The Death of Vivek Oji

by Akwaeke Emezi

  I knew exactly what he meant. It felt as if we had stepped out of everything we knew before and into something else entirely, as if what had just happened couldn’t have happened on the other side, only on this side.

  “Yes and no,” I answered, my voice hesitant. “Whatever you want.”

  Vivek turned his head and uncovered his eyes to look at me. “Have you done this before?”

  I almost laughed. It was such a far cry from those days when he was the virgin and I was the one who made fun of him. Now it was as if I was starting over, as if I didn’t know anything.

  “No,” I admitted. “Never. Have you?”

  His gaze didn’t waver. “Yes.”

  I was surprised at the pang that shot through me. “Oh. Okay.”

  Vivek rolled over on his side and put his hand on my cheek, turning my face to him. “Are you jealous?” He sounded amused.

  “Fuck you,” I said, and he laughed at me.

  “You’re jealous,” he sang, then he kissed me and pulled up my shirt, touching my stomach, dipping into my jeans. “Don’t be jealous,” he whispered, as his fingers drew me out. My body bent up to the ceiling and Vivek lowered his head till his hair was a shadow spilling across my hips.

  I died at his mouth.

  It was the clearest terror and pleasure I had ever known. How was it possible that the boy who once chipped my tooth was the same one with his cheek now pressed against my navel? I could feel the shame like a shadow in my chest, but it was faint, insignificant. I didn’t care. I didn’t care. I would do it again, all of it, for him, always for him. I clutched at his head and cried out as I came, my whole body a naked wire. Vivek pulled himself back up and wrapped his arms around me. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “Hey, hey.” He tightened his hold on me. “Osita, it’s all right. It’s all right. Just breathe.”

  My fingers were clawed in the fabric of his caftan and every muscle in my body felt locked. He touched his forehead to mine, and his skin was cool. “Bhai,” he whispered. “Relax.”

  For some reason, I wanted to hit him. I couldn’t tell if he was comforting or restraining me, but his strength was much more than I’d expected. I could barely move in his hold. How stupid I had been, to assume that I’d been the one restraining him earlier, the strong one. He had stayed in my hands because he wanted to, not because I was making him. How stupid I had been, full stop. I struggled, but he wouldn’t release me.

  “Let go,” he ordered, and I felt my throat twist, sounds choked within it. “I’m here. It’s all right. Let go, bhai.” My face was pressed into his chest and when the scream made it out of my mouth, it sank against his body, the volume muffled. I was sobbing—stupid, embarrassing sobs—and Vivek put his mouth to the top of my head. “You’re safe,” he murmured. “It’s just me. It’s just you and me.”

  We lay together like that until all the tears had wrung their way out of me, until we both fell asleep, wet with each other’s salt.

  Fourteen

  Vivek

  If I didn’t love Osita already, I would have for that evening alone. For coming to find me, for kissing sense into me. For breaking himself apart, trusting me with his secret.

  Later that night, I woke up to him unhurriedly kissing my neck. He was gentle as he pulled up white handfuls of my caftan, gentle when he touched me with spit-wettened hands, when he entered me—you would have thought it was my first time, not his.

  The sheets dragged in fractions beneath us. I turned my head to look back at him. “I’m not going to break, you know.”

  Osita rocked inside me slowly. “I know.”

  “I’m serious.” It was hard to think with that much of his skin all around me. “You don’t have to take it easy.”

  He pushed deeper, one glorious inch at a time, and I groaned. “I know,” he said, his voice thick. “Just take this for now.”

  * * *

  —

  Iknow what they say about men who allow other men to penetrate them. Ugly things; ugly words. Calling them women, as if that’s supposed to be ugly, too.

  I’d heard it since secondary school, and I knew what that night was supposed to make me. Less than a man—something disgusting, something weak and shameful. But if that pleasure was supposed to stop me from being a man, then fine. They could have it. I’d take the blinding light of his touch, the blessed peace of having him so close, and I would stop being a man.

  I was never one to begin with, anyway.

  Fifteen

  Juju knew nothing about her half brother until she saw him with her own two eyes.

