The lost soul

TheNightSheRan

Amara was sixteen when it happened.

The day was cold. It had just finished raining. What felt different that day wasn't the shouting, not even the sound of her father's belt hitting the door frame where she would usually stand and take the beating without crying, because crying only made him hit harder. Amara remembered the cold, because she had left the house with nothing but the clothes on her back and no shoes, and the road outside the gate was full of gravel, sharp under her bare feet, she didn't care. Anything was better than staying.

Her stepmother, Felicia, had married her father two years after Amara's mother died. Amara doesn’t remember much about her mother anymore. Just her hands. Soft hands, always smelling of Shea butter, always finding her hair to plait even when she ran away from her. She was too young when her mother died; he only had a few memories to hold onto.

Her stepmother’s hands were the opposite, strong and rough. I knew that from the very first day. She hated Amara from the first week she moved into their house. It took Amara years to understand why. Amara looked exactly like her mother. Same eyes, same stubborn chin, and every time Felicia looked at Amara, I think she saw a woman she could never replace, standing right there in her new house, refusing to disappear.

Felicia made sure Amara disappeared quietly. She stopped getting new clothes when I was eleven. Felicia had a daughter by name, Blessing. Blessing got two new dresses every session for school, and Amara wore whatever Blessing outgrew, patched at the elbows, too big or too small depending on the year. Amara had stopped eating breakfast around the same time. Her stepmother said growing girls didn't need three meals, that Amara was "getting fat," even though one could count her ribs through the school uniform by the time she was thirteen.

Her father, Richard, saw all of it. That's the part that still sits heavy, even now, even after everything. He saw it and said nothing, because saying something meant fighting with Felicia, and my father was a man who hated fighting more than he loved his own daughter.

When he started noticing me, I had prayed he never did.

Amara remembers everything her father did to her, the memories she had locked somewhere because thinking about them made her sad. By the time Amara was sixteen, Amara had learned to sleep with a chair pushed against my bedroom door. She also knew that no one in that house was coming to save her. At sixteen, she had realized that if she wanted to survive she would have to save herself.

The night Amara left, Felicia found out she had hidden a piece of bread from dinner in her school bag. Amara was saving it for the morning because breakfast never came anymore. She dragged her out of bed by the hair and called her a thief in her own father's house, and her father Richard just stood in the doorway and watched, and something inside her that had been bending for six years finally snapped clean in half. She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She only just waited until the house went quiet and dark, and she climbed out through the kitchen window, because the front door made noise and she couldn't risk it. She finally walked away.

She had no plans.but she knew what people would say. The girl had run away with a secret plan already forming in her mind. Amara had nothing. She had only the clothes on her back, no shoes, no money, no phone, because Felicia had taken her phone away months before as punishment for a mistake she can't remember.

She walked until the sun came up, and then she kept walking, and by the second day her feet had bled through in three places, and she could barely feel it anymore, not really, because hunger has a way of making every other pain feel smaller.

Amara slept in a church compound the first night, tucked behind a stack of plastic chairs where the security man wouldn't see me. Then he slept under a bridge the second night, curled up next to a woman selling roasted corn who took pity on her and shared half a canopy without asking a single question about why a teenage girl was alone in the dark with no shoes. I still think about her sometimes. I never learned her name.

By the end of the first week, Amara had learned how to beg without shame, because shame is a thing you can only afford when your stomach isn't empty. By the end of the first month, Amara had found work washing plates in a small food canteen near Oshodi, the kind of work nobody wants, standing over dirty water for twelve hours a day for money that barely covered a single meal.

Amara was sixteen years old, sleeping on a mat in the back of a stranger's shop, and some nights she would lie awake and ask herself if running had even been the right choice. At least in her father's house, she told herself, she had a roof. At least she had a bed, even if it came with a chair pushed against the door.

But then she would remember Felicia's hands, and her father's silence, and she would realize, with a certainty that never once left her, that in all the years that followed, that she would rather die free on the street than die slowly in that house, pretending to be loved.

She didn't know it then, standing over that sink full of dirty plates with blistered hands and an empty stomach, but that canteen was where everything started. Not because anyone was kind to her, they weren't, not really, but because it was the first place she would ever hear the word that would end up changing her whole life.

A customer left a newspaper behind on one of the tables. She picked it up during her ten-minute break, more out of boredom than interest, and her eyes landed on a small article buried near the back pages, about a girl not much older than Amara who had started a business from nothing and was now worth more money than anyone could imagine.

Amara didn't have a business plan. She didn't have money, or connections, or even proper shoes. What she had was a torn newspaper page that she folded carefully and kept hidden inside her wrapper for the next three years, and a promise she made to herself that night, sitting alone behind that canteen with the Lagos traffic roaring somewhere beyond the wall.

Amara had promised herself that one day, her name would be printed in a newspaper too. Not because she ran away. Not because she survived.

But because she built something so big, so undeniable, that the same father who let his daughter starve, and the same woman who called her a thief for hiding bread, would have no choice but to see it.

What she didn't know what she couldn't have known that night, was that the real danger wasn't behind her in that house.

It was still ahead of her, and it was wearing a very different face, and it was already waiting.

(To be continued in Chapter 2...)