Chronicles of a Runs Girl - S01 E02

2 years ago

Chronicles of a Runs Girl - S01 E02

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 2

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The policemen listened to our story as told by Mama and asked us if we wanted to come to the station to make a statement.

“He is on the bridge!” Mama shouted at them. “You can still catch him!” I was thinking the same.

One of the officers explained their position: “See ehn, just go and do thanksgiving that he did not succeed. By now he would have run away. How do we know where to catch him?”

Mama pointed out that we could take them to his hotel room but the same officer explained that “hotel people don’t like that kind of trouble. They won’t even let us see the man. Just go home and you too, stop doing ashara.”

We stayed with the policemen, partly out of having been placed under arrest and partly out of not wanting to be alone, and we listened to them tell stories of girls who had barely escaped ritual killers, just like we had. When they were ready to leave we realised we were also free to go. We begged them to drop us home and, surprisingly, they obliged.

When we got to the boys’ quarters on Peeple Road that we share with four other girls, there was no light. Clara, whose real name is Nkem, opened the door for us because they had locked the padlocks from inside.

“From where you ashewos dey come from this night?” she asked and thus unleashed Mama’s impatience to narrate our ordeal all over again.

Clara woke Toyin, Toyin woke Beatrice, Beatrice woke Antina who woke two other girls I didn’t know and who had taken my spot and Mama’s spot on the mattress.

Clara lit a kerosene lamp and the girls listened in silence as Mama embellished the story with magic rings and hidden charms. At the end of her tale the girls exchanged looks then burst out into laughter.

I was trying to see the humour when one of the strangers explained it to me.

It wasn’t a new thing; in fact, many sharp girls had fallen for the same trick. The boy wasn’t a ritual anything; he simply didn’t want to pay us and he tricked us into running away.

The girl, whose name turned out to be Kenny, assured us that if we went back to the hotel we would be told that the occupant had checked out, probably on his way to Abuja as he claimed.

To say I was pained is an understatement. But Mama preferred her own interpretation and hung on to the ritual story, no doubt, to be repeated to many a girl in the days to come. I only wished that she would leave my name out of it.

I was still smarting from being played so deftly when Kenny asked if we had checked our bags. Mama asked why, but I had clocked. I opened my bag up to the glow of the lantern and searched frantically. I emptied the contents of the bag onto the floor and searched the inner pockets. My money was gone.

That morning, as I lay on the crowded mattress, seething with anger and loathing the alarm that would soon go off to wake me up to get ready and go to school, I prayed to God to let me see that boy again. I didn’t tell God what I planned to do with him when I saw him.

My name is Amaka, by the way. But people call me Juliet.