WHERE THE SUNFLOWERS GROW

The first thing Adaeze Okafor noticed about the new term was that the harmattan had finally decided to be serious about itself. It came in the night, dry and deliberate, stripping the moisture from the air the way it stripped the leaves from the neem trees that lined the road to Riverstone Academy. By the time she walked through the school gates at seven fifteen on that grey January morning, her lips were already cracking at the corners and she had forgotten her lip balm on the dresser at home. She found this irritating in the specific, low-grade way that small inconveniences irritate people who have larger worries they are not yet ready to think about. And Adaeze had larger worries. WAEC examinations in four months. Her university application, half-completed. A personal statement that sounded, in every draft she had attempted, like it was written by someone who had read too many personal statements. The harmattan and the forgotten lip balm were almost a relief by comparison. She entered the Literature classroom at seven twenty-two, which was early enough to claim her usual seat by the window in the third row, the one with the afternoon light falling at exactly the right angle for reading and the added advantage of being close enough to the front to seem attentive and far enough from the back to avoid the disruptive energy that gathered there like weather. She had occupied that seat since Form Four. It was hers in the way that things that have never been formally claimed can still, irrefutably, belong to a person. She arranged her textbooks in the order of her morning periods. Literature first, then Mathematics, then Government. She uncapped her pen and opened her notebook to a clean page, and then, because she had three minutes and no one was watching, she drew a small sunflower in the top right corner of the page. She had been drawing sunflowers for as long as she could remember. In her earliest primary school notebooks, they appeared in crayon, lopsided and enthusiastic. Now they were neater, more precise. She drew the petals from the outside in, counting them without meaning to. Her best friend Chiamaka Eze arrived at seven twenty-six, dropped into the seat beside Adaeze with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who had survived something significant, and immediately began talking about her holiday. "Adaeze, I am telling you, Abuja in December is a different dimension. My aunty's compound alone is the size of our entire street. We ate pepper soup every single night. My uncle has a generator that does not go off once. Not once." She paused for breath and for effect. "I almost did not come back." "You say that every term," Adaeze said, without looking up from her notebook. "This time I mean it." "You mean it every time." Chiamaka laughed and pulled out her own books, and the classroom filled around them in the familiar, comfortable way it always did, with noise and movement and the particular social theatre of students who had been away from each other for six weeks and were performing their reunions for an audience of their peers. Mrs. Amadi, their Literature teacher, entered at seven thirty-five, which was five minutes after the bell and consistent with her established pattern of punctual tardiness. She was a compact woman in her early fifties who wore reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck and had the particular quality of seeming perpetually unsurprised by everything, including the chaos of thirty-two senior students rearranging themselves into the performance of attentiveness. "Good morning, class," she said, setting her bag on the table with the practised economy of someone who had done this ten thousand times. "Good morning, Mrs. Amadi," the class replied, in the ragged chorus that always sounds more like an ending than a beginning. "We have a new student joining us this term," Mrs. Amadi said, without any particular preamble. "He transferred from Federal Government College, Lagos, and he will need someone to share materials with until his books arrive from the bookshop. Emeka, you can take the empty seat in the third row." Adaeze looked up. The boy who walked to her row was tall and unhurried, and he moved through the classroom the way people move through spaces when they are accustomed to being looked at and have decided not to particularly care about it. He was wearing the Riverstone Academy uniform with the top button open, which technically violated the dress code and which Mrs. Amadi either did not notice or chose not to address. He had a copy of Things Fall Apart tucked under his arm, which Adaeze noticed and which she filed away without knowing why. He reached the empty seat to her left, the one that had been empty since Tunde Bello transferred out in November, and he looked at it and then at her with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of someone who has not yet learned the social codes of this particular room. "Is anyone sitting here?" he asked. It was a strange question given that the seat was visibly empty, but Adaeze understood that he was asking something slightly different, some version of: is this seat safe? Is this space available in all the ways a space can be available? "No," she said. He sat down. He put his Achebe on the desk. He looked at the board where Mrs. Amadi was writing the term schedule in her neat, unhurried handwriting. He did not introduce himself beyond his first name, which Mrs. Amadi had already given. He did not attempt to make conversation. He simply settled into the space beside Adaeze with a kind of quiet composure that she found, if she was being honest with herself, unexpectedly calming. She turned back to her notebook. In the top right corner, her sunflower was half-finished. She counted the remaining petals and completed them, one by one, while Mrs. Amadi began to speak about the term ahead. She did not think about the new student again for the rest of that class. She told herself this was true, and almost believed it.