  She’d been all the way over by the post office, which was two buses away from home and heavily crowded thanks to the fish market across the road. Maja had warned Juju never to take an okada there—people drove so recklessly, it wasn’t safe—so when Juju got off the bus, she walked the rest of the way to the post office, dodging speeding motorbikes and tiptoeing along the edge of rank gutters. The air smelled like dead seawater.

  Juju was on her way to swap out some of her books and see if she could find something for Elizabeth at the open-air secondhand-book market that happened every Saturday at the post office. “Check if they have any Pacesetters,” Elizabeth had said. She and Juju were in a new relationship, hiding it from all their parents, and Juju had been feeling guilty about not being present enough. She was fairly sure that her father was having an affair and that her parents weren’t telling her about it, which didn’t make sense because the secret was too big, too loud. Her mother was always whispering on the phone, then shouting at her father, when they thought Juju was asleep. Her father’s voice would scorch through the night and Juju would hear the familiar thuds of his hands hitting her mother. She was surprised when he actually left—it looked too much like him letting her mother win, and Juju knew him better than that—but she was glad he was gone, glad that the air in their house was calm and they could move a bit more freely. But between her new relationship and what was happening with Vivek, Juju had been distracted. This was her first time dating a girl, and it was easier, in some ways, to focus on other things rather than on Elizabeth and the terrifying feelings Juju had about her. Still, she wanted to get Elizabeth the books. She could at least do that one as her girlfriend.

  Juju was looking through the five Pacesetters she’d managed to find, feeling victorious, when she glanced up and saw her father. She fumbled and dropped one of the books, pages fluttering in panic. Charles was standing next to a short woman with wide hips and an auburn weave-on. He was holding the hand of a young boy, maybe five or six. The child resembled Charles so strongly that Juju immediately knew what she was looking at: her father’s other family. She stepped back, merging into the people around her, disappearing. He was supposed to be in Onitsha, she thought. For business. Yet here he was, in their own town, with this woman and this little boy.

  Her first thought was to rush home and tell her mother. She’d already started pushing through the crowd, toward the bus stop, when a sick feeling hit her stomach: her mother already knew. No wonder he’d left. He had a whole other family to go home to, and he didn’t even have to leave town to reach them. Juju glanced back at her father and saw the woman smiling up at him, her teeth shining like a Colgate advertisement. That gleaming joy made Juju want to take a stone and smash it into the woman’s face.

  Just the other day she’d pressed herself against the bathroom door and watched her mother cry soundlessly while pulling out a discolored molar from her own mouth with a pair of small pliers. Maja’s jaw had been swollen for a while—she’d told Juju it was from an infection, which was true, but it was also from a fight with Charles. She hid the bruising with makeup.

  “Mama, why don’t you go and see a dentist?” Juju had asked, wincing as she watched the tooth clatter into the sink.

  Her mother gargled with peroxide, spitting a swirl of foam and blood. “You have to trav
el to see a good dentist. Sometimes even overseas.”

  “So why don’t you travel?”

  Maja’s eyes glittered with the anger she usually hid from her daughter. “Why don’t you ask your father? Tell him all my teeth are rotting in my head!” She pushed past Juju and slammed her bedroom door, leaving her daughter wavering behind her.

  Now, looking at her father in the market, Juju felt a wave of revulsion so strong it made her want to bend over the gutter and vomit everything she’d eaten that day. She wanted to kill him; maybe she would, if he ever came back home. Poison his soup or something. It couldn’t be that hard, and no one could tell her he didn’t deserve it, not with her mother’s broken heart, not with her bloody tooth left in the sink.

  Juju went home and threw the books in a corner of her room, then climbed into bed and listened to her pulse as it galloped through her. She was too angry to cry, too young to save her mother and take her away from this country and the man who had trapped her here. She covered her face with a pillow and screamed into it, and that was when the sobbing started, large and loud, stopping only when she had cried herself into an exhausted sleep.

  * * *

  —

  Juju woke up to a faint knocking from downstairs, the sound winding up the stairs in an insistent thread. She groaned and rolled out of bed, then went down to open the door. Vivek was standing outside in jeans and a green T-shirt with butterflies scattered over the front. The word Philippines was embroidered in cursive underneath. Juju recognized the shirt—her mother had passed it over to Vivek after her father refused to wear it. (“We’re in Nigeria,” he’d said. “No one is interested in your country.”)

