Lami Marcus wasn’t the cutest girl in Calabar City, but Sammy Duke panted for her as the deer pants for water, regardless of the distance between them. He spent most of his time in the US where he had gone for a degree in International Affairs. Brown-eyed Sammy was tall, dark and heartbreakingly handsome.

He had broken the hearts of many girls he had never dated, girls who were feverish with desire for him and hoped he would make advances towards them.

Lami had a round face and high cheekbones. Sammy’s friend taunted him that he dated a female Goliath. Lami’s weight was genetic. She had inherited it from her grandma, who had become so big that she couldn’t leave the house because she could no longer pass through the door.

Before Sammy left Calabar for George Washington University, he was as popular as cappuccino in a New York café. As the son of an aristocrat, pizzazz covered him like a daffodil in an Irish garden. Apart from this, he was beautiful to behold in the dunking and slamming game. He was an indispensable point guard on his high school team, and people said he’d be the greatest to come out of the country, that he would surpass the feat of Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon who never donned the green and white.

When he was on the court, some would scream, “Shaquille O’Neal!” while others would scream, “Magic Johnson!” as blind Bartimaeus screamed, “Jesus, son of David!” among the multitudes of Pharisees and Gentiles.

But Sammy never thought of making a career out of the game.

At the university, he didn’t play seriously enough to merit a draft into the NBA. His focus was his coursework, because his ambition was to become a diplomat. He wanted to become a United Nations envoy to disadvantaged regions of the world; he wanted to bring succor to victims of war, famine, and natural disasters.

Whenever Sammy and Lami were together, as when he returned to the country for Christmas, Sammy complimented her flirtatiously, which made her blush. Once, she asked him, “Do you think I’m the fattest girl around?”

He grasped her upper arms, looked into her eyes and said, “Are you fat at all? You’re not fat. You’re only big. Even if you were, you should see it as a divine gift. Nobody receives a gift and throws it away, especially if it is from God. Some folks are jealous of you, because they don’t have what you have.” His voice was as soothing as a dove’s.

Lami’s eyes brightened like those of a new convert in a tent revival. “Sammy, I’m proud to have you,” she said.

 

On a December night, the city buzzing with the Christmas carnival, they went to Blast, an upscale nightclub in a hotel on the Marian Road axis. The ceiling of the club was ablaze with star-like strobe lights, and the dance floor swelled with young people like them, mostly in their late teens and twenties, whose style seemed to reflect their individuality.

One girl had on a short black gown, which she kept pulling down to cover her thighs. Another girl wore a long pair of silver earrings that hung lower than everyone else’s. Another girl wore her hair in long plaits. Every girl seemed to have something about her that stood out.

Lami was wearing a sleeveless pink dress with studded embellishments—which her mother had bought for her as a birthday present—over a pair of black tights and fuchsia suede shoes. A pink barrette held her bounteous hair, which was as black as the wintry night, back stylishly, and a gold cross hung from a dainty chain around her neck.

Sammy wore a white T-shirt that read, “You gotta make me happy, honey! I hate this sex” over a pair of jeans. The jeans left the impression that he had had all the trousers he had ever owned shredded by the two shaggy dogs in their house and then commissioned a visually impaired tailor to stitch them all back into one pair.

The night appeared scripted for the duo. Their ambitious, nimble movements were far superior to those of the others on the dance floor. The girl in the short black gown hailed them and chanted, “Go Lami! Go Sammy! Go Lami . . .!” The beat got louder. The action heavier. They built up more sweat and danced more confidently. Others pranced around them like backup singers, chanting, “Go Lami! Go Sammy . . .!” until the DJ, who was in a small booth in the gallery, changed the music, signaling the end of the session. They received great applause.

Still relishing the moment, Sammy held Lami’s hand and pushed his way toward an empty table at the corner of the club.  He pulled a chair out for her. Whenever she was with him, he acted as if he were the most chivalrous man around. He had picked up the lesson from his father; only he so overshot it sometimes that his friends called him a “guard dog.”

After Lami had taken her seat, Sammy shoved his way again to the bar to get them something to eat.

The stench of smoke, sweat, and booze was in the air. Lami checked her watch almost constantly.

The girl in black came by and hugged her, praising her dancing.

“Lami, I’m proud of you tonight,” she said.

Other girls came over, hugging and kissing her, as though she had won a beauty pageant. She gave only an appreciative grin in return. They all envied her, of course, wishing they, instead of Lami, had received the praise.

Sammy gingerly approached the table with a tray of bitter lemon and grilled chicken. Unlike his friends, he wouldn’t booze, and that was another thing Lami liked about him. He placed their food on the table and sat opposite her. He began telling her about his family’s next getaway.

Each year, the Dukes would spend their summer in an exotic holiday destination in a different part of the world – from a stunning spacious Costa del Sol villa with a pool set amid lush greenery to a flamenco retreat in Andalucía to a cruise to San Juan.

