Chronicles Of A Runs Girl - S01 E24

2 years ago

Chronicles Of A Runs Girl - S01 E24

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 24

All the girls were in the room, even girls from the next room. A little boy from the compound was on his knees by the door; his hands were held over his head and dried tears had formed a track down his cheeks. Janet’s things from her box were all over the floor.

Normally I’d have objected when after telling them the mirror story Kike said we should go through Janet’s box to see what else she was hiding, but I also wanted to know what she had in there. So far we had found a vibrator with a broken cable, a Gideon Bible, a half empty bottle of Olive oil and an assortment of SIM cards, but no more magic mirrors or other enchanted everyday objects (not that we’d known what one looked like).

As we picked through her things I couldn’t help wondering what my other roommates had in their boxes. Kike, who was leading the inquisition, was thinking the same.

“Oya, everybody should open their bags now!” she said.

Mama objected.

“Lai, lai! No one dey search my bag!” she said. “Abeg, abeg, abeg. What for? Amaka, me and you, we have talk.”

“We have talk?” I asked her. The only girl in the room that I could trust with my life, but right there and then, I looked at her with eyes tainted with suspicion. “Oya, talk nau.”

“It is not talk for everybody. Make we go outside.”

“No o!” Kike said, jumping up from a chair. “We must search your box first.”

She squared up to Mama and I feared for her should Mama with her hefty frame take up the challenge.

“Why is it my own box that you want to search? Open your own first nau.”

“I will open it. Why don’t you want us to open your own?”

“You dey craze. Oya, that is my box. If anyone one of you get liver, make you open am. Amaka, let’s go.”

It was Mama, after all; shame on me for thinking bad of her. I got up and followed her, but not before warning that no one should touch my bag. I did it for her.

Clara, who was holding a cane fashioned out of a branch she had torn off a tree outside, asked about the boy knelling down.

“What of this boy?”

I turned to look at the boy. He’s eyes pleaded and fresh tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Aunty, please, I won’t do it again,” he promised for the umpteenth time.

Clara swung the cane at him and he let out a yell, even though he had acrobatically dodged the lash. She followed up with a slap which registered right across his face.

“So, that is how you have been peeping all of us in this compound?” she said, “Ashewo! You will stay here till your mother comes for you.”

The threat of reporting him to his mother made him forget he had been warned not to get off his knees. He threw himself prostrate on the floor and begged profusely.

I had no pity for him. It was his face that I’d seen in the mirror. He had used a broom stick to part the curtain from outside and was feasting his adolescent eyes on near naked women. Only God knows how long he’d been doing it and what he’d seen. I could forgive him his voyeurism, but he had got me so close to madness that no punishment was enough. I already knew what I was going to do to him. I was going to take him from door to door telling everybody how he had been spying on them from their windows, then I would let him go to live in fear of who would be first to report him to his mother. Foolish boy!

Outside, Mama held my arm and took me far from the BQ.

“Eh hen, Amaka, what do they call twins in your language?”

I’d long given up trying to guess where Mama was going with anything. It was the same Mama who had once asked me if I knew how to apply for Visa, only for her to give me the gist of one girl that said that her boyfriend used the internet to apply for a Visa for her, in a Nollywood home video. With Mama, there’s just no point guessing.

I simply told her what she asked for and waited for the explanation that was sure to come in her own time.

“Ejima.”

“Eh hen. Is that one Taiwo or Kehinde?”

“No. That’s twins. Taiye is Agiliga and Kehinde is Onyisi”

“And they can use them for both of them for boys and girls?”

“Yes.”