Table Six, Episode 2: Two A.M.

Amina House. 11:58 PM.

"I don't know," Ife whispered. "Zee, I swear to God, I don't know what it means."

Zee's torch didn't move from her face.

"You're the one who writes everything down. You have a notebook for your notebooks. And you don't know what you signed?"

"I didn't sign anything!"

Two beds down, somebody turned over and muttered. Both girls went still until the breathing evened out again.

Ife held out her phone. Her hand was shaking, and she let Zee see it shake.

"Read mine. All of it."

Zee took it. Scrolled. Her lips moved on Do NOT tell Kamsi.

"He told you to come alone," Zee said slowly.

"Yes."

"And he told me to watch you."

"Yes."

"So either Dayo has gone mad over the holiday," Zee said, "or somebody is playing us like Ludo."

She switched the torch off. In the dark, Ife could only see the outline of her: the braids she'd retouched for resumption, the sharp shoulders of a basketball captain.

"Where did you even get a phone?" Ife asked.

"Inside my basketball. I cut it open and glued it back." A pause. "Where did you get yours?"

"Exam Focus Chemistry."

Zee snorted, very softly, and for one second it was SS1 again. The two of them giggling under a mosquito net about a boy in Jaja House with a gap tooth.

Then it wasn't.

"Two AM tomorrow," Zee said. "I'm coming with you."

"He said alone."

"He also said watch you." She stood up. "So I'm watching you."

---

SS3 Science Class. Tuesday, 8:00 AM.

Mr Ekpo came into Chemistry the way he came into everything. Slowly. Like the room had been waiting for him and could wait a little more.

He was Vice Principal Academics, which meant he controlled the timetable, the exam office, the results, and your future. He was short and neat, with a grey-touched beard and a fountain pen clipped to every shirt pocket he owned. He sucked menthol sweets all day. You could smell him coming down the corridor before you heard his shoes.

"Good morning, SS3."

"Good morning, sir."

"Mock examinations begin on the fourteenth of October." He wrote the date on the board in beautiful cursive. "As you know, there was an unfortunate incident last term."

The class went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with respect.

"This term," Mr Ekpo said, "all question papers will be stored in a new steel safe in my office. Only I have the combination. Not the exam officer. Not the principal." He smiled thinly. "Not the prefects."

His eyes moved over the class. They rested on Kamsi for exactly one second.

Then they moved on and rested on Ife.

And stayed there.

"Some people in this class," Mr Ekpo said, "were lucky last term. Let us hope their luck continues."

He turned to the board and started balancing an equation.

Ife stared at her textbook. Her ears were burning. Beside her, Tolu's pencil had stopped moving.

When Ife glanced down, she saw what Tolu had been drawing in the margin of her notes.

An organ. Every pipe, every stop, every carved rose on the side panel.

Tolu saw her see it, and closed the book.

---

Art Room. Tuesday, 1:30 PM.

The art room smelled of turpentine and dust. Nobody used it at lunchtime except Tolu, who ate there alone most days with her back against the radiator that hadn't worked since the Obasanjo years.

"Mrs Adebanjo doesn't have the organ key," Tolu said before Ife had even asked.

Ife stopped in the doorway.

"I didn't..."

"Kamsi told me you were asking. He asked me why you were asking." Tolu kept her eyes on her sketchbook. "I'm choir secretary. I know where every key is. That one went missing in July."

"Missing when in July?"

"The first week. Mrs Adebanjo thought one of the JSS boys took it for a dare." Tolu shaded something with her thumb. "She told the chaplain. The chaplain said nobody plays the organ anyway, so who cares."

"The first week of July," Ife said. "The week Dayo was expelled."

Tolu's thumb stopped.

"Tolu. Why did you cry for two days?"

It came out harder than she meant. Tolu's head came up, and for a moment her face was naked: frightened, guilty, something else Ife couldn't name.

"You were in the next cubicle," Tolu whispered. "Weren't you."

"Yes."

"You never said."

"I'm saying now."

Tolu closed the sketchbook. Then she opened it again, flipped to the back, and turned it around.

