"What are you looking for in my bag?" Dayo asked again, lifting the stainless cup filled with cold water to his dark lips. He moved closer and downed all the liquid, then resulted to placing the cup back into his cupboard.
Kelvin found himself in a puzzled fret and thought of the possible ways he could slide out of that very occurrence. He could lie and claim he searched for something else more trivial but something about saying the truth spiralled through him and so he did.
"I was-" he stopped, biting his lower lip so a newer shade of pink formed. "I was looking for the other memory card. Listen Dayo," he leaned closer, resting his palms on his knee in a way that showed sincerity. "I don't want Martins to do that dare! Let's just end all of this!"
Dayo said nothing, but broke into a cracking laughter and then wrapped his palm over his lips suddenly remembering the inappropriateness at that very odd hour of the day. He briefly gazed about and at the far end, the senior faced the cold wall in a deep sleep.
"I don't have the memory card anymore, I sent it home." He said. Kelvin said nothing and quickly heaved a sigh. He wasn't quite sure why he was relieved but he sure was. Whatever video Martins was threatened with was still in it and Martins still had the pen cam but yet, he sighed. A long weary sigh.
"Let's agree to never play a game like that ever again," Kelvin said, but Dayo was far drowned in sleep.
*****
The visiting day drew nearer as days faded into shades of grey and dark blue nights and then back up into orange and a bright yellow and once, a red or near red. Students envisaged that time of the month, clamouring in weird groups around their guardians and matrons to reach home. Some of the many others with snuck in cell phones, had easy access to their siblings well aware of their stunts.
Mary walked into the staff room and towards Mr. John, hoping she could borrow a minute or two from his generous self and call home. He nodded and placed a smaller cellphone in her front. She sighed, lifting it up to punch in the number Dominic had made her learn should any need arise. She had a need, her blocked airways slowed her breathing, causing her to clutch unto anything- her desk's leg, her bunk and gasp for breath. Even though she had proven herself hardworking, there were triggers. The dusty winds dancing around in tiny whirls made her pound her chest repeatedly. Some other times she felt choked, a suffocating need to have an inhaler and so she pushed in the rubber button with a green ink scratched off to have only a small remnant left.
"Who is this?" She heard the voice she hadn't properly bargained for. The near high pitched voice seemed to throw her off and a back and forth debate as to whether or not she should switch off the phone stirred in her head.
"M-Ma, it's Mary," She said instead. Mr. John fixed his gaze on a newspaper and would occasionally look up in noticing her hysteria. A tear clogged up in her lids threatening to pour out, she would cough into her folded arm because she hadn't the decency of a handkerchief.
"Mary who?" Maureen asked, "Which Mary? What are you doing calling my husband? What's your business with him?"
"Mary your house help," she replied. Mr. John had looked up again, a sad pitiful frown downing the corners of his lips. Perhaps he wondered more how anyone would send a help to a very expensive school and not one of the shambles people gloated about when they emphasized how they washed up the lives of their house helps.
Once, Mary recalled Maureen's friend visiting. Her rants were endless, as she complained bitterly of the maid she had thoroughly invested on and how the young girl stole from her.
"I took her to school, can you imagine? Her parents could not afford the decency of basic education and I helped her life. Can you see it? Okwa ifugo?" Mary would slowly fix biscuit pieces one after the other from its pack in a half circle beside the tall tumbler and even more slowly, the pace at which she poured the orange drink into a glass. She tried to grasp the details and feared her aunt would punish her more with the thought that she might one day steal from her as well.
Her aunt scrunched her face in the manner disappointed people did. She wrapped her arms around her wrapper that draped freely over a single strapped singlet and stared intently at Mary. Due to the fact Maureen's friend, Aunt Pauline as Ashley fondly called, was a regular visitor, Maureen thought it unnecessary to hide up any extra revealing flesh or pad her cheeks with make-up.
"Ezioku? Do you mean this?" Maureen asked.
"I mean it oh! You need to watch your maid very well oh," Aunt Pauline replied, sipping loudly from her glass cup.
