For a while, they just sat there as I sniveled. If it weren’t for them, I’d have let the snot run freely down my face and pool onto my covers. What does it all matter? I thought. My mood darkened and I reached for my bed sheet to pull it back over my head. I’ll just ignore them. Eventually they’ll go away.

“Onyesonwu, just tell us,” Luyu said, softly. “We’ll listen.”

“We’ll help you,” Binta said. “Remember how the women helped me during our Eleventh Rite? If they hadn’t helped me that night, I was going to kill him.”

“Binta!” Diti exclaimed.

“Really?” Luyu said.

Binta had my full attention.

“Yes. I was going to poison him… that very next day,” Binta said. “He gets drunk almost every evening. He smokes his pipe as he does it. He wouldn’t have tasted it.”

I wiped my face again. “My mother once said that fear is like a man who, once burned, is afraid of a glow worm,” I said vaguely. I told them everything but the details of my initiation. From the day of my conception to the day I crawled into bed and didn’t want to leave it. Their faces grew distant during the part about my mother’s rape. I relished a little in forcing them to know the details. When I finished, they were so silent that I could hear the soft footsteps outside of the door. Moving down the hallway. My mother had listened to the whole thing.

“I can’t believe you kept this from us all this time,” Luyu finally said.

“You can really change into a bird?” Diti asked.

“Come on,” Binta said pulling my arm. “We have to get you outside.”

Luyu nodded and took my other arm. I tried to pull my arms away, “Why?”

“You need sunshine,” Binta said.

“I’m… I’m not properly dressed,” I said, yanking may arms away. I felt the tears coming back. Life was out there and death was, too. I feared both now. They pulled me from bed, unwrapped my night rapa and pulled a green dress over my head. We went outside and sat on the front steps of the house. The sun was warm on my face. There was no red haze blocking it, no sickly fuzzy mold growing on the ground, no smoke in the air, no looming death. After a while I quietly said, “Thank you.”

“You look better,” Binta said. “Sunshine heals. My mother says that you should open the curtains everyday because the sunlight kills the bacteria and such.”

“You made your father breathe,” Luyu said, her elbow on my knee.

“No,” I said, grimly. “Papa had passed. I only made his body breathe.”

“That was then,” Luyu said.

I sucked my teeth and looked away, irritated.

“Oh,” Diti said. Then she nodded. “Aro will teach her.”

“Right,” Luyu said. “She can do it already. She just doesn’t know how.”

“Eh?” Binta said, looking confused.

“Onyesonwu, do you know if you can do it?” Luyu asked.

“I don’t know,” I snapped.

“She can,” Diti said. “And I think your mother is right. That’s why she worked so hard to keep you alive. Mother’s intuition. You’re going to be famous.”

I laughed at this. I suspected that I’d be more infamous than famous. “So you think my mother would’ve allowed us both to die out there in the desert if she didn’t think I was so special?”

“Yes,” Diti said looking serious.

“Or if you’d have come out a boy,” Luyu added. “Your biological father is evil, and if you were a boy you would have been, too, I think. That’s what he wanted.”

Again we were quiet. Then Diti asked, “So will you stop going to school?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“What was it like with Mwita?” Luyu asked, smirking.

It was as if speaking his name summoned him, for there he was coming up the road. Luyu and Diti snickered. Binta patted my shoulder. He wore light tan pants and a long matching caftan. His clothes matched his skin so well that he looked more like a spirit than a person. I’d always avoided wearing this color for this very reason.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Not as good as it was for you and Onyesonwu a few nights ago, I hear,” Luyu said under her breath. Diti and Binta giggled and Mwita looked at me.

“Good afternoon, Mwita,” I said. “I-I’ve told them everything.” Mwita frowned. “You didn’t ask me.”

“Should I have?”

“You promised me secrecy.”

He was right. “Sorry,” I said.

Mwita looked at the three of them. “They can be trusted?” he asked me. “Completely,” Binta said.

“Onyesonwu is our Eleventh Rite mate, there should be no secrets between us, Mwita,” Luyu said.

“I don’t respect the Eleventh Rite,” Mwita said.

Luyu bristled. Diti gasped, “How can you…”

Luyu held up a hand to silence Diti. She turned to Mwita with a hard face. “Just as we keep your secrets, we expect you to respect Onyesonwu as a woman of Jwahir. I don’t care what kind of-of juju you’re capable of.”

Mwita rolled his eyes. “Done,” he said. “Onyesonwu, how much did you…”

“Everything,” I said. “If it weren’t for them coming today, you’d have found me in my bed losing my… self.”

“Okay,” Mwita said, nodding. “Then you all have to understand that you’re connected to her now. Not by some primitive rite, but by something real.” Luyu rolled her eyes, Diti glowered at him, and Binta looked at Onyesonwu with surprise.

“Mwita, stop being such a camel’s penis,” I said, annoyed.

“Women always have to have companions,” Mwita mused.

“And men always have false senses of entitlement,” I said.

Mwita gave me a dark look and I gazed back. Then he took my hand and massaged it. “Aro wants you to come by tonight,” he said. “It’s time.”

CHAPTER 21 – Gadi

“YOU TOLD YOUR FRIENDS?” Aro asked. “Why?”

I rubbed my forehead. On the way to Aro’s hut, I’d had one of my headaches and been forced to lean myself against a tree for fifteen minutes until it passed. The headache was mostly gone.

“They helped me, Oga. Then they asked so I told them,” I said.

“You do understand that now they’re part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“You’ll see.”

I sighed. “I shouldn’t have told them.”

“Can’t be helped now,” Aro said. “So, answers. You will understand much tonight. But first, Onyesonwu, I have talked to Mwita about this and now I talk to you, though I wonder if I’m wasting my words. I know what you two did.”

I felt my face grow hot.

“You possess both ugliness and beauty. Even to my eyes, you’re confusing. Mwita can only see your beauty. So he can’t help himself. But you can.”

“Oga,” I said trying to hold calm. “I’m no different from Mwita. We’re both human, we should both make the effort.”

“Don’t deceive yourself.”

“I’m not d…”

“And don’t interrupt me.”

“Then don’t continue with these assumptions! If you’re going to teach me, I don’t want to hear any of that! I’ll stop having intercourse with Mwita. Okay. I apologize. But he and I will both make the effort to refrain. Like two humans!” I was shouting now. “Flawed, imperfect creatures! That’s what we both are, Oga! That’s what we ALL are!”

He stood up. I didn’t move, my heart pounding hard in my chest. “Okay,” Aro said with a smirk. “I will try.”

“Good.”

“However, you are never to speak to me as you just did. You’re learning from me. I am your superior.” He paused. “You may know and understand me, but if we came to blows again, I’d kill you first… easily and without hesitation.” He sat back down. “You and Mwita are not to have intercourse. Not only will it disrupt your learning, but if you were to become pregnant, you’d risk a lot more than your own and the child’s life.

“This happened to a woman long ago who was learning the Points. She was too early in her pregnancy for her Master be aware of it. When she attempted a simple exercise, the entire town was wiped out. Disappeared as if it never existed.” Aro seemed satisfied with my shocked look. “You are now on the road to something very powerful but unstable. Have you seen your birth father’s eye since you were initiated?”