Table Six, Episode 1: The Fifth Chair

Dining Hall, Heritage Hills College, Ibafo. Resumption Night.

The chair was still there.

Ife had told herself the school would move it over the holiday. Replace it. Burn it. Anything.

But there it was at the end of Table Six, wooden and wobbly, with two letters carved into the backrest by a compass point last February.

D.M.

Oladayo Martins. Expelled on the second of July.

Nobody sat in it. Nobody even put a bag on it. Around them the dining hall roared with resumption noise: cutlery, gist, a JSS1 boy crying for his mummy, the smell of jollof that was mostly tomato and hope.

Table Six was quiet.

"So," Zainab said, stabbing a piece of meat that was mostly bone. "We're just going to pretend he never existed."

"Zee." Kamsi didn't look up. "Not tonight."

"Then when? You want to schedule it? Send a memo?" She flicked her eyes to the new badge pinned to his blazer. Gold letters. SENIOR BOY PREFECT. "Oh sorry. You're management now."

Kamsi's jaw moved once. Then he smiled, the easy smile that made teachers forgive his late assignments and JSS girls walk into walls.

"I didn't ask for it."

"You didn't say no either."

Ife said nothing. She was good at that. Press Club Secretary, three years running. She had learned that people tell you everything if you just let the silence get uncomfortable enough.

Across from her, Tolu was drawing on a serviette with a blue Bic. She hadn't touched her food.

Ife leaned over. It was the principal's signature. Mrs Oyelaran's big looping O, the slash through the tail of the n. Perfect. Better than the original.

"Tolu," Zee hissed. "You want to land us in wahala on the first night?"

Tolu crumpled the serviette into her fist. "It's just practice."

"Practice for what? Prison?"

Nobody laughed.

The bell rang for prep. Chairs scraped. Four people stood up from Table Six.

The fifth chair stayed where it was, facing an empty plate that wasn't there.

---

Assembly Ground. Three Months Earlier.

It had rained that morning. Ife remembered the wet grass soaking through her sandals, the smell of it.

She remembered Mrs Oyelaran on the podium, holding a brown envelope like it was something dead.

"These," the principal said into the microphone, and the speakers squealed, "are the SS2 Promotion Examination questions. All nine subjects. Found this morning in the locker of a student in this school."

Six hundred students held their breath.

"Oladayo Martins. Come out."

Dayo walked out of the SS2 line slowly. Tall, thin, glasses mended at the bridge with masking tape. The boy who had scored 100 in Further Maths three terms in a row. The boy everyone said would be Senior Boy Prefect.

He didn't look at the principal. He looked straight at Table Six's corner of the line.

Straight at Ife.

His lips moved. Two words, maybe three. She couldn't read them. She had replayed it every night of the holiday and she still couldn't read them.

Then Zee screamed.

Not cried. Screamed. A sound Ife had never heard come out of a human being, and then Zee was on her knees in the wet grass sobbing so hard that two teachers had to carry her to the clinic.

Kamsi's hand had landed on Ife's shoulder. Heavy. Warm. Shaking slightly.

Tolu had stared at her shoes the whole time. Ife found out later that Tolu cried in the girls' toilets for two days straight and wouldn't tell anyone why.

Dayo was gone by lunch. His box, his mattress, his name on the scholarship board. Gone.

His phone was switched off by evening. It had stayed off all holiday.

Ife had called it forty-one times. She knew because she counted.

---

Amina House, Girls' Dormitory. 9:40 PM.

Lights out was at ten. Ife had twenty minutes and a plan.

She knelt by her locker box and dug under the provisions. Golden Morn. Two tins of Peak. A bag of garri her aunt had packed with the instruction "for emergencies only, not for every night." Six packs of Indomie.

At the bottom: Exam Focus Chemistry for SS3, thick as a brick.

She opened it. The middle three hundred pages had been carved out with a razor blade. Inside lay a small black Tecno phone, switched off, and a charger wrapped in a rubber band.

Contraband. If they caught her, it was suspension at minimum.

She didn't switch it on yet. Not with Zee two beds away pretending to read and Senior Folake doing her rounds with a torch.

Instead she took out her notebook. The green one. Press Club property, technically.

On the first page she wrote what she had written a hundred times over the holiday:

Who put the questions in Dayo's locker?

Underneath, four names. Her own included, because a good reporter suspects everybody.

Then she crossed her own name out. Because she knew where she had been that night.

Then she stared at the other three for a long time.

---

School Chapel. Sunday, 7:15 AM.

The first Sunday service of the term was always the longest. The chaplain liked to welcome everyone back with a sermon about the Prodigal Son, which felt rude to the students who had never left.

Ife sat at the end of the third pew with Zee on her left and Kamsi on her right. Tolu was up in the choir stand in her white robe, next to the big wooden organ that nobody had played since the music teacher left in 2023. The choir used a keyboard now. The organ just sat there, locked, looking important.