"-and here my husband is trying to take my maid to Ashley's school," Maureen added, flicking her fingers in disgust. She said 'my maid' repeatedly as though Mary had no identity and in an awkward third person conversation even though Mary was standing right there and had asked gently if she should pour more drink.
"Mba, No, I'll pour for myself," Aunt Pauline replied instead, dismissing Mary's presence with a wave of her hand. Mary thought quite often that Aunt Pauline visited more often than expected because she had lost her husband and indeed she was right. Pauline always returned back to her house with a full drink extra and many other things Maureen freely released after talking for long hours about who insulted her at work or about someone she tagged unfortunate. That was the time Mary had learned that the young girl Aunt Pauline talked about, attended a secondary school at the outskirts of their large town. The name sounded primitive and local and she imagined a falling ceiling with an array of teachers and their missed classes without any accountability, and a sandwich of students packed up in a classroom.
"Oh! Mary?" Her aunt asked, "What is it? Is anything wrong with Ashley?"
"No ma, Ashley is fine. Ma please I need an inhaler. Ma I can't breathe most times and it is as if something blocked my lungs," she said.
"Inhaler kwa? I will use inhaler and buy inhaler for you as well? So this is how you used to call my husband when I'm not there right?" She asked.
"No ma!" Mary replied. A cough throbbed her chest and she wanted to spit out the thick mucus that she felt was hanging there in mockery over her air sacs. She coughed so her aunt could hear and trust she was telling the truth, but her aunt had instead digressed so deeply on the fact that she disturbed Dominic. It didn't help that Mr. John's phone speaker was left on and shuddered with her rants as the phone vibrated. She felt Maureen's presence in her oblique form, raising her hands in the air to slap her. She would feel numbness at first, then adjust to the pain. A scar might be left, but that was it- another memory that would be left to narrate someday.
The other end of the call went off and a beep told her it had been cut. She slowly pulled out the phone and placed it on his table, pushing her knee out and thanking him before leaving. Her shoulder pressed against the many others that stood in and around the staff room, awaiting their turns to call home. She brushed through Martins, who was in a disturbingly long call with his mother outside the staff room. He would giggle, drawing curves with his squeaky black leathered shoe on the cold cement as he spoke about everything. He asked about his father, the ministry and the Oil and Gas business run at the sides, he asked about her health when she coughed once and about Sola in the university. He wanted her to bring his outfit for the End of the year dinner party and begged she added one of Sola's exquisite black gowns that had faux black diamonds knitted to it. "It is for a friend," he said.
*****
Ashley trudged to her class with two full polythene bags that smelled of richness and a branded white bag. The visiting was over and evening had descended, leaving the school sparsely filled with parents. The class was empty and so she walked in, with the intention of trying out the clothes her mother had selected for the dinner party. It would be a lot easier to try it out there and seal it up until the weekend so that everyone would gawk on it for the first time than trying it out in the dorms and letting every girl's eye become overly used to it.
She opened the bag, which had the brand name pasted in a bold font across it and lifted first a black gown which she had grown used to. It had feathery hairy tufts sticking out from the under and felt silky. It was the previous year's Christmas dress she wore selectively to church. She hurriedly dug out the other silver dress and the left leg of a silver heel fell out. The dress had strips of shimmery thread glisten under the fluorescent glow in class. She heard footsteps approaching and impulsively dunked the clothes into the bag she drew it from. When the figure intercepted towards the class, she hissed on realization of who it was.
"Big head," she had started, "you scared me."
"So you're now calling me big head? Interesting," Kelvin said, marching towards his desk with a smile forming on his once expressionless face.
"I know you don't know fashion, but which of these gowns should I wear for the dinner party?" She asked, letting the two dresses up with both hands. He stared at one and then seriously into the other. The silver dress.
"The Ash," he said.
"You mean the silver?" She asked and he nodded. "Why? My mum likes it too though, but why? Why is it better?" She asked again.
"I don't know, maybe it's because your name is Ashley? It's only normal you wear the one befitting for your name," he had said and she smiled, revealing a dimple he hadn't noticed before.