The dancing had stopped. In the background, Whitney Houston’s “I’ll Always Love You” still played.

A group of boys clustered around a table playing rummy. Lami glanced over Sammy’s shoulder. A muscular boy pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and lit one up, blowing smoke through his nostrils.

They had almost finished their food when one of the players banged the table flinging some cards away. Lami’s eyes dilated. Sensing her fear, Sammy told her they should leave before bottles began to fly. They headed upstairs, though the angry player had calmed down.

Walking down the corridor upstairs, they heard a couple’s chatter and laughter—animated voices rising and falling—from behind a door. Lami wondered what could be so exciting to the girl. When they got to a door at the end of the corridor, Sammy retrieved a key from his jeans pocket. As he opened the door, she wondered when he had got the key. But before she could ask, he led her into the room.

Lami mother’s words struck her heart like a hammer. And for a brief moment, her heart lurched in her chest. “Lami, you’re now growing to become a woman like me,” her mother had said when Lami reached puberty. “Be careful of where you go with boys. Never hang out with any boy in a secluded place.”

“Secluded?”

“I mean a dark place, where there are no others.”

She had her first period when she was barely 10, droplets that made her mother initially fear she may have ruptured her hymen while bicycling. She never expected her daughter to menstruate so early. Ms. Marcus had taken her time to explain pads and flows and cramps to her only child.

Sammy reached for the light switch. A blue shone on them. The room had a single double bed with sateen sheets, and two nightstands on the drawers either side of the bed. Lami sat on the edge of the bed as Sammy walked over to a window that opened out to Mandela Square, a fountain square with a revolving map of the state. She imagined what could be in the dresser table adjacent the bed.

He looked west up Mandela Road, which led to the Government Reservation Area (GRA), where the Dukes had a marble three-story villa. A villa with a gazebo and a lush manicured garden, a summer hut, a two-bedroom house overlooking a dolphin swimming pool, and exotic cars idling in the interlocking driveway. He thought it was boring having a house with high walls and an Iron Gate, a symbol of restriction rather than privacy, which his parents had claimed.

Nature’s light was shy and covered its eyes with a drifting cloud. The solar-powered street lights illuminated the roads, and a few store windows were lit up.

He called her to see the splendor of the fountain as the waters sparkled in the rainbow lighting. It reminded him of night life in Washington and the cafés where he and his friends went to have drinks.

“So fascinating,” he said.

She nodded. “I love it.”

“Maybe we’ll go there and take some pictures.”

“That would be nice.”

Silence stood between them for some moments before he reached for her. He traced her eyebrows and then her face down to her mouth. She wanted to pull away, but he held her face, and then his mouth locked on hers. The little resistance in her flitted away like a sylph on wings. He peeled off her dress, stripped off his jeans, lay her onto the bed. She was still as a stone, eyes shut, arms at her side, palms in a fist, her heart skipping like a petulant ram.

Her mother’s voice buzzed in her head. “Don’t allow any man to get in there before your time.”

He was undone by her passivity. It was unlike a couple of flings he had in Washington where the girls had been excited to remove their clothing and unzipped his pants. When he pulled out of her, guilt passed over him like a cloud.

***

In the General Hospital’s waiting room, Ms. Marcus sat on a bench, arms folded across her chest and biting her dry, lower lips. Like her daughter, she had a round face, framed by a jerry-curl hair plastered to her temples. Beside her was a pregnant woman whose face was as pale as wax. That morning, Ms. Marcus had not remembered or perhaps had not been enthusiastic to ink her lips with her Kate Spade lipstick. However, she remembered to wear her Gucci Guilty perfume, and in the car she could smell on her daughter the Estrogen perfume she wore the previous morning. They used the same range of cosmetics: soaps, creams, powders, perfumes, and eyelashes, and they would drive to Sonaset, a beauty parlor in Calabar central business district for facials, manicures, and pedicures.

Lami, between two middle-aged women, sat across from her mom and the pregnant woman. For a time, Lami was doubled over, her hands to her cheeks. She seemed to be gazing at the woman’s protruded belly, but all she saw was the scene of her affair with Sammy at Blast. However, she didn’t see Sammy enter into her, perhaps because she’d closed her eyes at that moment. Maybe because she was afraid that seeing it would confirm what she thought was her mother’s fear. She saw herself now seated on the bed where her tears had shimmered at the bottom of her eyelids. She glanced at the blood on the sheets, more tears welled up in her eyes. Sammy just stood there, swallowing hard.

When a baby shrieked, she jerked, alert again. At that moment a doctor beckoned Ms. Marcus. The doctor was narrow-shouldered with a slimmer torso and bigger waist. She walked off to her office with her heels clicking like an old Royal typewriter on the tiled floor. She wore her hair in a knot and clipped with a sequin headband. In her right hand, she held a piece of paper and a stethoscope. She was, according to her tag, Dr. Wendy Solomon.

