Eighteen O' Five {ONGOING}🇳🇬

•~~Chapter One~~•

"What happens at the Onire festival?" I always asked but he never gave a direct answer each time.
“Don't worry, you guys will learn about everything when you get to the town.”

Suspense was his way of getting my sister’s approval all the time as she was a sucker for surprises. And when my sister agreed, it had been two against one; I lost.

Anyways, I accepted defeat and agreed grudgingly to spend Christmas in the town but the fact that we’d graduated from school just to go to another school was really annoying.
Like, I didn't finish my WAEC to suffer soon after! This was supposed to be the freest time of my life, for a while at least, before going to university. But no, my father decided he'd take us to Ibudun town to sit with other kids in some community school again, make new friends and learn about the tradition of the town.

My perfect plan of taking Tolani, my long time secondary school crush, to Ventura on a romantic lunch, getting to know each other better, and winning her heart completely was nicely destroyed. It’d been scattered, undone, everything!

Thanks to my dad, it would take another lifetime before I could get such a perfect chance again.
I honestly couldn’t understand how my twin could be so okay with this.
With those thoughts in mind, I folded my arms and scowled at Dad and Olamipo from the passenger’s seat as they shopped for the things we needed.

It was late in the evening when we arrived at the house. It was a small place but it was beautiful. It looked new compared to the other houses we’d driven past, it’s fresh coat of orange and dark green making it stand out out.

The inside was even more beautiful, it had been only with white but it looked bit untidy. The furniture and surfaces had a year’s worth layer of dust. It was in desperate need of cleaning.

I hated cleaning.

Heaven could testify that was the last thing my body wanted to do. There was nothing I hated more. I had even lied that I was sick several times in school to be exempted from the cleaning rooster.

Those excuses wouldn't work here though, as I knew dad would hear nothing of it. However, just as I began to sluggishly search for a broom and a dustpan, my heroes arrived.
They were three women in uniform green polo shirts and long black skirts and they arrived at our door holding brooms, dustpans, mops and other cleaning equipments.

They said they had been asked to come and clean the house when I asked them what they had come for. Apparently, my dad, who also wasn’t a fan of domestic work, had contacted them to help with the house cleaning.
“Good evening, sir. I didn't know you'd take so long to arrive,” one of the women said to my dad when he came to the door.

As they made small talk with him, it was easy to tell from their accents that they were not indigenes of the town.

I was only able to tell because my mom had an Ibudun Yoruba accent since she had grown up there, unlike Dad, before moving to Lagos.  The accent had stuck with her.

Communicating with my sister and I in the dialect was her way of teaching us the language but as much as she tried, we couldn't seem to learn it before death took her from us.
I grimaced, her death was still so painful to think about.

It had been so sudden and had left us numb for so long, unable function as a normal family for a long time. It was, without a doubt, the most painful thing to ever happen to us.

Like Dad and Olamipo did, I kept my pain to myself but strangely, the knowledge that what was left of our family felt the same as I did, even though they dealt with it in their own ways, was oddly comforting. It’d taken a while for us to have some sense of normalcy again but we did, though the memories of Mom never left us.
In fact, it had followed me around wherever I went, along with the trauma of having been in the same car accident that had killed my mom and changed my life forever.