It was full of signatures. Pages of them. Mrs Oyelaran. Mr Ekpo. The chaplain. The bursar. Kamsi's father, from the plaque on the new ICT block. Ife's own aunt, from an exeat form in SS1.

And on the last page, over and over, small and slanted, every i dotted with a tiny circle:

Oladayo. Oladayo. Oladayo.

"I can copy anyone," Tolu said, very quietly. "Since primary school. I don't even have to try. It's like my hand just remembers."

"Tolu, did you write..."

The art room door banged open. A JSS2 girl, panting.

"Senior Tolu, Mrs Adebanjo says you should come to the chapel now now. The choir robes are missing again."

Tolu was up and gone before Ife could grab her sleeve.

The sketchbook stayed on the floor.

Ife picked it up. Opened it to the page of Dayo's name.

At the bottom, in Tolu's own round handwriting, a date: 12/9.

Last Saturday. The day before resumption Sunday. The day before the note turned up in Ife's hymn book.

---

Library. Tuesday, 4:10 PM.

Kamsi found her in the back corner, behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica that nobody had opened since 1998.

He didn't sit. He leaned on the shelf with his arms folded, blazer off, badge still shining.

"You went to see Tolu."

"Is it a crime now?"

"Ife." He sighed and slid into the chair opposite. Up close he looked tired. There were shadows under his eyes that hadn't been there in July. "I'm going to tell you something, and you're going to hate me for it."

"I'm listening."

"Dayo sold me Physics answers in SS1."

The library hum seemed to get louder.

"Two thousand naira. Third term. He had the answers to the test the night before. I don't know how he got them. I didn't ask." Kamsi rubbed his face. "I wasn't the only one. Half of Jaja House bought something from him at one point. Past questions, assignments, lab reports. He needed the money. His mum sells pap in Ketu. The scholarship doesn't cover provisions."

"That's not the same as stealing exam papers."

"Isn't it?" Kamsi's voice was gentle. "I loved Dayo. He was my bunkmate for four years. But you've made him a saint in your head, and he wasn't one." He leaned forward. "Whatever you think you're doing, stop. If you start digging, you'll find things about him you can't unfind. And you'll find things about the rest of us too."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's a favour."

He stood up. Pushed the chair in neatly.

"Oh, and Ife? Whatever phone you're hiding, hide it better. Box inspection is coming. I can't protect you from everything."

He walked away before she could ask how he knew.

---

Amina House to the Chapel. Wednesday, 1:51 AM.

Getting out of Amina House at night was a science, and Zee had a degree in it.

Left foot on the third step, not the second, because the second creaked. Wait at the corner for Senior Folake's snores to hit their rhythm. Through the laundry room, where the window latch had been broken since 2022. Over the low wall by the water tank.

Then the hard part: the open ground between the hostels and the chapel, with nothing but a mango tree for cover and Baba Sule's security hut in the middle like a lighthouse.

Baba Sule was awake. They could hear his little radio. Ebenezer Obey, crackly and sweet, drifting over the wet grass.

"He falls asleep at two," Zee breathed. "Every night. Like a clock."

"How do you know that?"

Zee didn't answer.

At 1:58 the radio went quiet. At 2:01, the snoring started.

They ran.

The chapel's side door, the little one behind the vestry, was supposed to be locked. Ife put her hand on the handle and pushed.

It swung open without a sound. Someone had oiled the hinges.

---

The Chapel. 2:04 AM.

Inside, the chapel was a different building. The pews were black humps. The stained-glass windows were grey. The cross over the altar caught a thread of moonlight and held it.

The organ stood in the choir stand like a sleeping animal.

They climbed the steps. Zee kept her torch pointed at the floor, the beam cupped in her fingers so it glowed red.

"Find the organ key," Ife whispered. "But the key is missing. So what do we..."

Zee was already kneeling by the organ bench. It was a long wooden box with a hinged lid, the kind where organists kept their music.

It had a small brass padlock on it.

"There," Zee said. "That's the organ key. The key isn't for the organ. It's for the bench."

