I used her body, stabbing the orange cubes with a metal teaspoon, the taste bringing Nigeria back into her mouth, memories of Fan-Orange she used to buy from the yogurt vendors who rode bicycles past her secondary school. I didn’t care about her nostalgia; I had only been a seed then, it was a different world. My world now was the boy above and beneath me. I fucked him in the suburbs on the plain sheets of his bed, running Ada’s fingernails down the tightness of his chest and stomach, amazed at how he could come and still stay hard. He snuck into the guest room of his mother’s house to fuck me, where I cracked my hips open and faced away from him, and that was the only time I came.
Ada was never there. I had already promised; she would never be there, not again. It was my job to protect her. But I liked Itohan’s brother, and I liked choosing a body for the first time. Soren didn’t count—no one chose him. So I used Ada’s face and practiced smiles on it, and to my surprise, Itohan’s family couldn’t tell the difference. I was that good. It’s not difficult to pretend to be someone you’ve been watching since she was born, but I was a little insulted to be mistaken for Ada. She was so gullible: she went and threw herself right into the arms of people who broke her; she would see danger and instead of avoiding it like a person with sense, she would walk behind its teeth. As if she would be safe. As if her childhood shouldn’t have taught her better. I refuse to believe that I looked anything like her—it must have been the humans who just couldn’t tell the difference. Me, I made my mouth as red as silk, I turned my eyes black, and I made sure no one could trick me. When I did cruel things, I did them with my eyes open. I’ve never been ashamed—I always looked at myself without blinking. But as much as Ada loved me, she avoided meeting my gaze. We would both materialize in her mind, the marble room, cool veined white walls and floors, and she would look away. It was understandable: I had arrived and I was so deep inside her, locked into her flesh, moving her muscles. Suddenly she had to share with something she couldn’t control. I understood, but at the same time, it wasn’t my problem.
I was selfish back then. You can’t really blame me—it was my first time having a body. Humans don’t remember the time before they had bodies, so they take things for granted, but I didn’t. I remembered not being myself, just being a piece of a cloud. I was careless with her body, sha, not thinking about the responsibilities of having flesh. Consequences were a thing that happened to humans, not to me. This was their world. I wasn’t even really here. It’s no excuse—I know I wasn’t fair to Ada—but it was still a reason.
The first few times with Itohan’s brother, he didn’t wear a condom. When Ada brought it up, he was reluctant, he didn’t want to go and buy them.
“Why on earth not?” Ada asked.
He looked uncomfortable. “If I buy them then it’s like I know I’m going to sin, like I’m planning to go and have sex.”
Ada stared at him. Inside her head, in the marble room, I came up and stood at her shoulder. We were thinking the exact same thing, and in that moment, it pulled us together, rippling electric.
I leaned over and spoke to her. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
She forgot to ignore me this time. “Be quiet. You know how religious they are.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense! He knows he’s going to do it, so why is he pretending?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. He was only a human—what else could I expect, realistically? He wanted to pretend he was somehow better than he knew he was; he wasn’t ready to throw himself into sin. Humans find it easier to just lie and lie to themselves.
Ada made him get the condoms anyway, and he told her how awkward it had been when the cashier asked him what size he needed. I watched him tell the story, his mouth split into a shy smile through full lips, and I listened to Ada say whatever she was saying to him. Honestly speaking, I didn’t care about the condoms, but then again, it wasn’t my body. I should’ve cared, though, at least for Ada’s sake.
What I cared about was that he felt good. Or maybe not good, but he made me feel full. He was thick and he stretched deep inside Ada, against the oath’s velveteen, pushing her body open in a way that seemed to say, with confidence, you are alive and you have not died. For me, that was enough. Alive was flesh. Alive meant I had a body to move with.
Ada went with him to Planned Parenthood twice to get the morning-after pill, even after he bought the condoms. You see, she was the one who insisted on protection, but she was never the one he slept with—I was. On their second visit to the clinic, the nurse there looked at Ada with contempt.
