My father was a professor, and we lived on the University of Nigeria campus in a house full of books; bougainvillea plants lined our driveway in splashes of purple. This was the small, gated world of my childhood: I went to the university primary school, the university children’s library, the university chapel for Sunday Mass. Everyone was similar—safe and sedate academic people—our lives circumscribed by the tended campus hedges.
In my teenage years, I walked two streets to the university secondary school, whose reputation attracted people from out of town, especially the children of wealthy traders from Onitsha, the location of the largest market in West Africa, that bastion of unsophisticated chaos. For the first time I knew people who were not like us. Bush was the word we used for their gaudy style, their mixed-up English tenses, their imported school sandals.
Echezona’s sandals were orangey brown with wedge heels, and he walked in a comical strut. He was popular and brash, a ringleader of boys; he often missed school and got into trouble with teachers and loitered during class hours. I was utterly uninterested in Onitsha boys like him until one day, I was so aware of Echezona the air pulsed if he passed by. How strange that a feeling can grow unprompted, from nothing, surprising even your own heart. I began combing my short Afro more carefully, looking in the mirror to see not myself but myself as seen by him. I was 14 and he was 16. I was an academic star and he had abysmal grades. I wasn’t sure he liked me—I was his junior after all—until his friends came to me to say, “Echezona wants to talk to you.”
“Then he should come himself,” I replied, falsely cool.
The first time he walked me home, he was quiet, almost solemn, his eyes trained ahead or downward, never once turning to me. I thought he was being superior until I realized with surprise that he was shy. To sense his shyness was to feel the intimacy of discovery, of seeing a different version of a person, suddenly known only to you. He took to walking me home. “I want us to be boyfriend and girlfriend,” he would say, and I would reply, “I have to think about it,” even though I wanted nothing more. One day I said yes. And so began a cracking open of my sheltered world. A rush of new bewildering air. My unlikely first boyfriend. His was an exquisite attentiveness, open and faltering, reaching but not quite holding my hand. Often, his skin brushed against mine. He treated me with care and a kind of fear, as though I might fall and break into pieces. (I thought of him when I overheard an aunt say in Igbo, “A man must hold you like an egg.”) I was not to be rushed, and so it was months before the trembling deliciousness of my life’s first kiss, standing near the quarters in our backyard where our house help lived.
