ROLA
March 1999
“You don’t go down there anymore,” Mummy said, standing at the sink, peeling potatoes with quick, practiced hands. I hated potatoes now because it felt like she had replaced yams with them. Yams used to be ordinary in Lagos. Here, they felt like prized possession you only saw in memory.
“Don’t play with those girls on the corner,” she continued. “You stay with Abigail now. You hear me?”
“Yes, Mummy.”
“Abigail is a good girl. From a good family. You go to her house, or she comes here. That is all.”
Her voice made it sound simple. Like friendships were things you could assign the way you assign chores.
I nodded again.
Nothing was the same after the incident.
Not the street. Not Mummy’s voice when she said “corner.”
That was what we called it now—”the incident.” A clean, clinical word. As if giving it a neutral name could strip away the terror, the violation, the feeling of his hands on me and his breath in my face and the certainty, absolute and total, that I was going to die in that stairwell.
The police never caught him. Two weeks after it happened, a detective called to say they were “deprioritizing” the case. No witnesses. No camera footage. The description I gave—white male, forties, brown coat—matched a thousand men in Brooklyn. The bite mark I left on his hand would scar, but unless they found him for something else, there was no way to trace it back.
“We’ll keep the file open,” the detective said. “If anything comes up.”
Nothing ever came up. He was still out there, somewhere. Walking the same streets. Maybe looking for another girl to grab in another stairwell. I tried not to think about it, but some nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I imagined him. Wondered if he thought about me. Wondered if he remembered the taste of his own blood when I bit through his flesh.
I hoped he did. I hoped the scar ached every time the weather changed.
I couldn’t walk past the spot anymore. Every day, going up and down the stairs to and from our apartment, I had to pass the landing between the first and second floors. And every day, my heart would start pounding and my palms would start sweating and I would run—actually run—up or down until I was past it, until I was safe.
Except nowhere felt safe anymore.
The world had cracked open and shown me what was hiding underneath. Monsters. Real monsters, not the ones in stories, not the ones you could defeat with magic words or brave deeds. Real monsters who looked like ordinary people, who walked the same streets, who could grab you when you least expected it and—
I couldn’t finish the thought. Couldn’t let myself imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t bitten him, if I hadn’t run, if I hadn’t screamed and made it to the door in time.
Mummy changed after the incident. She tried to come home earlier, though it meant less money. She walked me to school in the mornings, even when it made her late for work. She checked the locks obsessively—three times, four times, five times before she was satisfied. At night, I heard her praying, asking God for protection she wasn’t sure He would provide.
But the biggest change was Toba.
He was everywhere now. Always watching. Always present. Even when he was at school and I was at school, he called the main office at lunchtime to make sure I was there. He met me outside my building every afternoon, standing on the sidewalk like a soldier on guard duty, scanning every face that passed until he saw mine.
At first, I was grateful. The fear still lived in my body like a second heartbeat. Having Toba there, having him close, made me feel like I could breathe again. Like maybe the world wasn’t as dangerous as it had revealed itself to be.
But as the weeks passed, I started to notice other things.
The way he always positioned himself between me and the door. The way his eyes tracked my movements around the room, even when I was just getting a glass of water. The way he held me at night—every night now, because I couldn’t sleep without him.
“Toba?”
“Hmm?”
We were in his bed. My bed now too, really, since I hadn’t slept in my own bed since the incident. It was late—past midnight—and Mummy was working the night shift. The building was quiet except for the usual sounds: pipes clanking, distant TV’s, the ever-present hum of the city outside.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’ll wait outside the door.”
This was how it was now. He waited outside the bathroom while I peed. He stood at the kitchen corner while I made my cereal. He followed me to the window when I wanted to look outside.
Part of me felt suffocated.
But a bigger part of me felt loved.
No one had ever paid this much attention to me. Not Mummy, who loved me but was always working. Not Daddy back in Nigeria, who had looked at me like a disappointment from the day I was born. Not my friends, not my teachers, not anyone.
Only Toba. Only my brother.
From the kitchen window, I could see the corner where Deidra and the other girls jumped rope.
Some afternoons, when Toba was in the shower or on the phone with one of his school friends, I would stand there with my forehead pressed to the cold glass and watch them. The ropes turning. The girls counting. Sometimes Deidra would look up, a small frown on her face, scanning the building like she was trying to remember which window was mine.
I never waved.
I didn’t know how to wave from inside a body that no longer knew how to be ten.
Once, just once, I heard her voice through the cracked window — Rola? You up there? — clear as a bell on a still afternoon, the sound carrying up the brick. I stepped back from the glass and pretended I hadn’t heard. Pretended I wasn’t home. Pretended I was someone who didn’t know the rhythm of double-dutch, didn’t know what it felt like to laugh for two hours without thinking about anything.
After a few weeks, she stopped looking up.
Toba was the center of my world now. The sun I orbited around. The only thing that made me feel safe in a universe that had proved it wasn’t.
“Toba?”
“Yeah?”
I had come back from the bathroom. He was sitting up in bed, waiting for me, a silhouette against the faint light from the window.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For... everything. For being there. For not leaving me alone.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached out and took my hand, pulling me back toward the bed.
“I told you I would protect you,” he said. “I meant it.”
“I know.”
“Nothing bad is ever going to happen to you again. I promise.”
I climbed into bed beside him. Pressed myself against his warmth. Let him wrap his arms around me and hold me close.
I was ten years old. I didn’t understand what was happening. Didn’t understand the way my heart beat faster when he held me like this. Didn’t understand the complicated tangle of fear and safety and something else that lived in my chest whenever I was near him.
I only knew that I felt protected. That I felt loved. That I felt, for the first time since the incident, like maybe everything would be okay.
And home was Toba.
Home would always be Toba.
***
Toba also became more protective—he would check on me multiple times a night, waking from sleep to make sure I was still there, still breathing, still safe.
“You don’t have to keep checking,” I told him one night, after he had sat up for the third time to look at me. “I’m okay.”
“I know.”
“Then why—”
“Because I need to know. I need to see it.” His voice was fierce in the darkness. “I need to know that you’re real and you’re here and nothing happened to you while I wasn’t paying attention.”
I didn’t argue. How could I? He was afraid for me. He loved me. And in those weeks, when the nightmares came every night and I woke up screaming, his fear felt like the only thing holding me together.
Mummy noticed the change too. She saw us clinging to each other, saw the way I couldn’t let Toba out of my sight, saw the way he hovered over me like a guardian angel.
“You need to give each other space,” she said once, gently. “You’re not little children anymore. You can’t be attached at the hip forever.”
But she didn’t push. She was too tired, too overwhelmed by work and bills and the endless demands of survival. And maybe she thought our closeness was normal, a result of the trauma, something that would fade as I healed.
It didn’t fade.
It grew.
Spring turned to summer. The nights got warmer. The apartment got stuffier. And Toba and I got closer, in ways that felt natural and inevitable, in ways I didn’t question because I didn’t have the words to question them.
I was ten years old. He was fourteen.
We didn’t know what we were becoming.
We just knew that we needed each other.
And need, I was learning, was a force stronger than reason. Stronger than rules. Stronger, maybe, than anything.
* * *
Thank you ❣️
Ma,you are really keeping me in my toes 😭