Stars in a Beautiful Night | ✓

13| Kiishi

a/n: description of drug use

My right hand adjusted the tuning pegs of the brown acoustic guitar. I had not picked it up in a long time, some strings seemed to have loosened. I struck the thickest wire and was satisfied with the tune of the E string. The next was the A string, it was off. A sigh managed to escape my lips before I could fight it back. Still adjusting the guitar wires, I looked to my phone to observe the time on the time. It was 7:45pm. The day had turned from fast to too slow for me from when my course advisor demanded for my presence in her office while I was with Jide and with the efforts I used in avoiding my course mates...or soon to be former course mates.

I struck the next string with my pick and the sound—low and slightly terrible—caused my memories to spill out. The only memory I wish had never happened. The driving, the argument and the car-meet-trailer situation. I shook my head and focused on tuning the guitar again. The school had been compassionate enough to allocate two months of grieving time to me. But ever since I returned to school I did not bother to catch up. There was no need to. With or without music, school was not for me anymore.

"What do you want to do now, Ite?" I replayed the conversation with my course advisor. The middle aged senior lecturer who tried her best to stay up to date with her makeup skills was the only one school staff who called me by the name, mainly because she was a family friend.

I had found the call for papers posters on the walls more interesting than her face, I did not want to see the reaction she would give. "I am dropping out."

"What? God forbid," She was practically my second mother, "that won't happen Ite, that cannot happen you know it."

"Maami," My mother had forced her children to call any female she respected a lot, even if they were not of Yoruba origin, by that word. She said it showed we valued them as our non-biological mothers. It was a tag I liked to give, but I had grown up with identifying she and four other women with the word. Therefore now, it carried no real sense of meaning to me since I was not the one who respected them. "Its either I do that or I fail. Now that I think about it, either way, I'll fail."

She breathed out, "God forbid, you will not fail." Her voice was firm.

How many things does God forbid?

"Is it because of this your singing thing?" She talked on, reminding me of the fact that she hated my choice to go into music. She had spoken with my parents at the beginning and told them I planned to waste my intelligence. But thanks to my brother, my parents had let me continue. "Or is it because of the..."

The tone of her voice made me look at her face. She wore a heartbroken mother facial expression which made me uncomfortable. "Its just a personal decision."

"Ite, do your parents know about this decision?" I prayed she would not end up lecturing me on how hard my parents had worked to get me into school, paid my fees and made me be where I was today. I knew I was not throwing it away. I was preventing my already happy memories of school from becoming sour, because humans most times remember terrible times more than good times.