Teacher's Delight

Chapter Eleven Zarina — Five Months Earlier

Before the interview. Before any of it. The very beginning.

The first thing that struck her about the apartment was the silence.

Not peaceful silence. Not the settled quiet of a place at rest. This was a flatter, more absolute kind of silence, the kind that came from double-glazed windows and a street outside that didn't carry the particular symphony she'd grown up sleeping through — no generators, no distant call to prayer threading through traffic noise, no neighbor's television bleeding through a shared wall, no okada horns, none of the specific chaos that had always meant home without her ever having to think the word. She stood in the middle of an unfurnished living room at eleven at night, jet-lagged into a kind of raw, exposed wakefulness, two suitcases still zipped by the door, and found the quiet almost unbearable in a way she hadn't prepared for.

She had prepared for a great many things. She had not prepared for missing noise.

The knock came around midnight, tentative, and Zarina opened the door to find a woman roughly her own age standing in the hallway in pajama pants and an oversized university hoodie, holding, with the specific solemnity of someone delivering a diplomatic gift, a mug of tea.

"I'm Sugar. I live down the hall — well, I will be living down the hall from you, technically, once you're actually moved in, which you're not yet, judging by the suitcases." She held out the mug. "I heard someone in here and figured either you were the new flatmate arriving jet-lagged and miserable, or I was about to call the police on a very polite burglar. This felt like the safer opening move either way."

Zarina had laughed — the first real laugh she'd managed since the flight — and taken the tea, which was too sweet and exactly what she hadn't known she needed.

"Zarina," she said. "I only landed this morning. I don't think my body has decided what time zone it's currently arguing for."

"Yeah, that tracks. You've got the face. Everyone gets the face the first week — like your soul is still somewhere over the Atlantic filing a complaint." Sugar leaned against the doorframe, unhurried, apparently unbothered by the lateness of the hour or the fact that they'd known each other for ninety seconds. "Where's home?"

"Lagos."

"I don't know anything about Lagos. I'm from a town in Ohio with one stoplight and a Dairy Queen that closes at nine, so I'm not exactly going to be able to relate, but I'm a very good listener and I make excellent bad tea, as you can tell." A beat, and then, more gently, the performance dropping just slightly: "First time this far from home?"

"First time this far from home for this long," Zarina said, and something about the plainness of the question, asked by a stranger with no stake in the answer, let her say the truer version of it than she'd said to anyone yet, including herself. "I keep doing the math. Time difference, flight cost, how many months until I can justify going back even for a week. I've been here twelve hours and I've already done the math four times."

"That's allowed." Sugar said it simply, no pity in it, just fact. "Homesickness isn't a character flaw. It's just love with nowhere to go yet. It'll find somewhere to go. Takes time."

Zarina had thought about that sentence a great deal in the weeks that followed — love with nowhere to go yet — turning it over on nights when the silence outside her window felt less like absence and more like accusation, like the apartment itself was asking what right she had to be there instead of four thousand miles away where her name still meant something to everyone who heard it.

She unpacked slowly, over the first week, hanging clothes she'd chosen specifically because they reminded her of home rather than because they suited the cold — a habit she'd correct within the month, once the actual weather arrived and taught her, decisively, that sentiment did not keep a person warm. She called Afisa every night that first week, sometimes for no reason beyond hearing a voice that already knew the shape of her, and Afisa, four hours south in a city that was at least the right continent, had talked her through the specific loneliness of a first week in a new country with the particular patience of someone who'd done it herself two years earlier and remembered exactly how it felt.

"It gets easier," Afisa had told her, the third night, when Zarina admitted — quietly, ashamed of the admission — that she'd cried in the shower that morning for no reason she could point to. "Not because you'll miss it less. Because you'll build enough of a life there that missing it stops being the only thing filling the space."

She hadn't believed that, that first week. The apartment had felt too quiet, the classes hadn't started yet, and the only person she knew in the entire country was a stranger down the hall with excessively sweet tea and an easy laugh, and it had seemed, in the raw honesty of 2 a.m. jet lag, like a life she'd have to build entirely from nothing.

She had not known, standing in that unfurnished living room with a mug of bad tea warming her hands, about the interview that would happen in ten weeks, or the man behind the desk whose laugh would undo something in her she hadn't known was braced, or the venture that would grow, slowly and then all at once, into something worth an email with a subject line that made her hands shake. She had not known any of it yet.

She had known only the silence, and the tea, and Sugar's steady, unbothered voice saying it'll find somewhere to go, and she had gone to bed that first night homesick and uncertain and entirely unaware that she was already, in the smallest and most ordinary way, beginning to build the somewhere Sugar had promised her it would find.