TOBA
September 1998
Eighth grade was different.
Not better—different.
I had learned how to survive in this school now. Learned its rhythms and its rules, the ones that actually mattered, not the ones printed in the student handbook. I knew which hallways to avoid between classes. I knew which stairwells were safe and which were controlled by boys whose names I didn’t know but whose faces I had memorized. I knew which bathrooms you could use and which would get you robbed or beaten or both.
I had also grown. Four inches over the summer, sprouting up like the plants Mummy sometimes talked about growing on a balcony we didn’t have. My shoulders had broadened. My voice had deepened, cracking sometimes at unexpected moments but mostly deep and solid. I wasn’t the scrawny new kid anymore. I was… I honestly didn’t know. Just that the other boys looked at me differently.
Darnell still called me “African.” Still made monkey sounds when I passed. Still tried to shake me down for money I didn’t have. But the physical attacks had stopped. Maybe because I had gotten bigger. Maybe because he had gotten bored. Maybe because word had spread about what happened in June—the day I finally hit back.
I didn’t win that fight. Not even close. But I had proved that I would fight, that I wouldn’t just curl up and take it anymore. Sometimes showing that you had something worth protecting—even if it was just your pride—made the predators move on to easier prey.
The classes were easier now too. My English had improved dramatically over the summer, absorbing American TV in the laundromat where Mummy sometimes took us, reading free newspapers people left on the subway, listening to how the other kids talked and copying their rhythms, their slang, their ways of making words sound lyrical.
I could code-switch now. When I was tired or angry, the Nigerian accent came out—the rounded vowels, the musical rises and falls of Yoruba-influenced English. But when I needed to blend in, I could flatten my voice to sound more Brooklyn. More… American. It wasn’t perfect, and I kept learning.
Still, school was a place to survive, not enjoy. A place to get through. The real part of my day came after. The walk home. Unlocking the door to find Rola waiting for me.
“How was school?” she’d ask from her spot on the bed, legs crossed, homework spread around her even though she didn’t really need help with any of it. She was smart—smarter than me—but she liked the ritual of us doing homework together. Liked having something to share.
“Fine.”
“Did anyone bother you?”
“No.”
“Good.” She’d pat the space beside her. “Come help me with this math problem.”
I’d drop my backpack and sit next to her.
Her math homework was easy—multiplication tables that I had mastered years ago in Lagos—but I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I went through each problem with her, patient and slow, watching her work through the logic, praising her when she got it right, gently correcting when she got it wrong.
This was what our afternoons looked like now. Homework first. Then TV if we had electricity and cable, which we usually did thanks to a neighbor who had figured out how to steal it from the building’s main line. Then dinner—whatever Mummy had left for us, reheated on the hot plate, eaten on the bed because we didn’t have a table.
And always, always, Rola close beside me. Her small body leaning against mine. Her warmth the only warmth in this gray room.
“Toba?”
“Hmm?”
“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”
I should say no. I knew I should say so. Mummy had started talking about how Rola was “getting too big” to share a bed with her brother. How we needed to “start being proper.” How I should sleep on the floor or in the closet we had converted into a tiny bedroom for exactly this purpose.
But Mummy wasn’t here. She was working the night shift at the hotel, wouldn’t be home until nearly dawn. And Rola’s voice had that quality it got when she was afraid.
“Why?” I asked.
“I had a bad dream last night.”
“What about it?”
She was quiet for a moment. Her hand found mine and squeezed.
“I don’t remember exactly,” she said. “I just remember being scared. And I woke up and you weren’t there and the room was so dark and I could hear sounds from outside and I didn’t know what they were and I—” Her voice broke slightly. “I just want to feel safe, Toba. I feel safe when you’re there.”
How could I say no to that?
“Okay,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Her smile was like sunrise—sudden and warm and making everything else seem less gray.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re the best brother in the whole world.”
“I’m your only brother.”
“So? You’d still be the best even if I had a hundred brothers.”
I laughed. And she laughed too. In that small room with its brick-wall view, broken drawer and a smell that stuck no matter what mummy burnt, we were two kids being silly together. Brother and sister. Best friends. Each other’s whole world.
That night, she curled up beside me in my narrow bed, her head on my chest, her hand gripping my shirt like she was afraid I would disappear if she let go. And I lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling, feeling the weight of her against me, wondering when holding my sister had started to feel like the only important thing in my life.
Mummy came home just before dawn. I heard her key in the lock, heard her footsteps, felt her pause in the doorway. Looking at us. Her two children, tangled together in sleep.
I kept my eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. Waited for her to say something. To separate us. To remind me that this wasn’t proper.
But she didn’t. She just stood there for a long moment, then turned away and went to her own bed.
Maybe she was too tired to fight. Maybe she saw something peaceful in us that she didn’t want to disturb. Maybe she understood, in some way I couldn’t articulate, that this was what we needed. Each other. The only stability in a world that kept shifting under our feet.
Whatever the reason, she let us be.
And I was grateful.
* * *
The next morning, Rola woke up before me.
I felt her stirring against my chest, felt her sit up slightly, felt her eyes on me. I pretended to stay asleep, curious what she would do.
She didn’t get up. Didn’t leave. Just lay there, looking at me, her breath soft and even.
“I know you’re awake,” she said quietly.
I opened my eyes. She was propped up on one elbow, watching my face with that serious expression she got when she was thinking.
“How did you know?”
“Your breathing changed.”
“Maybe I was dreaming.”
“You weren’t.” She paused. “I watch you sleep sometimes. When I can’t sleep. It helps.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t know what it meant that my ten-year-old sister watched me sleep. Didn’t know if it was normal or strange.
“Why does it help?” I asked.
“Because you look peaceful. You look like nothing can hurt you. And if nothing can hurt you, then nothing can hurt me too.”
I sat up, facing her. In the morning light filtering through the window—gray light, city light, nothing like the golden Lagos mornings I remembered—she looked smaller than she was. Fragile.
“Nothing’s going to hurt you,” I said. “I promise.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can. I am.”
“But what if—”
“No.” I took her hands in mine, squeezed them tight. “No what ifs. I’ll protect you. Always. Whatever it takes.”
She searched my face, looking for doubt, for lies, for the cracks that adults always had when they made promises they couldn’t keep.
She wouldn’t find any.
Because I meant it. Every word. I would protect her with my life, with my breath, with everything I had. She was my sister. My responsibility. My reason for existing.
I didn’t know, then, how dangerous that kind of devotion could become.
I didn’t know that love, taken too far, can become its own kind of prison.
I only knew that I would do anything for her.
* * *