Chapter Four: First Week, First Fears
940 Words
THIRD PERSON POV:
Room Seventeen had become more than walls and windows to Khione. It was beginning to feel like a strange sort of body—breathing with her, quiet with her, tense with her. Her books lined one corner now, stacked neatly beside a folded white uniform that still smelled like new cotton and starch. On the wall beside her metal bedframe, she had stuck a small sticker from her devotional—Be Still and Know That I Am God. But knowing didn’t always feel like believing.
She hadn’t even met most of her coursemates yet. The campus was a sea of white uniforms and cold stares—girls who seemed to already know where they belonged, how to laugh in the right way, how to blend into the right rooms. Khione moved past them like air, always clutching a file, her ID card swinging on her neck like a bell that made her presence louder than it needed to be.
Back in Room Seventeen, she peeled off her shoes and pulled her knees to her chest on the narrow mattress. She wasn’t lonely, not exactly. Not in the way people used that word. She just… hadn’t settled. Her body was here, yes, but her soul was still trying to crawl out of the shell it had retreated into the moment her parents drove off that Sunday afternoon.
She thought of her mother’s stiff hug at the gate, the way her father kept checking his watch. And her siblings didn’t even come along. “Firstborns are used to leading alone,” her mother had said. As though loneliness was inheritance.
Khione sighed and opened her school journal. She had decided to write every night. Not because she enjoyed journaling, but because words were easier to hold than emotions. Emotions were slippery. Words stayed. She titled the first entry:
“Day 3: Holy Rosary Doesn’t Feel Holy Yet.”
A knock startled her. She froze, notebook halfway closed. Another knock, lighter. She moved slowly to the door and opened it just wide enough to see Ebele—bright-eyed, talkative Ebele from orientation day.
“Hi! I was passing by. Just wanted to check if you’re okay.” Ebele leaned in with a smile, holding a banana and groundnuts in one hand. “Hungry?”
Khione hesitated. The last time she accepted snacks in school, the girls whispered she was "greedy for food and attention." But Ebele didn’t look like the type to offer something and mean something else.
“Thanks,” she said quietly and took the banana.
They sat side by side on the bed, chewing slowly. Ebele talked about how her roommates always left the window open and how someone snored loud enough to summon village spirits. Khione smiled politely, listening more than talking, nodding at the right moments. When Ebele left with a little wave, the room felt strange again—like it had witnessed something too soft and wasn’t used to it.
She locked the door.
Later that night, as she brushed her teeth at the common bathroom, two girls whispered behind her.
“Is that the SUG girl?”
“She doesn’t talk to anyone.”
“She thinks she’s better because she has her own room.”
Khione spat, rinsed her mouth, and walked back to Room Seventeen without a word. Her hands didn’t shake, but her chest did. They didn’t know her. They didn’t know she cried into her pillow the first night. They didn’t know she prayed until she felt foolish. They didn’t know she whispered “I’m fine” until her tongue got used to lying.
Back in her room, she closed the curtain and looked at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. Her skin, a warm, soft brown. Her curves, full and obvious, even in the oversized hostel wear. Her cheeks still held the remnants of baby fat. People had always looked at her and expected confidence, strength, ease. But nobody ever saw the girl who had to practice conversations in her head before she dared open her mouth.
She climbed into bed. The walls didn’t echo like home. They stayed silent and cold. Still, they held her better than people did.
She wrote another journal entry:
“Room Seventeen is mine. No one to fight with over locker space or mirrors. No one to borrow my slippers without asking. But also… no one to tell me how my day went. I guess solitude is freedom and punishment at once.”
She closed the book and curled deeper under the sheets.
The next morning, she woke before dawn, long before the hostel bell rang. She sat at her table, reviewing the week’s orientation notes, highlighting feverishly, her eyes scanning lines with military precision. It was the only way to silence the noise in her head—by focusing on something outside of it.
Khione had come here to succeed. To become a nurse. To make her parents proud. She just hadn’t realized that the uniform wouldn’t automatically cover her cracks. That there’d be no applause for trying to survive the small things—like sitting alone at lunch, or walking past laughter she didn’t feel invited to.
By the end of the week, she had learned three things:
1. No one was going to offer her belonging—she would have to take it slowly, in teaspoons.
2. Room Seventeen was the safest place in the entire school.
3. Her name was beginning to pass between mouths—sometimes with admiration, sometimes with misunderstanding. But always, always noticed.
She wasn’t invisible.
That scared her more than being unseen.
- Writer
