Echoes of the past

Chapter 6

The days after that coffee meeting felt different. Not in a big way. Not like in the movies where everything suddenly makes sense. Just lighter. Like someone had cracked a window in a room I didn't know was stuffy.

I kept thinking about Ezekiel. A boy who lost his mother at ten. A father who chose distance. A nanny who was more present than blood.

He didn't even ask his dad, I thought. He just assumed.

But wasn't I doing the same thing? Assuming my parents would never understand me? Assuming university would be just another cage?

Then my mother surprised me.

It was a Tuesday evening. I was at the dining table, highlighters scattered everywhere, trying to memorize the differences between civil and criminal procedure. My brain was mush. My eyes burned.

My mother sat across from me with a cup of tea.

This never happened. My mother did not sit. She moved. She directed. She left.

Anita, she said, stirring sugar into her tea even though she always took it black. Tell me about this boy.

My hand froze.

His name is Ezekiel, I said slowly. We studied together for WEAC. He's a nice person, Mummy. Nothing more."

She looked at me for a long time. Her eyes were the same brown as mine. I'd always hated that—the way looking at her was like looking at an older, harder version of myself.

Your father and I met in university, she said quietly. He was the first boy I ever spoke to without my parents permission.

I stared at her. In eighteen years, she had never told me this.

I was like you once, she continued, staring into her tea instead of at me. Sheltered. Obedient. Terrified of making the wrong choice. She paused. I made plenty. Some of them I'm still paying for.

I didn't know what to say. This woman—this stranger wearing my mother's skin—was not the woman who had planned my life down to the minute since I was born.

Be careful, Anita, she said finally, standing up. Not because the world is dangerous. Because you are more like me than you want to admit. And the thing about people like us? We feel everything too deeply. And we hide it too well.

She left before I could ask what she meant.

That night, I called Ezekiel. Not because I wanted to sound cool or interesting. Because I needed to hear a voice that wasn't inside my own head.

Hey, he said, picking up on the second ring. "Everything okay?"

I don't know, I admitted. My mother just told me she was like me once. And I don't know if that's a warning or a gift.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Maybe it's both."

We talked for an hour. About JAMB. About our fears. About nothing and everything. He told me he applied for industrial relation and human resources management, even though his father wanted Accounting.

I didn't tell him, he said. He'll find out when I get in. Or if I don't.

And if you don't?

"Then I'll deal with that disappointment when it comes. No point carrying it before its time."

I envied that. The way he seemed to understand that fear was a visitor, not a permanent resident.

The weeks that followed blurred into a rhythm of study, eat, sleep, repeat. JAMB loomed like a storm on a horizon I couldn't stop walking toward.

My parents hired a tutor. Mrs. Akinwande. She smelled of menthol and disappointment. She drilled me on past questions until my eyes burned and my answers came out before I could think.

You're too cautious,she said one afternoon, clicking her tongue at my practice score. "You hesitate. Law doesn't reward hesitation, Anita. It rewards conviction. Even wrong conviction is better than none at all."

I wanted to tell her that hesitation was all I'd ever known. That when you grow up with parents who decide everything for you, your own voice becomes a whisper you can barely hear.

But I didn't. I just nodded and answered another question.

The night before JAMB, I couldn't sleep.

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, counting the small cracks in the plaster. I had memorized them years ago. My room was too familiar. Too safe. Too much like a cage I had decorated with my own two hands.

What if I failed?

What if I passed?

My phone buzzed. A text from Ezekiel.

You're going to do great tomorrow. Because you're braver than you think.

I didn't reply. I couldn't. Because bravery, I was beginning to learn, was not the absence of fear.

Bravery was being terrified and showing up anyway.

The next morning, I walked into the examination hall with my heart in my throat and my mother's prayers still warm on my lips.

I sat down. Facing my computer.

And for the next hours, I forgot to be Anita George.

I was just a girl with answers to give.

When it was over, I walked outside into the blinding sun. My legs were shaking. My hands were cold. I found a bench under a tree and sat there for a long time, just breathing.

Then I called Ezekiel.

"I think I did okay," I said.

"I know you did," he replied.

And for the first time in a long time, I believed someone.