Her mother handed over the bags while she had finished a full plate of jollof rice with carrot toppings and green peas scattered evenly about the mix. She had handed Mary a plate also and so Mary glued herself to the seat feeling distant, feeling left out of the chats while scooping the jollof into her mouth. She wanted to talk as well but drowned her words with the repeated glasses of water she drank.
"Do you think Martins would like it too?" Ashley asked, running her fingers around the polished ends of her wooden desk.
Kelvin stood from his seat at the far end and walked leisurely towards her, his red checked shirt seeming blazingly hot. "Are you more worried about what Martins would think?"
"It would be nice to know I looked good to him at least," she said. Her eyes seemed dewy like it would rain out tears, but she didn't or rather wasn't going to. Kelvin wanted to say something about not letting other people's opinion design her choices, but he didn't. He knew he would love to look good for Mary as well.
"Can I borrow the black gown?" Kelvin asked in an ill fashioned manner that seemed entirely out of place. Ashley first let out a look of surprise and then suddenly straightened the folds her forehead caused when she realized what he wanted it for.
"You guys want to do another dare involving wearing a girl's cloth?" Ashley asked, a faint tinge of memory sweeping in, in her thoughts.
"No," Kelvin laughed, feeling the silky gown by the sides. "It's for Mary. Can you please give it to her?"
Ashley nodded slowly, unsure why she had agreed to something she knew ordinarily she wouldn't have. Perhaps it was the pleading look in his face or the illusion she created to make it look so. Her walk towards the hostel felt endless and it didn't help that she had eaten a lot that pulled her weary self down. The night preps during visiting was cancelled and everyone prepared for the next morning, a Sunday morning, for morning mass.
Piles of used up packs of provisions lined up at the hostel's middle and endless chats about home, the latest release of movies and all that could be absorbed within the short frame of the visiting hours filled the air. Sometimes the girls stopped to laugh in an uncontrolled hysteria or argued in raised voices that caused strains to their lungs, enunciating quite intensely over a particular subject.
Mary was seated on the flattened mattress that rested on her bunked bed. Her fingers scribbling helplessly on her diary as her eyes grew sore. She held her throat and coughed, feeling suffocated. She could die and no one would ever know. Everyone seemed to be interwoven at the other end of the hostel and sewn into a tasty story that she had no particular interest in. In between rapid writing and light sobs, she started to bleed on the open sheet. It trickled from her nostrils and then she closed up a hole with her finger, running outside.
Ashley stepped into the hostel almost immediately and dropped the bags on her bed. The feathery end of the black gown peeked out and she released an exasperated sigh turning towards Mary's bed but missing the lean figure on it. She turned towards Stella who sat keenly on her spring bed, absorbed in the conversation that soon blossomed into a budding war. Her eyes met with the two girls that had torn themselves apart from the crowd and fixed their index fingers at each other in a high pitched word exchange. It was supposed to be an argument about which actor in a movie looked more handsome.
"Stella, have you seen Mary please?" She asked and Stella shook her head, in a graceful disdain. Her fingers stitching up the broken threads in her bright yellow gown.
Ashley walked into the bathroom and into the boxroom, calling out for Mary while she did. She exchanged a short smile with Thelma in the boxroom, who was occupied with stuffing up her box with the newest toiletries she received that day. Ashley poked her head and glanced about all the girls lost in their small talk right there in the tiny room where they clogged their boxes in a file. She shrugged and retired back to her bed. She had toured the entire hostel and would see Mary the next day to hand over the dress. Inwardly, she patted herself on her back for her generosity. It seemed noteworthy that she intended handing over a dress she considered wearing to Mary for the dinner party.
Thelma drew herself from the locked boxes and into her dormitory with an ironed uniform and a polished pair of black shoes. She placed them carefully on her top mattress beside Ashley's and turned to keep the shoes underneath her bunk when she sighted the book Mary wrote into half eaten by the pillow at the edge. It didn't seem to trigger any curiosity at first, until she sighted blood stains. The red thickened circles that had spread out and it had a smear of blood stains at the edge. She pulled it out and ran her eyes over the words written in a blue ink.
"Oh my God! A suicide note," she muttered, her hands feeling cold.