Revolt

20. Elastic Heart

“Do you not that a man is not dead, while his name is still being spoken?” – Terry Pratchett.

•••

Anjola let herself into the living room, quite stridently, without caring for the loud fuss her sneakers, was making—as its sole, kissed the terrazzo tiles. Since the house was empty and no one was home, she wasn’t racking up a ruckus by disturbing anyone and was free to be as rebellious and seditious as she wished, before her folks arrived from work.

After dumping her heavy back-pack onto the center rug, she slumped into the nearest couch—which was the two-seater sofa—and fully relaxed her back into the cushion, letting the comfy foam massage her worn out back. One of these days, she feared her backbone was going to crack under the weight of her bag, reducing her to a hunchback.

She had plans. Shower, eat brunch, play loud deafening music and dance in the carefree, blithe way she couldn’t back at school, because she believed decency was defined by being civilized and cultured, unlike her mates that had descended to the pits of animalistic, primal behavior intoxicated by alcohol—and reduced to smashed, irrational versions of themselves. Some of them had the courage to do what they did while drunk, in their clearest heads—but some would regret their actions deeply and wish they could take them back. Not her, she wasn’t going to be under that statistic of people and that was why she refrained from drinking, and had bolted from the scene, the moment the party ended.

She wasn’t a wallflower—some people did view her as one, but she was no pariah that was ignorant to the numerous pleasures characteristic of such wild, feral life. The reason why she abstained from such practices weren’t because she was the reincarnation of the holy Mary, who had a pure and untainted soul.

She didn’t know if she could claim such title since she had seen and knew things, but refused to practice because she knew how incapacitating it could be, how debilitating the effect could be to one’s sanity, how it had the power to derail her from the logical path, she had been treading all her life. The price was too costly to pay, and at the end of the day—it wasn’t worth it. People who usually went down such path, hardly ended well. She couldn’t afford not to end well. She was the only one, her parents had and were bargaining on to be the—

“You’re back early,” A baritone startled her, that she shot to her feet and scanned her surroundings, furtively as if there was a chance of a breaking and entering. Her palpitating heart slowed down, when she realized it was only her dad—Mofe, clad in his grey sleeping robe, holding a saucer filled with groundnuts, he was eating from.

From the look of things—his puffy cheeks, and his wobbly stance—she could infer he had been in bed all day. She had automatically assumed he had gone to work, like every other normal day. It was a good thing, she hadn’t progressed with her plan to play loud music yet.

“The type of noise you made while coming in, I was almost afraid you weren’t moving of your own free will, and that someone was probably maybe dragging you, and you were wrestling with them. Matter of fact, it was pretty much what woke me up.”

“Oh, about that.” Anjola bit her lower lip, and shrunk back into her seat while Mofe lowered himself onto the seat, by her right. She bought time, trying to calibrate her thoughts to come up with an explanation worthwhile to explain her earlier lousiness. Kicking off her mud-stained Adidas, she flexed her toes and sighed. “Yeah, the class party has ended so I’m here. Although, it hasn’t ended technically anyway, as there is still stuff going on, but its stuff I’d rather not be around to watch.”

“Stuff you’d rather not be around to watch?” Mofe’s brows creased, and he gave her a curious look, while throwing a handful of groundnuts into his mouth. His next words were accompanied by the crunchy sound, of the nuts being grinded by his teeth. “Nobody came with a pornography film or something, did they?”