Table Six, Episode 3: Visiting Day

Office of the Vice Principal Academics. Wednesday, 3:16 PM.

"I was checking a date, sir." Ife's voice came out higher than her own. "For the article. When the exam office was built."

Mr Ekpo looked at the register in her hands. Then at her face. He took his time with both.

"2009," he said. "It was built in 2009. You won't find that in July."

He held out his hand. She gave him the register. He slid it back into the drawer, closed the drawer, and turned a small key in its lock.

Then he did something worse than shouting. He smiled.

"Finish your article, Ifeoluwa. Make me sound kind." He sucked his menthol sweet. "And be careful what you put in that magazine. Some stories are true. Some stories are just printed."

She walked out of the admin block without feeling her legs.

He hadn't reported her. He hadn't even asked why.

A teacher who catches a student going through his drawer and doesn't report it is a teacher who already knows exactly what the student found.

---

Amina House. Wednesday Night.

Ife didn't tell Zee about the name.

She lay awake and went through it again and again. Zee had a brass key that had appeared in her locker. Zee knew Baba Sule's sleep schedule to the minute. Zee had seen Kamsi leave the admin block, she said, and kept quiet for three months, she said.

Don't trust the one who cried the most.

Across the dormitory, Zee's bed was empty for twenty minutes after lights out. When she came back, she smelled of outside: wet grass, night air.

Ife pretended to be asleep.

The phone in the Chemistry book stayed silent all night.

Somehow that was worse.

---

The School Field. Visiting Sunday, 12:30 PM.

On visiting days, Heritage Hills turned into a carnival.

Cars lined the drive all the way back to the gate: Camrys, Siennas, one gold Lexus that everyone pretended not to stare at, a danfo full of somebody's extended family. Mats and folding chairs covered the field. Every shade tree had a family under it. The air was thick with fried chicken, jollof, moi moi, and the sound of mothers saying "You've lost weight, are they not feeding you?"

Aunty Bukky arrived forty minutes late with a cooler the size of a small fridge.

"Ifeoluwa! Come and greet me properly." She crushed Ife into a hug that smelled of Dior and car air-freshener. "Look at you. SS3! Your mummy called from Manchester last night, she says you should read your books and stop writing gist for that magazine."

"I'm doing both, Aunty."

"Do one well." She opened the cooler like a treasure chest. Party jollof. Chicken. Dodo, still warm. Two bottles of zobo with ginger. "Eat. You look like somebody is chasing you."

Ife ate. For ten minutes, she let herself be a girl with a full plate and an aunty who fussed. It felt like coming up for air.

Then the convoy arrived.

---

Three black SUVs rolled up the drive with their hazard lights on, like the school was a state function. Men in suits got out first. Then Chief Ifeanyi Eze-Obi, tall and broad in a wine-coloured agbada, waving at nobody in particular.

Mrs Oyelaran practically ran to greet him. Mr Ekpo was a step behind her, fountain pen gleaming, both hands extended for the handshake.

"Chairman of the Board of Governors," Aunty Bukky said, chewing. "He paid for that new computer block. His name is on the wall in gold. Is his son not your friend?"

"Kamsi."

Kamsi had come out to meet his father. He stood very straight in his prefect blazer while the Chief clapped him on the back and turned him towards the cameras that one of the aides was holding. Proud father, Senior Prefect son. Click, click.

The Chief put one hand on the back of Kamsi's neck and squeezed. Smiling for the photo.

Kamsi flinched. It was tiny. Ife would have missed it if she hadn't spent three years learning to watch people.

Then the Chief leaned down and said something into his son's ear, and Kamsi's face went completely blank. Like a light switched off.

Across the field, Mr Ekpo was watching them too.

---

The Almond Tree. 1:40 PM.

Ife almost didn't see her.

A small girl in a JSS3 uniform, alone on the low wall under the almond tree at the far edge of the field. No mat. No cooler. No family. Just a sachet of water and a book she wasn't reading.

Ife knew her face before she knew her name. The same narrow chin. The same way of sitting very still, like she was trying to take up less space.

"Damilola?"

The girl looked up. Dayo's eyes. Without the glasses.

"Senior Ife." She stood up quickly, the way juniors do. "Good afternoon."

"Sit, sit. Please." Ife sat beside her and put a foil pack of jollof and chicken on the wall between them. "My aunty cooked for ten people. Help me."

Dami hesitated. Then she ate like someone who had been pretending not to be hungry all morning.

"Your mummy isn't coming?" Ife asked gently.

"Transport is too much." Dami wiped her fingers carefully on a tissue. "And she's been going to the police station every week. They say he's seventeen, he'll come back on his own."

Ife went very still. "Come back from where?"

Dami looked at her. "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"Dayo left home three weeks ago. Before resumption. He packed one bag and said, 'Tell Mummy I'm going to fix it.' That's all." Her voice was steady in the way that only happens when you've cried all the crying already. "Nobody has seen him since."

The noise of the field seemed very far away.

"Dami. Does he have his phone?"

"No. The school took it the day they sent him home. Mr Ekpo took it from his pocket in front of everybody. Mummy asked for it back twice. They said it's school property now until the investigation is finished." She looked at her hands. "But he texts me."

"From his number?"

"Every night since I came back. Are you okay, Dami? Are you eating, Dami? Don't tell anybody, Dami." Dami's mouth twisted. "And at first I was so happy, Senior Ife. I was so happy, I cried."

"At first?"

Dami pulled out her school ID card on its lanyard and turned it over. On the back, in tiny slanted handwriting with circles over the is, someone had written: Lola. Be brave. D.

"Dayo wrote this for me in JSS1," she said. "He has never called me Dami in my life. Not once. Since I was born, I've been Lola to him. Only to him."