"And we don't have it."

Zee looked at her. Then she reached into the neck of her nightgown and pulled out a chain. On the end, next to a small silver cross, hung a tiny brass key.

Ife's skin went cold.

"Zee. Where did you get that?"

"It came in my locker this morning. In an envelope. No note." Zee's voice was flat. "I wasn't going to tell you until I saw what it opened."

"You didn't trust me."

"I still don't." The padlock clicked open. "Torch."

Inside the bench were yellowed hymn sheets, a dead cockroach, and a brown A4 envelope that was much newer than everything else.

Ife opened it with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling.

A photocopy. One page, ruled, with a printed header: EXAMINATION OFFICE: KEY REGISTER.

Columns. Date. Time out. Time in. Name. Purpose. Signature.

Most of the page was teachers' names, boring and normal. But one line had been circled in red biro:

01/07 | 10:40 PM | 11:25 PM | K. EZE-OBI | Return of prefects' files | [signature]

The night before the expulsion. Forty-five minutes alone in the exam office.

Underneath, a yellow sticky note in Dayo's handwriting, the tiny circles over every i:

This is a copy. The original is in Ekpo's drawer. Compare them.

Zee made a sound like she had been punched.

"I knew it," she whispered. "I knew it."

"Knew what?"

"That night. The first of July." Zee's eyes were wet in the red torchlight. "I was coming back from the basketball court. Late. I saw Kamsi coming out of the admin block at like eleven-something. He saw me see him. The next morning, they found the questions in Dayo's locker, and Kamsi looked at me across the assembly ground, and I just..."

"You screamed."

"Because I understood. And I didn't say anything. For three months." Her voice broke. "I let them send Dayo home and I didn't say anything, Ife."

Ife reached for her hand.

Then the main chapel door creaked.

---

They dropped flat behind the organ.

Footsteps. Slow. Coming up the centre aisle.

A torch beam swept across the pews, along the altar, up the steps of the choir stand. It passed over the organ bench, which was still open, the padlock hanging loose.

The footsteps stopped.

Ife pressed her face into the dusty carpet. Zee's fingernails were digging into her wrist hard enough to bruise.

The torch beam held still on the open bench for a long time.

Then, softly, under their breath, the person started to hum.

Abide with me. Fast falls the eventide.

Hymn 207.

The footsteps turned and went back down the aisle. The main door creaked again. Closed.

Neither girl moved for ten full minutes.

"Who was that?" Zee finally breathed.

Ife didn't answer. She was thinking about who in this school knew that hymn number. Who had been in the choir stand on Sunday, watching her open the hymn book.

Who had been practising Dayo's handwriting on Saturday.

---

Office of the Vice Principal Academics. Wednesday, 3:15 PM.

The interview had been Ife's idea, and she had been proud of it. A Day in the Life of the VP Academics, for the first issue of the Heritage Herald. The Press Club patron had signed the request without blinking.

Mr Ekpo's office smelled of menthol and old paper. The new steel safe sat in the corner, grey and fat, with a combination dial.

He answered her questions in long careful sentences while she scribbled. Then his desk phone rang.

"Excuse me, Ifeoluwa. The principal." He turned his chair to face the window.

His top drawer was half open. A black hardcover register lay inside, with a white label on the spine: KEY REGISTER, EXAM OFFICE, 2025/26.

Ife didn't think. She reached over, slid the register halfway out, and flipped.

June. June. July.

The first of July. 10:40 PM.

Same time as the photocopy. Same purpose. Return of prefects' files.

But the name was different.

It didn't say K. Eze-Obi.

It said I. ADENIRAN.

And next to it, in blue ink, was a signature Ife had been writing since she was nine years old. The big curved I. The little loop on the A. The tail she had always been proud of because it looked grown-up.

Her signature.

Perfect. Better than the original.

Her stomach turned to water.

Behind her, the phone was placed gently back on its cradle.

"Ifeoluwa," said Mr Ekpo pleasantly, and she heard him crack a menthol sweet between his teeth.

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

To be continued in Episode 3.