365days between us

Chapter 5

The first harmattan wind of the new semester swept through the hostel corridors, carrying with it the scent of dust and the noise of returning students dragging boxes up worn staircases. Somewhere in the chaos, a girl stood at the entrance of room fourteen, suitcase in one hand, the other nervously smoothing down her uniform-less clothes, eyes scanning the room like she was searching for something familiar in an unfamiliar world.

“Senior Elsa?” she said, voice small and uncertain.

Elsa turned from her bed, where she’d been arranging her books, and blinked. The face was younger, rounder with the softness of someone barely out of secondary school, but unmistakably familiar.

“Lyra?” Elsa’s eyes widened. “Lyra! What are you doing here?”

“I got posted here,” Lyra said, breaking into a grin that erased all her nervousness in an instant. “I didn’t even know you’d be in this school until I saw your name on the allocation list. I couldn’t believe it!”

What followed was the kind of reunion neither of them had planned for, a junior from Elsa’s secondary school days, someone who used to trail behind her in the school corridors calling her “senior” with the kind of reverence younger students reserved for those they admired, now standing in her hostel room, suitcase and all, fate having tangled their paths together again.

It was Lyra, in fact, who had met Julie first on her very first day, wandering the school grounds lost and overwhelmed, when Julie had stopped to help her find the registrar’s office. By the time Lyra dragged her belongings into room fourteen and found Elsa waiting there, she’d already befriended the very girl Elsa had bonded with hours earlier.

“Wait,” Julie had said, laughing so hard she nearly dropped her books, “you two know each other?”

“She’s my senior!” Lyra had announced proudly, and Elsa had simply shaken her head, smiling, marveling at how small and strange the world could be.

Over time, “senior” softened into “Elsa,” the honorific slipping away the way titles do when familiarity replaces formality. And Lyra, gap-toothed and endlessly cheerful, became something like a little sister to both of them squeezed onto the bottom bunk, joining their evening reading sessions, laughing at their inside jokes until she had jokes of her own to add.

But love, even sisterly love, isn’t blind to shortcomings.

Lyra never seemed to return from her trips home with enough foodstuffs. While Elsa and Julie unpacked bags heavy with garri, rice, tins of tomatoes, and neatly wrapped provisions from worried mothers, Lyra would arrive with a half-empty bag, sometimes just a change of clothes and little else. At first, it was easy to overlook, then it became routine. Elsa and Julie found themselves quietly stretching their own supplies to cover the gap, grumbling under their breath but never truly complaining out loud, because by then, Lyra wasn’t just a roommate. She was theirs to look out for.

The semester rolled forward the way semesters do, fast in memory, slow in the living of it until hostel space ran short and girls scattered into the city searching for off-campus rooms. Elsa, Julie, and Lyra, having become inseparable, agreed without much debate: wherever they went, they’d go together.

They found a small room not far from campus, pulled their money, and signed the agreement with the kind of excitement only first-time renters feel. The thrill of a shared kitchen, a shared space, a shared life. For a while, it worked beautifully. They cooked together, ate together, laughed over the same small stove that took forever to boil anything.

Until the week money ran thin.

Elsa and Julie, waiting on delayed transfers from home, couldn’t contribute to that week’s food fund. Lyra, holding what little she had, cooked her own pot and then, without a word of explanation, locked the kitchen door behind her.

Elsa remembered standing outside that door, hunger gnawing quietly at her stomach, staring at the padlock like it was a betrayal she couldn’t quite name. Julie hadn’t said much either, just a tight jaw, a long exhale, and the silent decision, shared between them without words, that some battles weren’t worth fighting.

“We still have a whole year left in this room with her,” Julie had murmured that night, lying on her mat. “Let’s not turn this into war.”

So they swallowed it. Let it settle into the unspoken terms of their strange, imperfect little sisterhood, where love and hurt lived side by side, and nobody dared disturb the fragile peace holding it together.

Weeks later, the sky had turned that particular shade of orange that only appeared just before evening classes ended, when Elsa and Julie walked back from a lecture, chatting about nothing in particular. That was when Julie’s face lit up, and she darted ahead with the ease of familiarity.

“Hey! Long time!” she called out, waving at a tall, fair young man crossing the path ahead of them.

He turned, smiling, the easy confident smile of someone used to being noticed and fell into step beside Julie like they’d done this a hundred times before.

Elsa hung back slightly, walking along the edge of the path while the two of them talked and laughed, their conversation flowing effortlessly all the way to the hostel gate. She caught pieces of it, something about a lecturer, something about a mutual friend but mostly she just watched, curious, the way one watches something they don’t yet understand is important.

He walked with them all the way to the hostel entrance before peeling off toward his own block, throwing a casual wave over his shoulder.

Once inside their room, Elsa dropped her bag on the bed and turned to Julie; the question already sitting on the tip of her tongue.

“Who was that?”

Julie didn’t even look up from unpacking her books, answering with the breezy indifference of someone with absolutely no idea what she’d just set into motion.

“Oh, that’s Calvin.”