She looked up, and her eyes were full.

"So who is texting me with my brother's phone?"

---

Behind the Chapel. 4:50 PM.

The visitors were leaving. Car doors slammed. Mothers shouted last instructions out of windows. Aunty Bukky had hugged Ife twice and told her to rub Robb on her chest because she sounded "somehow".

Ife found Tolu behind the chapel, sitting on the steps of the vestry door. The door with the oiled hinges.

Tolu didn't run this time. She looked like she had been waiting.

"It was you," Ife said. "The note in my hymn book. You wrote it."

Tolu closed her eyes.

"Yes."

One word, and Ife felt the ground tilt.

"There was an envelope in my locker on Saturday. Before resumption. Inside was Dayo's Further Maths notebook, so I could copy his writing. A typed sheet with exactly what to write. Twenty thousand naira." Tolu's voice was a thread. "And a photocopy of an exeat form I forged in SS2 for a girl in Moremi House. My handwriting, my mistake. Do this, or Mrs Oyelaran gets this."

"Who sent it?"

"I don't know! There was no name. I swear on my mother." Tolu's hands were shaking. "I put the note in your hymn book after the Saturday choir practice. That's all I did. That's all."

"And Tuesday night? In the chapel? Humming?"

Tolu stared at her. "That was you?"

"Was it you?"

A long pause. "I needed to see if you'd found it. The typed sheet said, If she doesn't find it by Wednesday, you'll write another one. I didn't want to write another one, Ife. I didn't want any of this."

"Then why did you cry for two days in July?"

Tolu's face crumpled.

"Because in June," she whispered, "someone asked me for Dayo's locker combination. They said it was for a prank. Glitter in his books, for his birthday. I knew it because I'd seen him open it in the lab." She pressed her fists against her eyes. "Two weeks later they found the exam papers in that locker. And I knew. I knew I'd helped."

"Who asked you, Tolu?"

Tolu lowered her hands. She looked past Ife, out towards the hostels, where the girls of Amina House were already drifting back with their buckets and their coolers.

"Zee," she said.

Ife couldn't speak.

"Zee asked me. And she's the one who screamed the loudest." Tolu laughed, a horrible small laugh with no joy in it. "You know what the note said. I wrote it myself. I just didn't know it was true."

Ife opened her mouth. Then closed it. Then made herself ask the question that had been burning her since Wednesday.

"Did you sign my name in the exam office register?"

Tolu blinked. "What register?"

"The key register. The first of July. My name, my signature."

"No. Ife, no, I've never even seen..." Tolu stopped. Something passed over her face. "Your signature has a tail. A long one, at the end. Like a grown-up's."

"How do you know that?"

"Because last term," Tolu said slowly, "somebody asked me to teach them how to do it."

The bell for evening roll call began to ring across the compound. Long, harsh, final.

"Who?" Ife grabbed her arm. "Tolu. Who?"

But Tolu was looking over Ife's shoulder now, and all the colour had gone out of her face.

Ife turned.

Senior Folake was striding towards them across the grass, torch in hand even though it was still daylight.

"Adeniran! Amina House, now. Box inspection. The principal is waiting for you."

"For me?"

"For you."

---

Amina House. 5:10 PM.

Forty girls stood at the ends of their beds with their locker boxes open, like soldiers. Nobody was talking.

In the middle aisle stood Mrs Oyelaran in her Sunday gele. Mr Ekpo, hands behind his back. The house mistress, Mrs Danjuma, looking sick.

And Kamsi. Senior Boy Prefect. Badge shining. Hands in his trouser pockets.

Boys weren't allowed in Amina House. Ever. But prefects came with teachers for inspections, and today he had come.

He didn't look at Ife when she walked in.

"Miss Adeniran," the principal said. "Open your box, please."

It was already open. Somebody had unlocked it.

"I'll do it," Mr Ekpo said pleasantly, and stepped forward.

He didn't search. He didn't even look around. He reached past the Indomie, past the Peak milk, past the garri, and lifted out the big box of Golden Morn.

Underneath it lay a brown envelope that Ife had never seen in her life.

He opened it slowly, so the whole room could watch. He drew out the top sheet and held it up in the evening light.

HERITAGE HILLS COLLEGE. SS3 MOCK EXAMINATION. CHEMISTRY. PAPER 2. CONFIDENTIAL.

Forty girls gasped at once.

"That's not mine," Ife said. "Ma, that is not mine, I've never..."

"It was in your box," said Mr Ekpo.

"Somebody put it there!"

"That," said Mrs Oyelaran tiredly, "is exactly what Oladayo Martins said."

The room tilted. Ife looked at Kamsi. He was staring at the floor.

She looked for Tolu, who had slipped in at the back, white as chalk.

She looked for Zee.

Zee was standing in the doorway behind Kamsi. She had not come in. Her face was wet. Her hands were behind her back.

Then, in the silence, something buzzed.

Not loud. But the dormitory was so quiet that everybody heard it. A dull vibration coming from the inside pocket of Ife's Sunday skirt, where she had moved the phone that morning because of the rumours about inspection.

Mr Ekpo held out his hand, palm up.

"Give it to me, Ifeoluwa."

Her fingers were numb. She took out the black Tecno. The screen was lit.

One new message. From Dayo's number.

Now you know how it felt.

Ife stared at it.

Mr Ekpo's hand was right there in front of her. Open. Empty.

Mrs Oyelaran was holding the envelope.

Kamsi's hands were still in his pockets.

And in the doorway, Zee's hands were still behind her back.

The phone buzzed again.

Don't cry, Ife. Crying never helped anybody in this school.

To be continued in Episode 4.