Too Much Lie To Be True

Fake Smiles and Real Questions

POV: Ada

A week into the arrangement, Tobias and I had settled into something that worked from the outside. Lunch together three times a week. He walked me to afternoon class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On the school's social channels, photos appeared that neither of us had posted ourselves, tagged and captioned by the PR team. People I had never spoken to left heart reactions on pictures of us walking across the courtyard.

I watched the attention shift around me and did not like what I saw. People who had ignored me completely during my first two days now smiled when I walked past. Two girls from the senior class stopped me in the corridor to ask where I had bought my earrings. It was not because they liked me. It was because I was standing next to someone with power, and some of that light was landing on me. I made a note of it because it told me something true about this place.

I sent Femi everything I had gathered so far. His reply came back fast. "Ada, this is bigger than either of us thought. The tape on the archive door, I think there is someone inside the school watching for exactly what you are doing. Be very careful."

I pocketed my phone and put my face together before Tobias reached the table.

He set his tray down and looked at his tablet while I looked at my notebook. From any camera angle we looked comfortable together, which was the point. We had practiced comfortable.

Then without looking up he said: "You flinch every time my grandfather's name comes up."

I went very still. "I don't."

"You do. I have been watching for a week." He looked up then. His eyes were steady and direct and not unkind. "I am not asking why. I am just telling you that I notice."

The table felt very small. I held his gaze and kept my voice even. "Is there something about your grandfather that people should know?"

A pause. Long enough that I counted it. Then he said: "Probably. But a school cafeteria is not the right place for that conversation."

He went back to his tablet. I went back to my notebook. But the air between us had changed, and I could feel it sitting there for the rest of lunch like a third person at the table.

Priya found me in the library after school. She did not sneak up on me. She walked in and sat down directly beside me like she had a right to that chair, which in this school she probably believed she did.

"I looked you up," she said, pleasantly. She was holding a tablet face-down on her knee.

"I would expect nothing less," I said, and kept writing.

"Ada Eze. Port Harcourt. Scholarship student. Very good grades." She paused. "But there is almost nothing of you online before three months ago. No old photos. No tagged posts. Not even a comment on someone else's page."

"I am a private person," I said.

"Everyone our age leaves something behind, even if they try not to. Even deleted things leave traces."

I stopped writing and looked at her. "Maybe I am better at not leaving traces than most people."

We looked at each other for a moment. Two people measuring each other. I had done enough research on Priya to know she was not simply mean. She was careful, and she was loyal to the Mensah family in a way that went beyond normal friendship. That made her more dangerous than someone who was just cruel.

"I don't know what you are doing here," she said, still with that steady, pleasant expression. "But I am going to find out. And when I do, I won't keep it to myself."

She got up and left without waiting for me to respond. I sat with the silence for a moment. Then I texted Femi.

"Priya is actively digging. How long before she finds a c***k in the cover?"

His reply came back in under a minute. "A week. Maybe less if she pays for the right database search."

I put the phone face-down and kept writing. Thinking time.

On the way to the car park I heard a voice behind me that I did not expect.

"You are not who you say you are."

I turned slowly. A girl was leaning against the wall beside the side exit, arms folded, uniform sleeves rolled up. She was younger, maybe fifteen, with her brother's same steady eyes set in a smaller, quieter face. She looked like someone who was used to watching things from the edges of rooms.

"I am Lena," she said. "Tobias's sister."

"I know who you are," I said carefully.

"And I know you are not just a scholarship girl from Port Harcourt." She tilted her head slightly. "The way you look at our grandfather's portrait in the main hall. I have seen admiration my whole life. I grew up in a house full of it. What you have when you look at that portrait is not admiration. It is something much older than that."

I said nothing. I had learned a long time ago that silence was safer than a bad lie.

"I am not going to tell anyone," Lena said. "I just want you to know that I am watching too. And whatever you came here to find." She paused. "I hope you find it."

She walked away without giving me a chance to respond. I stared after her for a moment before I started walking again.

Tobias fell into step beside me near the gate, his driver waiting at the kerb. He did not have to walk with me. He did it anyway.

We were quiet for most of it. The evening air smelled like cut grass and the faint exhaust of cars leaving the car park. Then I asked, because the question had been sitting in my throat all afternoon, "Do you actually like any of it? The cameras. The image. All of it?"

He thought about it before he answered, which I appreciated more than I expected. "Some of it," he said. "Not most."

"Then why?"

"Because when you are born into something," he said, "it takes longer than seventeen years to work out how to step away from it without losing everything else at the same time."

I understood that better than he knew. I understood it so well it made my chest hurt.

At the gate he stopped. "Whatever you are looking for in this school, Ada," he said, "be careful."

My stomach went tight. "What do you mean by that?"

He looked at me for a moment with that same careful, measuring expression I had seen in the corridor on the first day. "I mean exactly that," he said. Then he turned and walked back to his car.

That night I went back to the archive. The folder I had photographed on my first visit had been moved. Not much. Just enough. And when I opened it, the printed email was gone. In its place was a single blank sheet of paper with seven words written on it in small neat handwriting.

Stop looking.

I stood very still in that cold room and read it twice. Then I put the folder back and walked out, and did not let my hands shake until I was alone in the stairwell with the door closed behind me.