Ajie was watching Paul watch Bibi and Wendy. Apart from her sky-blue short dungarees, Wendy had everything else to match: white T-shirt, white sneakers, white socks, and white wristwatch strap.
“Bibi,” Bibi replied. “My name is Bibi. I was just replying to a letter from my friend.” She pulled out one of the dining chairs for Wendy, but the two of them just stood behind the chairs for a moment, and right then Ajie would have loved to call Bibi by her full name; he would have loved to cough out, “Edobibi!” in his thickest Ogba accent, anything that might mar the sweet first impression Bibi seemed so bent on making. He would go on to explain to Wendy, who would be manifestly appalled by such an uncool name, “She was born in the year our house in the village was completed. Her name simply means a place to live,” and then it would be left to Ma to raise her voice and say, “No. Home. It means home.” But anyway, Bibi beat him to it. “My brother Paul”—she gestured toward Paul, and then turning the other way—“Ajie, my kid brother.”
Kid stung him. The way Bibi delivered it, knowing exactly what she was doing and counting on him to endure the slight until at least the visitor was gone. Ajie snorted, hissed, and swayed in resentment, but no one noticed. Wendy nodded coolly at Ajie, and although Paul was right before her, she waved her fingers hi-yaa and immediately turned to Bibi as if there were something they had to discuss.
“Bibi, won’t you offer your friend something?” Ma asked. “I think we have some soft drinks in the fridge.”
Wendy shook her head at Bibi and winced in a big-girl sort of way, Don’t bother.
“So you are always writing letters to your friends. Who is this one to?” Wendy asked.
“Atinuke, my best friend. She lives in New Bussau,” Bibi said, shifting the writing pad away
“Where is that?”
“Niger State. It’s where you have the Kainji Dam. I think her father works in NEPA.”
“Hmm, okay.”
“I just received her letter today. I wanted to reply at once,” Bibi said. Everyone in the parlor was listening to the two of them, and their chat took on an air of play rehearsal.
“You live at number seventeen, right?” Paul asked.
“Oh, yes.” Wendy turned to face him, looking a little surprised that Paul was there at all.
“We know your brother Wobo,” Paul said.
“Oh, no, my brothers.” Wendy rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “They frustrate me. Why do you think I left to come here?”
“What did they do?” Bibi asked.
“I don’t know. They are all much older than me, and they are just mean and boring. Jesus.” She sighed and then looked at Paul. “What class are you in?”
—
Two weeks later, on a moderately warm Friday evening at about five-thirty, Wendy went berserk with rage and called Paul a “stupendous ignoramus” and Paul yelled, “You nematode!” in her face.
“Take this fake rubbish away.” Bibi shoved the BMX bicycle back at Wendy.
Wendy held on to her bike with one hand and stepped in front of Bibi, stared her down, moving her eyes up and down, up and down, and then hissed, “We shouldn’t even be breathing the same air. You scruffy thing.”
“That’s enough, now. Take your bike and go.” Paul put himself between the two girls.
“Ask your father to buy you your own bicycle,” Wendy shouted as she rolled off.
“Ask your father to stop picking you things off the dump,” Bibi shot back. At which point Ajie thought she deserved a round of applause, but his knee was scraped and still hurting from the altercation that had preceded the ongoing fallout.
An hour before, they were all laughter, shrieks, and shouts as Paul gave Wendy a crossbar down the street with Bibi and Ajie running behind them. Bibi then asked to have a go and pedaled up and down the street while Ajie, who couldn’t ride properly, was counting on Paul to give him a hand. When Bibi got off the bike, Ajie assumed it was his turn next and asked Wendy if he could ride, but she refused: “I can’t let you practice with my bike, you will spoil it and my father will be angry.” She pedaled off.
Paul told Ajie to relax, he would ask her himself, but Ajie went and stood by the dogonyaro trees, watching them, keeping a decided distance so as to feel lonely enough, and imagining how one day the girl would be knocked down by a bigger, faster bicycle or an okada and how he would not care when she returned from hospital on crutches, in bandages and casts.
“Don’t worry, Ajie, come.” Bibi beckoned to him in high spirits. “I’m sure she was just joking.”
When Wendy cycled back to where they stood, Paul asked if she could let Ajie learn to ride, and Wendy pursed her lips and reluctantly stepped aside. Twilight had descended in an instant and clothed the trees in shadows. “Steady,” Paul said to Ajie as he got on the bike gingerly. Paul touched gently on the handlebars to keep them steady.
“Don’t pedal too fast,” Bibi admonished, “just take it slow.” Then she turned to Wendy. “I think he’ll be fine, he won’t spoil your bike.” Bibi failed to notice the unyielding look on her friend’s face. She couldn’t see beyond her own excitement that her friend wasn’t with her, so she just rubbed sand off her face and kicked her bathroom slippers to the curb and walked behind the bike as Ajie stepped, ever so gently, on his first pedals, Paul’s hand still on the handlebar, Bibi following right behind. They were soon doing a quick walk, a jog, and then a sprint. Ajie was pedaling along all by himself. “Yeah!” Bibi threw her hands in the air. “We did it!” Ajie looked back and realized they weren’t holding on to the bike anymore; he kept his feet working on the pedals — if he stopped stepping, he would fall, so he looked ahead and kept his frame steady. When he saw the pothole, he swerved and tried to return his hands to a straight position, but everything became wobbly and crazy and he saw himself going down in slow motion. Kraap! The bike scraped the tarmac. He tumbled off and fell flat on the road. His knee burned with pain. In a second, Paul was there, pulling him off the ground. “Ajie, Ajie, are you okay?” Bibi was looking at Ajie’s bruised knee now, blowing air to soothe it, saying, “Sorry, it’s only a scratch,” and then looking at Ajie’s face to confirm if she was right: It’s only a scratch, isn’t it? Nothing is broken…That was when Wendy walked up to where they were huddled together on the ground. She picked up her bike from the ground and checked to see if anything was damaged.
Paul was looking at her. “Sorry,” he said, then looking back at Ajie, “he has wounded himself.”
That was when the roaring came out of her: “I don’t care! It’s all your fault! Stupendous ignoramus!” Paul leaped to his feet, quivering with rage, and for a whole second there was no sound from him, then he screamed, “You nematode! Horrible creature, and you can go to hell with your bike.”
Ajie got up and tried his leg out in a few steps, as if checking for damage. The security lights of the nearby compounds began to come on as Wendy walked toward her gate.
“Let’s go home, don’t mind her,” Paul said, “she is a very stupid girl.”
“No wonder her brothers hate her,” Bibi added, but Ajie couldn’t help feeling the heaviness that somehow he had ruined everything.
—
Bibi wrote a letter that night, under candlelight. She made several drafts and threw the old ones in the bin, crumpled up in a ball. She covered up the letter when anyone got close, as if shielding class exercises from a seatmate. “State secret,” Ma said, and clicked her tongue. “Mind your eyes, Bibi, that letter can wait till daybreak.”