back, merging into the people around her, disappearing. He was supposed to be in Onitsha, she thought. For business. Yet here he was, in their own town, with this woman and this little boy.
Her first thought was to rush home and tell her mother. She’d already started pushing through the crowd, toward the bus stop, when a sick feeling hit her stomach: her mother already knew. No wonder he’d left. He had a whole other family to go home to, and he didn’t even have to leave town to reach them. Juju glanced back at her father and saw the woman smiling up at him, her teeth shining like a Colgate advertisement. That gleaming joy made Juju want to take a stone and smash it into the woman’s face.
Just the other day she’d pressed herself against the bathroom door and watched her mother cry soundlessly while pulling out a discolored molar from her own mouth with a pair of small pliers. Maja’s jaw had been swollen for a while—she’d told Juju it was from an infection, which was true, but it was also from a fight with Charles. She hid the bruising with makeup.
“Mama, why don’t you go and see a dentist?” Juju had asked, wincing as she watched the tooth clatter into the sink.
Her mother gargled with peroxide, spitting a swirl of foam and blood. “You have to travel to see a good dentist. Sometimes even overseas.”
“So why don’t you travel?”
Maja’s eyes glittered with the anger she usually hid from her daughter. “Why don’t you ask your father? Tell him all my teeth are rotting in my head!” She pushed past Juju and slammed her bedroom door, leaving her daughter wavering behind her.
Now, looking at her father in the market, Juju felt a wave of revulsion so strong it made her want to bend over the gutter and vomit everything she’d eaten that day. She wanted to kill him; maybe she would, if he ever came back home. Poison his soup or something. It couldn’t be that hard, and no one could tell her he didn’t deserve it, not with her mother’s broken heart, not with her bloody tooth left in the sink.
Juju went home and threw the books in a corner of her room, then climbed into bed and listened to her pulse as it galloped through her. She was too angry to cry, too young to save her mother and take her away from this country and the man who had trapped her here. She covered her face with a pillow and screamed into it, and that was when the sobbing started, large and loud, stopping only when she had cried herself into an exhausted sleep.
* * *
—
Juju woke up to a faint knocking from downstairs, the sound winding up the stairs in an insistent thread. She groaned and rolled out of bed, then went down to open the door. Vivek was standing outside in jeans and a green T-shirt with butterflies scattered over the front. The word Philippines was embroidered in cursive underneath. Juju recognized the shirt—her mother had passed it over to Vivek after her father refused to wear it. (“We’re in Nigeria,” he’d said. “No one is interested in your country.”)
Vivek walked past Juju into the house. Someone had plaited his hair for him and it hung like a snake between his shoulder blades. “Were you sleeping?” he asked. “It’s still afternoon.”
Juju closed the door behind him. “I took a nap.” Her head felt stuffed and heavy. Vivek jogged up the stairs to her room and Juju followed, watching as he spun and landed on her bed.
“Wow,” she said, “you really have energy today.”
He eyed her up and down. “Unlike some of us,” he retorted. “What’s disturbing you?”
Juju shook her head. The pain was still too personal, the information too new. Juju wanted to hold it, cup it in her hands a while longer before she uncurled her fingers to expose it to others. She sat on the bed next to Vivek, then flopped back, staring at the ceiling. “Do you think I’m a bad girlfriend?” she asked.
Vivek turned to her, lying on his side and propping up his head with one hand. “To Elizabeth? Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know.” Juju twisted the end of one of her braids between her fingers. “I don’t know if I’m doing it right.” She hadn’t planned any of this; she hadn’t grown up with a crush on Elizabeth, not the way Osita had. Juju had