Mother and daughter sat across from the doctor who slid her black plastic-framed glasses from her oblong face and rested them on top of her desk. Then, leaning forward, clasping her hands on the desk, her big eyes boring into Lami’s mother’s she said, “I’m afraid, the result was positive.” She passed the paper to Ms. Marcus and whispered, “Your daughter is pregnant.” Ms. Marcus’ face collapsed like a pricked balloon. This was not what she had wanted to hear. She turned to her daughter, and with a razor-like gaze said, “How could you let this happen?”

Lami couldn’t find her voice. A tear rolled into the corner of her lips. Salty.

Ms. Marcus drove away from the hospital and headed to the left instead of the right, which would have taken them home. The road went directly by some grocery stores and the Chinese restaurant where they had gone to watch the Lion Dance at Chinese New Year. She may not have been as rich as the Dukes who lived in the GRA, but she could afford to live in an apartment on the third floor of a condo in a neighborhood of civil servants and the middle class. She may not be able to afford trips to exotic locations outside of Nigeria, but she had, with her daughter, explored some tourist attractions in the country, which was even a luxury to some of her neighbors. She was doing her best to make life comfortable for her daughter.

The mid-morning traffic streamed by as she went past the Mardozy Mall where she bought Lami her first bra. She passed the university, the fire station, and the Itu Bridge.

Lami stared straight ahead, her eyes unfocused. She moved her legs together and clasped her clammy hands beneath them. After her mother drove past a truck full of carbonated drinks she said, “Mom, I still had my period last month.”

Her mother didn’t look at her, didn’t say anything. The BMW had been heading to nowhere for twenty minutes. She took an empty exit and turned onto a road leading to a village where a Millennium Development Goal (MDG) compost plant was situated and where a dual carriageway was under construction. Heaps of gravel and sand, and drums of bitumen and reinforcing bars lay on the roadside. A few meters in front of an old dump truck, she pulled onto the shoulder and opened the window. She leaned back into her seat, censoring the thoughts in her troubled mind.

“Sammy? It was Sammy, right?” she said, finally breaking her silence.

Lami turned to her and answered, “Yes.” She could see puffiness spreading around her mother’s eyes. She was accustomed to seeing the puffiness whenever her mother was greatly worried and sad.

Ms Marcus leaned forward, holding the steering wheel. “You have brought a shame on us. You should know this.” The tears under her lids were collecting and waiting to fall.

For a long time she’d suffered amnesia with regard to her own past, of how she had gotten pregnant in high school and of how she was abandoned and left to suffer. The girl beside her was the product of that experience and Lami’s current state had shone the spotlight on her mother’s harrowing past.

She laid her head against the headrest and continued in a faraway voice, “I’m not an opportunist. I don’t want people to see me as one.” The tears streaked down her cheeks, but her daughter didn’t see them, for her own eyes were blurred with tears, too.

***

Lami opened her eyes to a stretch of white ceiling tiles. She was lying on a bed, with a blue tube passing waters into her body through the vein in her left arm. Ms Marcus was by the bedside, her hands folded across her chest. When Lami saw puffiness in her mother’s eyes, she reasoned all hadn’t been well after all. Her eyes glanced at the wall nearby. There, the poster of a mother breastfeeding her infant hung. The two other beds in the room were empty. Closing her eyes, she peered into her memory portal to recall her last moments before waking up in the hospital, but those eyes opened as soon as Dr. Wendy strode in with the company of Mrs. Duke.

“She aborted the pregnancy,” Dr. Wendy told Mrs. Duke matter-of-factly. “We had to flush the dead fetus out of her.”

Lami’s mother shook her head forlornly. “She was covered in blood when we rushed her here. — scared out of my wits.” Mrs. Duke touched her arm consolingly. “I never would have thought she could—”

“Lami, Lami!” her mother called.

Lami was brought back to the presence. Actually, she didn’t have an abortion and wasn’t rushed to any hospital. She was in her bedroom, at the mahogany mirror-framed dressing table, imagining the consequences of getting rid of the fetus when her mother’s voice roused her from her awful daydream.

On the table were a jewelry box, a pack of sanitary pads, and cosmetics, which included the two bottles of Gucci Guilty and Estrogen. She turned her head toward the voice. Her mother was standing at the door.

“I just spoke with Mrs. Duke. She’ll be here tomorrow evening. Dinner is ready.”

When the door closed behind her mother, Lami turned back to look at herself in the mirror, perhaps checking for changes on her face. Maybe she was looking at the Estrogen which she had used more than the Gucci Guilty. Perhaps, her eyes were on the sanitary pad, which would remain useless for some time.