Chronicles Of A Runs Girl - S01 E07

2 years ago

Chronicles Of A Runs Girl - S01 E07

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 7

Thanks for coming

I was marching to the song playing on my iPod and as such I was oblivious of the world around me, and of the car that had slowed down to a crawl beside me.

Not until an arm reached out of the front window and pulled my arm bag did I sense danger and feel the need to cry out and flee.

But the arm belonged to a babe, a fellow student, and the car was being driven by First Lady, the so-called biggest babe on campus.

As my heartbeat returned to normal, the car pulled up ahead of me and parked on the sidewalk, blocking my path. I waited for someone to come out. But it was First Lady and four of her deputies; of course they expected me to walk over to them.

First Lady and I are not friends, this I must stress. She’s one of those girls on campus who manage to travel to Dubai frequently, own a neat Tokunbo, and arrange girls for their ‘big boy’ friends. She’s a pimp, for want of a better embellishment. But her real claim to fame is the fact that she was the first babe on campus to get a boob job, and most likely the only – at least that we know of. Over one overseas trip she went from a 34 B to a 36 D, and with her inflated assets came an inflated ego to match, and a flock of worshiper admirers. Exactly why getting a boob job should suddenly make a girl popular amongst her girlfriends still baffles me. Men, maybe. But girls?

I leaned to look into the car through the front passenger window and I recognised the other girls – her inner caucus. I wasn’t friends with any of them. Not enemies; but we don’t talk – or greet. I felt them eyeing me as if we had a grudge from before-before.

First Lady spoke: “There’s a private party tonight. Some guys from London. Can you come?”

Till today I hate myself for my response. “Whose party?” I asked.

The sidekick answered me. “London big boys,” she said in a boastful manner.

I wanted to tell her what one ‘London boy’ had recently done to me – God let me catch him. But come to think of it; was he even really a London boy or was that all just part of his mugunification of me? How does one even tell a true London boy from a 419ner who just wants to chop and run? By his accent? Even I have been asked several times if I studied abroad – on account of the way I speak. We all watch DSTV after all, and if musicians can do it, why can’t the rest of us?

“I can’t come out tonight,” I said, and with that the sidekick looked at my crotch as if she expected to see evidence of my reason through my jeans.

At that precise moment I felt more shame than I’ve felt in a very long time. They had invited me to prostitute myself and I had turned them down using language that they understood. No one else would have known that ‘I cannot come out tonight’ means ‘I’m on my menses,’ and no one would have used that language if they were not part in the game.

Ever since Kike’s guy said to her ‘I didn’t know you were an ashewo like that,’ I had been thinking about his words night and day and I was yet to fully convince myself of the way I had convinced myself that I am NOT an ashewo like that – or like any other way. But here I was, being approached byogbologbos,and I was talking to them in their own secret language.

First Lady adjusted her Gucci shades and turned the ignition.

“You can still come,” she said, “There will bethanks for coming.”

And she drove off.

Thanks for coming: another industry term. But my mind was made up; I might hustle, but only out of necessity. I wasn’t like them.

On my way home from school that day my phone kept vibrating ever few minutes but I had stopped checking who it was. I was even considering switching it off but then they would surely know I was intentionally avoiding their call.

I walked into our room and found over ten girls inside: the usual crowd, a couple of girls from next door, a girl I didn’t know kneeling over an open suitcase full of clothes – the centre of everyone’s attention, Mama standing over the little crowd gathered round the suitcase, and Clara lying face down on the mattress, naked to her pants, another stranger rubbing her back.

The chocking smell of Rub was thick in the room. I saw an open can of it on the bed, next to the girl knelling over Clara. I hate the smell of Rub, but whatever was going on there was more interesting than the girl who had come to sell stuff.

“Clara, wetin do you?” I asked.

Mama, the only one who bothered to greet me (the girl really does have manners, howbeit shadowed by the overpowering thickness of her razzness), filled me in:

“You remember that her banker bobo? She followed him to gym!”