YES I WILL MARRY YOU

The message took four seconds to type, and it would cost three people almost everything. Ayo didn’t know that yet. At eleven forty seven on a Thursday night in April 2020, all he knew was that Lagos had been locked inside its own house for three weeks, that the generator next door had finally died, and that he was bored enough to do something stupid. He lay on the flat concrete roof of his family’s house in Agege with his back against a water tank still warm from the day’s sun, one earphone in, a cigarette burning down between two fingers. Below him the street was dark except for a single lantern outside Mama Sidi’s shop, which the government had ordered shut and which was selling indomie through the back window anyway. His phone lit his face blue. Forty three unread messages. Most of them were from girls. That was not vanity. It was arithmetic. Ayo had a face people described as “trouble”: a sharp jaw, heavy lidded eyes, a small gap between his front teeth that he had learned to use like a weapon. He also had a way of replying to messages that made every girl feel she was the only one he was replying to. Three years at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, had taught him that the rest was logistics. He thumbed through the inbox without really reading. Sharon: Are you ignoring me? Don’t let me come and find you. Gift: a voice note, three minutes and eleven seconds long. Jennifer: a photo of her new braids, captioned Rate me. Grace: Call me when you’re free, it’s important. It was never important. Mary, who had never written anything longer than a single word to him: Hi. He answered none of them. He pulled the smoke deep into his chest, held it, and let it go toward the dark sky, where the only things moving were two bats and the red blink of a plane that had no business flying. Then he opened f*******:, because f*******: was where the lockdown had moved everybody’s life, and he scrolled until he found the group everyone at school had been living in: FUNAAB Gist 24/7. Someone had posted a meme of a man in a face mask and a wedding agbada. Caption: Lockdown 2020: nobody to marry, nowhere to go. The comments were a war zone. Ayo scrolled, half smiling, until one stopped him. Nifemi A. If this lockdown reaches June, I will marry the first man who sends me a plate of jollof rice. Don’t test me. Underneath it, forty one laughing faces and a stranger replying, Which jollof? Party or smoky? And Nifemi, again: Smoky. I’m not a savage. Ayo laughed out loud, alone on a roof at midnight, and the sound surprised him. He tapped her name. Her profile was mostly public, which in his experience meant a girl who either had nothing to hide or wanted to be found. Her cover photo was a sunset over a rock he recognised: Olumo, the great granite hill that sat in the middle of Abeokuta like a sleeping animal. Her profile picture was a girl in a yellow gele, head tilted, caught halfway through a laugh with her eyes closed. Under Education it said: Chisland University, Abeokuta. Under Lives in: the same. Same town as his school. A different school. He had been in that town for three years and had never seen her. He looked at the laughing girl for longer than he meant to. Then, because it was almost midnight, because the generator was dead, because nobody was watching him, and because a person who has been told no by the whole world for three weeks starts to find the word funny, Ayo opened a new message and typed: Will you marry me? Four seconds. He sent it before the sensible part of him could object, then lay back on the concrete, grinning at the stars like an i***t, waiting for her to ignore it or to tell him to go and wash his mouth. He had barely lifted the cigarette to his lips again when the phone buzzed against his chest. Nifemi A. Seen. Then the three dots appeared. Then they went away. Then they appeared again, and he found that he was holding his breath, which was ridiculous. The message landed: Yes, I’ll marry you. Ayo stared at it. Then he laughed so hard that he coughed on his own smoke, rolled onto his side, and had to press the back of his hand against his mouth so his mother wouldn’t hear him through the ceiling fan of her bedroom below. Wow, he typed. Just like that? Just like that, she wrote back. You asked nicely. I’m a reasonable woman. You don’t even know my name. It’s on your profile. Ayo. Ayomide? Ayodeji? Don’t make me guess, my husband. He was grinning so widely now that his jaw hurt. Ayo is fine, he wrote. Just Ayo. Okay, Just Ayo. When is the wedding? After lockdown. Excellent. Then you have till June to find the jollof. He pressed his fist against his forehead and wheezed. This was the best conversation he had had all month, and it was with a girl who had known his name for four minutes. It was a joke. Of course it was a joke. She was as bored as he was, and she had good timing, and that was all it was. He was typing his next line when another notification slid down from the top of the screen and covered hers. Zainab. Good night, Ayo. Did you eat today? Please remember to eat. 🤍 The smile on his face did not disappear. It simply stopped moving, the way a smile does when you remember a bill you have not paid. Zainab. His girlfriend. He used the word loosely, even in his own head. Seven months, if you counted from the day he had slid into her inbox after she posted a long, serious paragraph about soil erosion on the FUNAAB department page. One real date before the lockdown, at a quiet restaurant near campus, where she had sat across from him with both hands folded on the table and answered every question with the care of a student sitting an oral exam. Since then, a message each night, always the same shape: a greeting, a question about his health or his food, a small white heart. He read it now, and felt the guilt move across his chest like a cloud passing over a field. It didn’t stay. It never stayed. He thumbed a reply with one hand: Good night. Yes, I ate. He had not eaten since afternoon. He sent it and went back to the other conversation.