  Vivek walked past Juju into the house. Someone had plaited his hair for him and it hung like a snake between his shoulder blades. “Were you sleeping?” he asked. “It’s still afternoon.”

  Juju closed the door behind him. “I took a nap.” Her head felt stuffed and heavy. Vivek jogged up the stairs to her room and Juju followed, watching as he spun and landed on her bed.

  “Wow,” she said, “you really have energy today.”

  He eyed her up and down. “Unlike some of us,” he retorted. “What’s disturbing you?”

  Juju shook her head. The pain was still too personal, the information too new. Juju wanted to hold it, cup it in her hands a while longer before she uncurled her fingers to expose it to others. She sat on the bed next to Vivek, then flopped back, staring at the ceiling. “Do you think I’m a bad girlfriend?” she asked.

  Vivek turned to her, lying on his side and propping up his head with one hand. “To Elizabeth? Why would you think that?”

  “I don’t know.” Juju twisted the end of one of her braids between her fingers. “I don’t know if I’m doing it right.” She hadn’t planned any of this; she hadn’t grown up with a crush on Elizabeth, not the way Osita had. Juju had been reluctant to make friends with the Nigerwives’ children, because she didn’t believe in ready-made communities—you couldn’t just throw people together and expect them to become a real support system simply because they had one or two things in common. Their mothers might have been able to do it, but that’s because they were a proper organization. It didn’t mean their children had to follow suit.

  But then Vivek came home, and Somto and Olunne showed up for him, and when they brought him to Juju’s house she’d fallen for him, in a way—not like she fell for Elizabeth later, but she and Vivek had clicked. They fit into each other’s lonely worlds. Everyone could see it; even Somto and Olunne didn’t mind seeing him and Juju grow close so quickly, maybe because as sisters they’d always known what it was like to have a best friend. For Juju it was new; for Vivek, she thought the friendship might have taken some of the sting out of Osita’s absence. But now Osita was back, and now Juju had Elizabeth. She still couldn’t believe she had a girlfriend—hurtled into each other’s lives thanks to the Nigerwives, who apparently never grew tired of shoving their children at one another.

  It wasn’t as if Maja and Ruby had meant for their daughters to fall in love, or even knew anything about it. All they’d done was start a jam-making experiment. They had a whole list of jams they were going to make: guava, mango, pawpaw jam. Maybe even some marmalade. Maja had dragged Juju into it, buying a bag of large green guavas—the kind Juju liked, crunchy and white on the inside. But Ruby suggested it might be better to make it with the other kind of guavas, the small, soft ones with pink or yellow insides, so Maja had sent Juju to Ruby’s house to collect a bag of them. “We’ll try it both ways and see which one works better.”

  Juju had rolled her eyes, but she loved her mother and the jam experiment was fun, so she went. That was the day she met Elizabeth again, and the thing Juju always remembered about it, that day, was the heat. How it pressed down through the air, wet and insistent, how it forced its way past skin until it felt like even your bones were hot. Juju caught a bus that was almost full, and sat on the conductor’s fold-out seat, the backs of her thighs sticking to the torn vinyl seat cover. The conductor was squatting by the open door, holding on to the frame of the bus as it sputtered down the road. Juju leaned away from the woman next to her, who stank of stockfish and sweat. The heat was cooking the stench, deepening it till it was overpowering, almost choking. By the time Juju reached Aunty Ruby’s house, she was fanning out the hem of her T-shirt to try and get a breeze against her skin. Aunty Ruby’s gate wasn’t locked, so Juju walked into the compound and straight to the back door. It was open, but the mosquito-net door was closed and latched.

  “Hello?” she called, wiping her forehead. “Is anyone around?”

  Footsteps came down the corridor; then Elizabeth appeared, hazy behind the green mesh of the mosquito net. She was wearing shorts and a singlet, as tall as she’d ever been. Juju stood with a polite smile as Elizabeth unlatched the door.

  “Good afternoon,” she said, wincing a little at how formal she sounded. “I’m Aunty Maja’s daughter?”

