WHERE THE SUNFLOWERS GROW

What Chiamaka Knows

Chiamaka Eze had been Adaeze's closest friend since Form Two, when they were assigned adjacent beds in the dormitory during a school inter-house sports competition that neither of them had qualified for on merit and both of them had been dragooned into as alternates for events their respective houses were short on participants for. Adaeze had been assigned the javelin throw, an event she had never attempted and which resulted in a throw of approximately three metres. Chiamaka had been assigned the high jump, an event she had less than no aptitude for and which she cleared by crawling under the bar on her first attempt to general confusion and the eventual disqualification of her entire house.

They had laughed about this in adjacent beds that night for longer than was appropriate, and by morning they had the kind of friendship that forms between people who have witnessed each other at their most absurd.

Chiamaka was perceptive in the way that warm-hearted people are perceptive: not analytically, not coldly, but with a directness born from the simple fact of paying attention to the people she loved. She noticed Adaeze the way Adaeze noticed details in poems: with close attention to the things that were different from what they usually were.

It was Chiamaka who noticed, in the fourth week of term, that Adaeze had begun arriving to Literature class with two pens.

"Why do you have two pens?" she asked, in the casually pointed way she asked questions she already suspected the answers to.

"In case one runs out," Adaeze said.

"You have been using the same pen since Form Four. You refill it. You have never, in two and a half years, run out of ink during a class period."

"There is always a first time."

"There is," Chiamaka agreed. "Or there is another reason."

Adaeze kept her eyes on her notebook. "There is not another reason."

"So it has nothing to do with the boy who borrowed your pen three weeks ago and who has, I notice, been assigned the desk beside you for the foreseeable future?"

"It is a practical decision."

"It is a very sweet decision."

"Chiamaka."

"I am just saying that it is sweet. It is fine. It is also extremely obvious to everyone except apparently you."

Adaeze looked up at that. "What is obvious?"

Chiamaka smiled, not unkindly. "Nothing yet. I am speaking about future possibilities."

"There are no future possibilities. He is a classmate."

"He is a classmate who makes you laugh quietly enough that you think no one can hear you, who you discussed a Chimamanda short story with for twenty minutes after Government class last Tuesday, and for whom you now carry a spare pen."

"You are constructing a narrative."

"I am observing a reality."

Adaeze opened her mouth to say something definitive and was saved by the arrival of Mrs. Amadi, who began the class with a review of their paired poem analysis papers. She and Emeka had received a B plus, with a comment noting that their interpretation of the stream imagery was original if slightly overcomplicated.

"She means we overthought it," Emeka said, reading the comment over Adaeze's shoulder in the way he had developed of reading things adjacent to her without technically leaning.

"She means our analysis was thorough," Adaeze said.

"She wrote the word overcomplicated."

"Thorough interpretations are sometimes perceived as overcomplicated by readers who prefer brevity."

He looked at her with the quiet smile. "You are defending us against a fair criticism."

"I am contextualising a fair criticism."

"Right," he said, and returned to his own copy of the paper.

Adaeze was aware of Chiamaka, two seats to her right, very carefully not looking at her.

She ignored this with considerable effort and focused on Mrs. Amadi, who was now explaining the next assignment: an individual essay on the theme of identity in any Nigerian literary work published after 2000.

Adaeze wrote the assignment details in her notebook and underlined the due date twice.

In the margin beside the deadline, without deciding to, she drew the beginning of a sunflower petal and then stopped herself.

She looked at what she had drawn. Then she looked at the board. Then she finished the petal.

Chiamaka, from two seats away, said nothing.

But later, as they walked to the dining hall for lunch, she linked her arm through Adaeze's in the affectionate way she did when she wanted to say something she intended to say gently.

"Ada," she said.

"Do not," Adaeze said.

"I was only going to say that you deserve nice things."

Adaeze was quiet for a moment. The harmattan had softened slightly in the past few days. The air was still dry but warmer, and the afternoon light was the particular gold of a season beginning its slow transition.

"I know that," she said.

"Do you though?"

It was such a simple, kind question that Adaeze had to look at the middle distance for a moment before answering.

"I am working on it," she said finally.

Chiamaka squeezed her arm and they walked into the dining hall and the conversation shifted to the catastrophic quality of the day's jollof rice and the upcoming literature magazine deadline and whether Form Three students should be permitted to submit experimental poetry, which Adaeze believed they should, enthusiastically, and which Chiamaka believed required at minimum a basic understanding of what they were experimenting with.

It was a familiar argument. They had it every term.

Adaeze found herself laughing through the entirety of it, and did not examine why this particular Tuesday afternoon felt lighter than the Tuesdays before it.

She went back to the literary magazine after lunch, settled at the small desk they had assigned her in the magazine room, and worked through three more poem submissions. Two of them were too self-conscious to be good yet but showed real promise underneath the performance of poetry. The third was by a Form Five student named Bello Osei who wrote with the particular unselfconsciousness of someone who had not yet learned to be embarrassed by his own sincerity, and the result was something Adaeze read twice and then placed in the acceptance pile without hesitation.

She wrote him a brief editorial note: Your poem works because you trusted the image and let it carry the feeling without announcing it. This is the right instinct. Keep it.

She considered this note for a moment after writing it. Then she thought of what Emeka had said the week before, in the library: the reader is smarter than you think, and your instincts are better than you believe. She had borrowed that without telling him she was borrowing it. She thought he would not mind. She thought, in fact, that he would find it fitting, the way a well-made tool finds its way naturally from one pair of capable hands to another.

She put the note in the envelope with the submission and sealed it and went back to the next poem in the pile.

Outside the magazine room window, the afternoon was moving toward evening with the particular unhurried quality of a school day that had been good rather than merely completed. Adaeze worked until the light changed, and then she packed her things and walked home, and the two pens were both in her bag, and she did not think about this at all.