Waiting On a Text

Zuri had imagined freedom a hundred different ways before she ever set foot on campus. She just hadn't imagined it would feel this loud. After years in a school where the gates locked at six and her mother's text me when you get there followed her out every door, university felt almost unreal. Nobody asked where she was going. Nobody questioned when she came back. Freedom, she discovered within the first week, came with an unexpected problem: it expected you to decide everything yourself. Two weeks later, she was still getting lost — literally, between lecture halls that all somehow looked identical, and figuratively, in the specific way of someone who'd spent eighteen years being told exactly where to be. Her hostel room was small and shared, one side of it already fully colonized by a roommate who'd gone out to "find her people" within the first hour of moving in, tossing the phrase over her shoulder like it cost her nothing. Zuri had people too. Just not here — old friends scattered now across other campuses, reachable only through screens that made everyone sound a little further away than they actually were. She had exactly one name on her phone that meant something on this campus, and today's entire objective, as far as she'd allowed herself to plan it, was simple: find Sam before she lost her nerve entirely. They'd met a year earlier at an interschool debate. Sam had been assigned to argue that the male child was superior to the female child, and he'd defended it with such deliberate lack of conviction that Zuri accused him afterward of trying to lose. He'd just grinned and said, "Somebody had to." They'd exchanged numbers "for future debates" and never once actually discussed a debate again. He'd warned her a little, in his usual half-joking way, days before resumption. It's a whole different world out here. No teachers babysit you every five minutes. You'll be fine, don't be a stranger. So she wasn't. Two weeks in, her stomach still doing its nervous little twist every time she crossed a lecture hall full of strangers, she texted him first. They met up that evening, along the main road that cut through the middle of campus — alive now that lectures had let out, students unwinding in loose clusters, the cafeterias filling fast, and the roadside stalls doing brisk business with noodles, shawarma, and bottled Fanta, the whole stretch thick with the smell of it. And predictably — because nothing about Sam was ever simple — he wasn't alone. Three guys trailed behind him, cracking jokes and teasing each other the easy way people do when they haven't seen each other in months. "My cousin," Sam said, nodding toward Zuri, not even trying to sound convincing. He didn't even glance at her when he said it, as if the lie cost him nothing at all. Zuri gave the smallest smile she could manage without it looking rude — the kind of smile she'd perfected over years of being told to greet elders and otherwise stay quiet — and said next to nothing. Hi. Nice to meet you. That was the entire extent of what freshman-year Zuri knew how to offer strangers, three boys' worth of names arriving faster than she could file them. The introductions went around — Toby, Chidi, Kian, names she'd have to work to remember later, faces she cataloged without much thought. Then one of them leaned in, just slightly, just enough that it was between the two of them and no one else. "I know you guys aren't cousins," Toby said, low, almost amused, as if he was letting her in on a joke at Sam's expense. "I know his sister." Zuri's smile shifted before she could stop it — not shy anymore, just caught, a small laugh she hadn't planned on slipping out before she could swallow it back down. She nodded, said nothing, because really, what was there to say to that? Toby straightened back up and reintroduced himself properly — full name, exaggerated handshake, like the first version hadn't counted, like he wanted her to actually remember his name this time, not just file it away with the others. The other two — Chidi and Kian — closed in after that, a fresh scramble of names and handshakes and someone's joke. She laughed a beat too late, the way you do when you're still learning a group's rhythm. And then, as easily as it had started, it was over — Sam and his friends were peeling off toward wherever they'd been headed before she interrupted, someone throwing a see you around over a shoulder without looking back. She didn't think much of it, walking back to her hostel alone, replaying none of it particularly. Except that by the time she got to her room, two new numbers sat saved in her phone under names she'd have to double-check later. A boy's face — the one who'd caught the lie before anyone else even blinked — stayed a little longer in her head than the rest, uninvited, refusing to file itself away as easily as the others had. It struck her then, oddly, why she'd never quite let the thread with Sam fade in the first place — not really a habit, she realized now, more the small comfort of having one person on this campus who didn't require explaining herself from scratch. She hadn't expected the evening to hand her a second name worth keeping. Toby. She repeated it once in her head before sleep finally found her. Months later, she would struggle to remember what she'd eaten that evening. She would remember his name perfectly.