  Elizabeth stared at her for a moment, her face blank, and Juju stared right back. She remembered Elizabeth’s face, but back then Elizabeth had been a lanky, dark-skinned child with threaded hair and puffy dresses. Now she had shaved off her hair, and Juju felt herself staring at all that skin, from her scalp to her arms and legs, even the smooth cleavage that the singlet couldn’t quite cover. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Juju blushed.

  “Oh, Aunty Maja,” Elizabeth finally said, after a forever of staring silence. Her voice was deep and sweet. “You’re Juju. Come in.” She moved aside to make space and Juju tried to walk through the doorway, but it was impossible to do so without brushing against Elizabeth, who didn’t move. She just smiled and looked down as Juju squeezed past. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said, and Juju wondered if she heard a trace of amusement in her voice.

  “You, too,” she said.

  Elizabeth latched the door again and led them into the kitchen. “Do you want something to drink?”

  Her question seemed to come from a great distance. Juju had been watching her legs, the smooth bulge of her calves, the soft places behind her knees, barely paying attention to what she was saying. She had been looking at girls that way, with an interest in the texture of their flesh, for some time, but she was always afraid that they’d catch her and see into her head, into the places even Juju was a little scared of seeing. So she avoided Elizabeth’s eyes, in case Elizabeth saw how much she wanted to put her mouth on the back of her neck. She looked up, down, over at the kitchen tiles, anywhere but directly at this tall and beautiful girl. Later, once they were together, Elizabeth told her it was the most adorable thing she’d ever seen. Juju had expected to collect the guavas and leave, but somehow she was answering yes to the glass of water and then they were talking and it was a few hours before she finally left with the fruit.

  The next time they’d met, Elizabeth had come to Juju’s house, bringing jam jars for Maja, who insisted that Juju
invite her into her room, thinking they would become friends.

  Elizabeth kissed Juju for the first time that day, quickly, on her way out.

  “You don’t need to be so afraid,” she’d said. “I like you, too.”

  And that was it, that was how Juju got a girlfriend.

  * * *

  —

  I think you’re great with Elizabeth,” Vivek was saying, his long limbs splayed across Juju’s bed. “Do you think you’re doing a bad job at it?”

  Juju rolled over to her side as well, facing him. “I don’t tell her everything,” she said.

  Vivek looked at her, and his eyes were soft and dark pools, floating under long lashes. “We don’t tell anyone everything,” he said gently. They were lying close enough that Juju could feel his breath drift against her cheekbones. Suddenly the air seemed full of secrets, an iridescent bubble surrounding them.

  “What are you not telling me?” she whispered, keeping her voice inside the bubble.

  Vivek reached over and stroked a thumb across her cheek. “I tell you everything,” he said. “It’s other people I don’t.”

  “You don’t tell Osita everything?”

  His eyes dropped briefly to her mouth. “No,” he said, after a pause, dragging his gaze back up to hers. “Not everything.”

  Heat rushed to Juju’s face. She’d thought he’d forgotten—almost thought it was a dream she’d had—what happened the morning after Osita came looking for Vivek at her house. Juju had given the boys their privacy, minding her business, trying not to hear anything that was happening in the room across the corridor. In the morning, she’d woken up early and made some tea, then sat at her bedroom window, looking out at the birds in her mother’s garden. When her door creaked open, she already knew it was Vivek. He’d come up to her window seat, dropping a kiss on the top of her head before he sat next to her, tangling his legs with hers. He was shirtless and he smelled like sex. Juju leaned forward and kissed him for the first time, her mug of tea between them, her breath sharp and sweet with mint. She wasn’t sure if it surprised him, but Vivek had kissed her back, his morning breath sour on their tongues before he broke it off and nipped his teeth against her nose lightly. “Good morning,” he’d said, taking the mug away from her and sipping at it, his hair tousled and dark. He looked out of the window and the morning sun hit his face and Juju wondered why she’d just kissed him. Maybe because he had been hers and now she knew he wasn’t, or perhaps he had never been. But Vivek never mentioned the kiss, and even now Juju wasn’t sure if he was hinting at it or if she was imagining things.