"Hymn two hundred and seven," the chaplain announced. "Abide With Me."

Ife opened her hymn book.

And stopped breathing.

It wasn't her hymn book. Or it was, it had her name on the inside cover in her own handwriting, but she had lent it to Dayo the last week of term and forgotten all about it. Then somehow it had come back to her pew, to her seat, waiting.

Between pages 206 and 207 was a sheet of exam pad paper, folded into a tight square.

Around her, six hundred voices started singing. Kamsi sang loudly, slightly flat, the way he always did.

Ife unfolded the paper on her lap, under the cover of the hymn book.

The handwriting hit her like a slap. Small, slanted, every i dotted with a tiny circle instead of a dot. Every 7 with a line through it, the way Dayo's uncle in France had taught him.

Ife,

I didn't do it. You know I didn't do it.

One of the four of you did.

Don't trust the one who cried the most.

Find the organ key. Then you'll understand.

D.

"Fast falls the eventide," sang the school.

Ife's hands were cold.

She looked left. Zee was singing with her eyes closed, the way she did when she actually liked the hymn.

The one who cried the most.

Zee had screamed on the assembly ground. Everyone saw it. Everyone talked about it for weeks.

But Tolu had cried for two days in a locked toilet cubicle. Nobody saw that. Ife only knew because she had been in the next cubicle on the second day, listening, and had never said a word.

And Kamsi.

She looked right. He caught her looking and winked.

Kamsi had never cried. Not once. Not even when they sent Dayo home. Ife had always thought that was strange for a boy who used to share a bunk with him.

She folded the note back into its square and slid it inside her sock.

Up in the choir stand, Tolu had stopped singing. She was looking down at the third pew. At Ife.

Then she looked at the organ.

Then she looked away.

---

Classroom Block, SS3 Science. Monday, 10:05 AM.

"Organ key?" Kamsi repeated.

Ife cursed herself silently. She had meant to be smooth about it. She had asked it during break, casual, like a question for a Press Club article. Fun facts about the chapel.

Kamsi had been leaning on her desk eating chin chin from a nylon bag. Now he was just leaning.

"For the magazine," she said. "Nobody's played that organ in three years. I thought it would make a good story. The Ghost of the Chapel."

"Hm." He offered her chin chin. She took one. "Mrs Adebanjo has it. Choir mistress. She keeps it on that big bunch with the piano key and the vestry key."

"Okay."

"Why the sudden interest in ghosts, Ife?"

His voice was light. His eyes weren't.

"It's a magazine. We need stories."

"You have a story." He leaned closer. "First term in SS3. WAEC in eight months. Mock exams in four weeks. Everyone is stressed, everyone is reading. Write about that." He straightened up and smiled for the whole class. "Leave the old things alone. Abeg."

He walked off. Three JSS3 girls passing the window giggled at him.

Ife looked down. On her desk, next to her notebook, he had left something.

A single chin chin, broken neatly in half.

It meant nothing. It was a snack.

She looked at it for the whole of Further Maths anyway.

---

Amina House. 11:52 PM.

The dormitory breathed in the dark. Forty girls, forty different snores. Somebody's mosquito net rustled. The generator had gone off at eleven, so the fans were dead and the heat sat on everyone like a blanket.

Ife lay on her side with her face to the wall and the Chemistry book open against her chest.

She pressed the power button and pulled the wrapper over her head.

The phone lit up her little cave blue. The Tecno logo. The jingle, which she had muted months ago, thank God.

One bar of network. Then two.

Then the phone started to buzz.

And buzz.

And buzz.

Messages piling in, one after another, all from a number she knew by heart. A number that had been switched off since the second of July.

Dayo.

Did you find my note?

Ife I know you're reading this.

Organ. Tomorrow night. 2 AM. Side door will be open.

Come alone.

Do NOT tell Kamsi.

Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. She typed: Where are you?

Deleted it.

Typed: Is this really you?

Deleted it.

Typed: Why me?

Before she could send it, the wrapper over her head was yanked away.

Torchlight. Full in her face.

Ife slapped the phone flat against her chest, heart slamming, already rehearsing the apology for the house mistress.

But it wasn't the house mistress.

It was Zee. Crouched beside the bed in her nightgown, torch in one hand.

In her other hand she was holding a phone. A cracked Samsung that Ife had never seen before.

"Who are you chatting with by midnight?" Zee whispered.

"Nobody. Zee, please, if Senior Folake..."

"Is it Dayo?"

Ife froze.

Zee turned her own screen around. The light from it made her face look hollow, older.

Same number. Same name. A message that had arrived four minutes ago.

Watch Ife. She's the one who signed it.

Zee's voice cracked.

"Signed what, Ife?"

To be continued in Episode 2.