Heir To Nothing But You

Chiamaka sat on top of it anyway, bouncing until the seams gave way. “You’re going to break it before you even leave the country,” her mother said from the doorway. “It’s not breaking. It’s compromising.” Her mother laughed, a tired, proud laugh that had become more frequent over the years since she left her job as a nurse. Chi looked around the room one final time. The certificate from her secondary school valedictory speech hung crooked on the wall. The desk where she’d typed out all four scholarship essays before one had finally gotten her here. The window, which framed the view of Enugu’s evening chorus of okada horns and the distant murmur of a neighbor’s radio that drifted through two adjacent compounds. She was going to miss it all. She was not going to say that out loud. “You’ve checked your documents?” her mother asked. “Passport. Visa. Admission letter. The scholarship letter, the real one, not the photocopy.” “Three times, Mama.” “Check them a fourth.” “Mama.” “I am your mother. Anxiety is in my job description.” Chi smiled, despite herself. At twenty-two, her mother still sounded as if she was sending her off to boarding school, not on a graduate student exchange program halfway across the world. Perhaps that was why it felt so momentous. The scholarship letter had come eight months ago, and Chi had stood in the university library for ten minutes, rereading the page before she allowed herself to believe it was real. It was a full ride, one year of Media and Communications at Hanul University in Seoul. She had applied to eleven different programs and gotten rejected from nine of them. This was the one that had said yes. She had not cried. She had learned, the hard way, that one should wait to celebrate, lest one risk the very thing one was celebrating becoming undone. A promotion that fell through, a landlord who pocketed her deposit and vanished—Chi had learned to keep her victories carefully tucked away until she could confirm their permanence. It wasn’t until the visa was stamped into her passport that she allowed herself to dissolve into quiet sobs in the embassy parking lot. “You worked for this,” her mother said now, folding one last wrapper into the side pocket of the suitcase as if it might come in handy in September in Seoul. “Don’t go there and shrink yourself small because the room is unfamiliar.” “I won’t.” “You will meet people with more money than sense.” “Mama.” “I am not wrong.” “You are not wrong.” Her mother fastened the wrapper pocket and gave her a look that meant a sermon was coming. “You belong in whatever room you walk into, do you hear me? You are not there because they felt sorry for you. You are there because you are brilliant, and because you worked when it would have been easier to give up.” Chi’s throat tightened. “I hear you.” “Say it back.” “I already belong in the room.” “Good girl.” The flight was departing at 11:40. In the meantime, Chi busied herself relearning her five-year plan, the one she’d painstakingly put together like everyone else’s but with far fewer opportunities for improv. Year one: the exchange program, top of her class, a desirable internship. Year two: back in Lagos, a junior copy-editing position at one of the media houses that had rejected her tenacious application three years ago. Years three through five: working her way up to the newsroom of her dreams, the one that made room for meaningful long-form journalism. There was not an item in the five-year plan for falling madly in love with someone she hadn’t met yet. Chi didn’t know, as the Qatari official waved her toward the gate, that the real complication was still hours away. She only knew that her connecting flight had been delayed by forty minutes, and her neck pillow, long gone flat, had ceased to provide any comfort whatsoever after the sixth hour. Seoul, when it appeared before her, tiny lights blinking like something she would find in a child’s bedroom, was everything she had imagined and much more. She pressed her forehead against the glass. “Okay,” she whispered to no one in particular. “Let’s go be brilliant, then.”