She flicked her eyes at him impatiently. “They’re saying that they’ve caught a thief. They’re going to take him down to the junction.”

A young boy holding a tire—it looked as heavy as he was—ran past them, shouting excitedly, his body jerking as he lugged the weight down the road. Another boy followed him, holding a small jerry-can in each hand. They had no covers, so when the liquid sloshed out of them and spilled on the ground, Vivek could smell the sharpness of the petrol. The girl flagged down an okada and pushed past him to hop on it. She didn’t look back as the motorcycle roared down the road away from the noise and people. He stood and watched, adrenaline surging through him. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. As the mob drew closer, the road cleared, onlookers scrambling into nearby shops to get out of the way. Vivek stood where he was, feeling as if things were draining out of him. The cashier from the supermarket poked her head out of the door.

“My friend, p?? n’?z?!” she shouted, waving at him to get out of the way.

Vivek didn’t hear her. People had spilled into the road and cars were diverting impatiently. A taxi pulled up next to Vivek, brakes screeching, and a young man jumped out. He slapped Vivek hard on the back of his head. Vivek reeled as the guy grabbed him and dragged him toward the taxi.

“Tobechukwu?” he said.

Their neighbor’s son glared at him. “Sharrap and enter this car,” he said. “Useless idiot.” He shoved Vivek into the backseat and climbed in after him, slamming the door. “Oya, dey go!” he shouted at the driver, and the car pulled away. Vivek twisted to stare out of the back window and Tobechukwu hit his arm. “Face your front!”

Vivek stared at him. “What are you doing?”

The mob receded behind them and Tobechukwu sucked his teeth loudly, stretching the sound to show his contempt. Clumps of his beard stuck out from his clenched jaw. They rode back to their street, where Tobechukwu pushed Vivek out of the car. He paid the taxi driver, and when Vivek tried to thank him, Tobechukwu glared at him.

“Go home to your mother,” he said, “and make sure you don’t tell her how stupid you were today.” He walked into his compound, the metal of the gate clanking behind him.

Vivek stood in front of the gate for a few minutes, wondering what would have happened if he’d been swallowed by the mob. Would he have run with them down to the junction, just to see what it was like to be part of a whole? Or if someone had seen him for what he was immediately, a piece that didn’t match anything else, would they have just thrown out an arm to remove him from the road, maybe pushing him into a gutter? Why had Tobechukwu stopped for him? They barely spoke to each other, not since their secondary school fights, even after all these years of growing up with only a fence between them.

Vivek slid his hand through the bars of the gate and maneuvered the padlock on the inside bolt. Both his parents were in their room when he entered the house.

“Vivek? Beta, is that you?” Kavita called out.

“Yes, Amma,” he replied.

“Is it not after curfew?” said his father, looking up from his book.

Vivek looked at the clock. “Only five minutes,” he called back.

“There’s food in the kitchen,” his mother said.

Lowering her voice, she added to Chika, “At least he’s home and he’s safe.”

“For how long?” replied Chika.

His wife patted his arm. “Relax,” she said.

Kavita changed into her nightgown. Together, she and Chika listened to the small sounds of Vivek in the kitchen—his footsteps into his room, the click of his door.

Outside, smoke rose from the junction, but it was swallowed by the night.

Twelve

Vivek

The girls dragged me out. I don’t think they meant to. I knew my mother was behind their visit; it was one of the few times a plan of hers actually worked.

I was drowning. Not quickly, not enough for panic, but a slow and inexorable sinking, when you know where you’re going to end up, so you stop fighting and you wait for it to all be over. I had looked for ways to break out of it—sleeping outside, trying to tap life from other things, from the bright rambunctiousness of the dogs, from the air at the top of the plumeria tree—but none of it had really made any difference. So I was giving up; I had decided to give up. That afternoon, Somto and Olunne burst into my room and spoiled my whole plan.

They knocked first, but I ignored it. Then they knocked again and I heard a flutter of quick conversation before one of them turned the handle and opened the door. It would have been Somto; she always made the decisions because she was older, because she was never afraid. I sat up in bed as they came in, in time to see Olunne close the door, a slight sorry across her face. I’d drawn the curtains, but Somto switched on the light. She looked at me, shirtless in pyjama trousers, lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon.

“So,” she said, tilting her head so her ponytail swung behind her shoulders. “What’s wrong with you?” Her sister nudged her but Somto ignored it.

I blinked at the intrusion of the light. “Many things,” I said.

“I can see that,” said Somto, making a face. She put the cupcakes on my desk and plopped herself on my bed. “You look terrible.”

I drew back with a frown. They were acting entirely too familiar, entering my room and sitting on my bed as if they knew me. Whatever had happened a childhood ago didn’t make us friends now; we hadn’t even seen each other since secondary school. Olunne glanced at her sister, then sat on the bed with me.

“I think you look pretty,” she said, and that surprised me enough to knock the frown off my face.

“What?” I said.

Olunne reached out and pulled at my hair gently, just enough to make it stretch and spring back, then touched her fingers to the silver Ganesh I wore around my neck. “I said, I think you look pretty. Your hair is beautiful. You’ve lost too much weight—that’s why Somto is saying you look bad. But you don’t, not really.”

I looked from one of them to the other.

“You must be tired of them talking about you,” Olunne added.

“Everyone is talking about you,” her sister said. “They’re saying you’ve gone mad.”

“Yet here you are, entering my room to talk about it,” I snapped.

Somto shrugged. “I think there’s probably something more interesting going on,” she said. “Why not just come and ask you?”

“It’s none of your business,” I said. I didn’t know why their kindness was making me so spiky.

Olunne put a hand on my knee. “Don’t mind her,” she said. “You don’t have to tell us anything if you don’t want. We just thought that maybe, if you felt like talking, it would be nice to have someone who was ready to listen. Actually listen. Not like how they like to say they’re listening.”

Somto scoffed in agreement.

I was, I must admit, taken aback. Alone is a feeling you can get used to, and it’s hard to believe in a better alternative. Besides, it was true that all of us used to be friends, even though it was years ago, when we and our lives were simpler. And now they were being nicer to me than anyone had bothered to be in a while, so I tried to relax.

“Are those cupcakes?” I asked, and Olunne smiled, hopping off the bed to get the tray. I picked up one and peeled back the wrapper, biting into it mostly out of politeness. True to form, it was sickly-sweet, as Aunty Rhatha’s cupcakes always were. “Jesus,” I said, making a face.

Somto swiped a fingerful of icing from another and licked it. “You don’t have to eat the whole thing,” she said. “She still hasn’t learned how to put a normal amount of sugar in them.”

I put the cupcake down and shook my head. “I can feel my teeth rotting already.”

Olunne leaned over and picked the sugar dragonfly off the cupcake, popping it into her mouth. That was how we found each other again, in a blocked-off room filled with yellowing light: two bubblegum fairies there to drag me out of my cave, carrying oversweet wands. I don’t know how deep I would have sunk if not for them. I wish I’d told them more often how much that mattered to me.