“Maybe try using contraception?” she said, and her sarcasm brought blood rushing to Ada’s cheeks.
“Don’t mind her,” I whispered to Ada, looking back at the woman with hatred. “Who is she, sef? Stupid bitch.”
She’s just a fucking human, I almost added, she doesn’t even matter, none of this matters. Still, I didn’t let Ada go back to the clinic after that, not even when it would have been the smart thing to do. There are many things I did to protect her and there are many ways in which I failed.
*
I continued to sleep with Itohan’s brother, and one morning back at their mother’s house in the suburbs, the sun was breaking like thin water through the window when Itohan’s mother walked into the room and caught Ada lying inside the curve of the boy’s long body. They were both wearing clothes—it was actually innocent, not like the night when Ada had been sleeping on the sofa in the upstairs parlor, when he held his penis to her face, thick and partial, bumping into her nose and nudging her lips apart. I had overtaken her before she woke up fully, moving quickly so I could push back the first wave of terror and disgust that was breaking in her. This was mine. He was mine. I had promised her, never again.
When his mother opened the door, Ada and the boy startled awake just in time to catch her firm gaze sweeping over them.
“Come to my room,” she told her son, and shut the door with a sharp click.
Ada’s stomach dropped. I stretched inside her and looked around lazily.
“Oh fuck,” she said, sitting up. “Should I go also?”
“Shit.” Itohan’s brother leaped off the bed and pulled on a T-shirt. His face was twisted with worry. “Just stay here. I’m coming.”
He left the room, carefully closing the door behind him as if someone else might walk past and see Ada in his sheets. I sat with her, excitement thudding through me. It was so bad, being caught. I loved it.
“What’s going to happen?” Ada asked me, chewing on the corner of her thumb. “What if she finds out?”
I thought about it. “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “You know what will happen.”
She was right. If Itohan’s mother found out I had been fucking her third child under her roof, Ada wouldn’t be welcome there anymore. Their family had wrapped her up as if she had a right to feel safe with them, and if this secret was discovered, she would lose them all.
“Don’t worry,” I told Ada. “She didn’t see anything.”
Ada wrapped her arm over her stomach. She was wearing an old oversized T-shirt, green with large colorful butterflies all over, a souvenir from the Philippines that Saachi had given her. She also wasn’t really listening to me, not anymore; she was too afraid. I sat with her anyway, until the boy came back into the room looking chastened.
“She wants to talk to you,” he said.
“What?!” Ada clambered off the bed. “For what? What did she say to you?”
He shrugged uncomfortably, not wanting to explain more. “Just go,” he said. “She’s waiting for you.”
By then, even I had become cautious, although the thrill of being bad still hummed quietly in me. Ada walked down the short hallway and knocked on his mother’s bedroom door, pushing it open when the woman’s voice told her to come in. She had never been inside that room before. It was shadowed and Itohan’s mother was sitting on the edge of her bed with a Bible lying next to her on the duvet. When she spoke, her voice was firm but not angry.
“I’ve seen you two cuddling on the couch before, and that one is fine,” she said. “I know you weren’t doing anything, but you should never share a bed with a man unless you are wearing his ring. Not even your own brother.”
Ada kept a scared and straight face, but I caught her relief and broke out in rib-tearing laughter inside her.
“She doesn’t know! I can’t believe she doesn’t know,” I gasped. “Fuck!”
“Shut up,” hissed Ada, her mouth closed.
The woman continued talking and my laughter turned bitter at how blind she was. So much had changed. So much had changed, and if this had happened six months before … but that wasn’t even possible. Six months before, Ada would never have been in Soren’s bed, I wouldn’t have been born, and Ada would still be the sweet and good girl who this mother thought she was talking to. But I was here now and I was the world, lying in ugly entrails. I envied his mother the cleanliness she lived in, where everything was still innocent and no one had ever touched Ada. It was such a fucking lie.
After she released Ada from her room, Ada went back to the boy’s bedroom, but she made sure to leave his door open. He was leaning against his wardrobe, looking beautiful and stressed out.
“I hate lying to my mother,” he said.
Ada made a face and put her hand on his arm. “I know,” she replied, and she meant it. She hated dishonesty and she knew what loving a mother felt like. Me, I rolled my eyes at the both of them.
“He can hate what he wants,” I told her. “You know he loves fucking us. It’s not as if he’s going to stop. They never stop.”
“You mean he loves fucking you,” she whispered back, and I made a rough sound. She was right. I was staying behind her face like a good little spirit, sha, like a small beast on a leash. When the boy drove us to church, Ada stood up in the car to stick her head out of the sunroof and feel the wind rocketing against her face.
“Come inside the car,” he scolded.
She looked down at his face and sat back in her seat. “What’s the problem?”
He stared straight ahead, through the windshield, his face set. “My girlfriend won’t do things like that.”
Ada raised her eyebrows and I snorted inside her head, but neither of us said anything. After the service, Ada headed toward the other car to return to the house with the rest of the family—the boy had to run some errands.
“You people, take care of my wife,” he called out to his mother and his sister and his older brother. His voice carried over the green lawn and he was smiling like the sun, and everyone laughed fondly as Ada blushed.
After I had Ada cut off her hair, the boy was disapproving, but he still prayed with Ada when he dropped her off at the airport because he had somehow become her boyfriend. When he prayed, Ada held his hands, closed her eyes, and pretended as if she could feel Yshwa anywhere close to her. She couldn’t, of course, not anymore, but I was helping her get better at lying.
After her visit with Saachi, Ada flew back to Virginia for her final year at the university. On her first day back, she walked through the cafeteria and set her tray down on a table. One of her friends on the track team slid in next to her, flipping a ponytail over her shoulder.
“Hey, Ada. How was your summer?”
Ada shrugged. “It was cool. Went to Georgia, visited my mother, had sex. You know, the usual.”
Her friend shrieked. Everyone knew Ada had never been touched like that before. “Girl, what?! You got laid?”
Ada smiled and they both dissolved into laughter.
Her friend was nodding and proud. “Yo, when I saw you walking across the room, I could tell, you know? I said, ‘Yeah, she’s walking different.’”
I wondered if that was true. Was I showing that much on the outside? Had I entered Ada’s walk, the way she moved her head, her smile? She kept stretching her mouth and laughing with them, but I knew she was just relieved that they were treating her as if she was normal, now that she wasn’t the uptight virgin anymore. But inside, I could smell it: she still felt ashamed, dirty with sin. She hadn’t gone back to her christ, Yshwa. Instead she went to see that other boy she’d been talking to over the summer, that other brother of a friend, the one who was there when she left Soren. Ada thought she might love this new boy. If she could love Soren, then why not this one? But while I was kissing him on the blue mattress of Ada’s dorm room, I drifted her hand down between his legs and recoiled at the thinness of his penis.
“I can’t work with that,” I told Ada, and I ended the crush.
She didn’t argue with me. I had her call Itohan’s younger brother, and she broke up with him.
“I was feeling single already,” he said. He sounded petulant.
“Good,” I told Ada. “It’s better this way.”
“If you say so,” she said, and she let him go.
The next summer, we went back to Georgia, and I set my sights on Itohan’s older brother. Ada never forgave me for what I did to him.
*
She wasn’t doing a lot of forgiving, to be fair. Not of me, not of herself. Before Soren, Ada had been obsessed with her christ, that Yshwa. She loved him, or to be more accurate, she adored and worshipped him, which is exactly how he likes it. She lived for him. I don’t even know why—he was never there for her, not like me, not even close. He couldn’t even be bothered to materialize when she was just a little girl, when she really, really needed him. How can you leave a child alone like that? But whatever—it’s stupid to think that gods actually care about you. Ada stopped talking to him after I was born, all because of that promise she’d made to be abstinent, which is another thing I don’t understand. Her body meant more to me than it ever did to her. Promising abstinence was like promising not to play with a weapon that she didn’t even like in the first place. After Soren was done with her, Ada walked away from Yshwa and straight into my arms, where she belonged. Yshwa’s teachings included a lot about repentance and forgiveness and being white as the snow of a bleached lamb, the general gist being that you could fuck up and start over, and Ada believed in it until I was born and then she didn’t.
She tried to, since it seemed like a betrayal to lose faith so deeply, to be that lost, but she just couldn’t believe that she would ever be clean again. Now that I was there, with my sleek skin and wet hair, she was probably right. I couldn’t be excised. Life moves in only one direction and things couldn’t go back to what they used to be: bright and untouched, with Ada being ignorant of what our shared body now meant and what it could be used for. All that mattered was this, and I told her—I had to use the body first, before they did.
Yshwa didn’t give up on Ada, which was touching, I suppose. He started to materialize inside her mind, as if he was one of us, as if he belonged there. He was trying to reach her but I never liked him, so I blocked him at every chance. He had too much light inside him, it was always reflecting off the marble and glaring into my eyes. I would have to pull in shadows just to soak it all up. But it wasn’t difficult to keep him away from Ada; she didn’t believe him anyway, that he would take her back. Yshwa kept trying to tell her what it would take her three years to hear, that she hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was so hurt and broken that she heard nothing. The only one who was listening to him was me, and he could tell I didn’t care. Yshwa had this way of looking at me, with this half-loving, half-sad face, his head tilted to one side and darkness drifting off his shoulders from the shadows I tried to throw on him.
“I’m just trying to help her, you know.” His voice was tucked and soft. I didn’t care.
“I don’t care,” I told him. “Just go away.”
“I want to help you too. I can help you too.”
“I don’t need your help. Go away.”
“Asụghara,” he said, and my name sounded like a spring bubbling in his mouth.
I glimmered in and out impatiently. He was sitting cross-legged on the marble, wearing bone-colored linens, his hair short and curled this time. I stood by her eyes, looking out, dressed in matte black. The shadows were good at sticking to me.
“Do you really think what you’re doing with Ada is helping?” he asked, and I could feel my temper growing my nails out, long and pointed, dark red like his blood an hour after they pierced his side. I folded my arms and stared at him. I wanted him to leave.
“Are you angry with me?” he asked.
“I don’t want you here,” I told him. “You make her sad. You remind her of too much shit. You know I don’t give a fuck about you, but you still matter to her, and this”—I gestured at his presence on my marble—“all this does is make it harder. For her.”
He looked at me as if I was a wound. “You’re so far away from home,” he said, so quietly that I thought he was talking to himself. Then he added, “I’m not leaving her. You understand?”
“Then you’re an idiot,” I snapped. “It doesn’t matter whether you say you’re leaving her or not. You don’t want to hear word—Ada is not talking to you anymore.”
“She talks to me all the time,” Yshwa shot back. “She’s crying, she’s screaming, the girl is sorry all the time. There’s so much guilt over her eyes, it covers everything else.”
I scoffed at him. Gods always think everything is about them. “Biko, that’s not talking. That’s basically her telling you good-bye. As in, you’re behind her while I’m in front. In fact, I’m around her. I’m everywhere. She tells me what she’s too ashamed to tell you.”
“You are the thing she’s ashamed of,” he reminded me. “And I hear everything anyway.”
I was amazed at how well I was keeping my temper. “Clap for yourself. She’s still not talking to you. So go away.”
He stood up, towering above me. “I’ll be here, Asụghara. Ada knows that.”
“She has me.” I couldn’t help snarling at him when I said it. “It’s enough.”
Yshwa touched my cheek and his palm felt like wet silk. “I’m not ashamed of you,” he said, as if it was nothing. “You know I love you.”
I jerked my head away. “Fuck you.”
He gave me that damn look again as he left, the fucking resurrected bastard, but I didn’t care, I was just glad that he was gone. He wasn’t getting her back. Ada was mine, I told myself, standing in the empty marble.
She was mine.