The lady stepped out of the afternoon and into my mother’s shop. In one hand, she held a shopping bag, in the other, a plastic hand fan. The meat of her upper arm quivered as she flicked the hand fan back and forth, and stray wisps of her hair lifted and settled, lifted and settled. “This heat is something else,” she said. “Good afternoon, is this Mummy Tomiiwo’s shop?”

“Yes, good afternoon, my dear,” my mother said, the lady’s presence jolting her back to real life. She’d been reading the latest Alaroye newspaper, engrossed to the point of stasis. A housefly had perched on her head and she hadn’t even stirred. Now, she folded the newspaper, got up, and reached into her refrigerator for a bottle of Fanta. She handed it to the lady who stared at it, surprised.

“To help you cool down from the heat,” my mother said. She reached for the opener which dangled from a long string, and, with a movement of her wrist, stripped the bottle of its cap. The bottle sneezed—a sharp tch sound, and the cap clattered onto the cement floor.

“Thank you,” the lady said.

“Ko tope. I don’t think I’ve seen your face before.”

“Yes. I just moved here.”

“No wonder. Pele. What is your name?”

“Anjola.”

“That’s a beautiful name! Anjolaoluwa, we’re enjoying God’s wealth.”

“Thank you. I prefer Anjola though.”

“Kosi wahala, I’ll remember it the next time you come here.”

My mother was not the only one in our neighborhood who sold frozen foods, but she believed gestures like this—a soft drink on a hot afternoon, asking about and remembering small details of their lives, offering unexpected discounts—endeared her to people and brought her the most customers. “Doing business in Ikola requires common sense,” I heard her say to my father once, “you have to give something to get something back.” Our neighborhood was made up of five interconnected, overlapping streets; it was not uncommon for me, on an errand within the neighborhood, to run into and be hugged by a stranger who had benefited from my mother’s generosity and now considered them friends. “Tomiiwo!” they’d say. “Greet your mother for me. Tell her I said thank you for the other day.” As soon as they left, I’d wipe the smile off my face and go about my life.

“What do you want to buy?” my mother asked after Anjola finished her Fanta.

“Chicken and turkey, four kilos, and six kilos of gizzard.”

“Ah-ahn adurugizzard yi, am I invited to this party you’re throwing?”

Anjola laughed. “There’s no party. It’s for customers.”

“Customers? You sell food? Where’s your shop? I’ll send my son to come buy food.”

“It’s not my shop, it’s Fun Embassy. I work there.”

My mother was prying chunks of poultry from their ice bed, but at the mention of that place, she stopped, chicken thigh in gloved hand, and took a good look at Anjola. “I see,” she said.

On the bench where I sat, she gestured to me with a slight raise of her eyebrow. Eye language. As she liked to say, “I don’t always have to tell you everything with my mouth before you understand what I mean.” I knew immediately that this meant they were about to have a conversation I wasn’t supposed to be a part of. I got up to leave.

“Ibo lo n lo?” she asked, her voice sugary with concern, like she didn’t have a hand in—or an eye on—my current course of action.

“I’m going out for fresh air,” I said.

“Fresh air, in this sun?” Anjola asked.

“Oh, that’s how he is,” my mother said. “He just does whatever he likes. Make sure you stay away from the sun, okay?”

I nodded and stepped outside.

Fun Embassy was the new building on Coker Street, two streets away from us. Because the other houses on Coker Street were older, Fun Embassy stood out, bright yellow and beckoning. After its construction was completed, my mother and I passed it on our way to the shop. I saw the mural before she did: a painted lady, wearing only panties and a bra, dancing, her hips swung to one side to show her buttocks which a man cupped in his hands. He was fully dressed, in jeans, T-shirt, and a face cap. The woman’s eyes were closed, her expression blissful, but the man’s eyes bulged, ecstatic, as though he could not believe his good fortune. Above them, the words: FUN EMBASSY.

“Jesu Kristi!” my mother said and immediately shielded me with her body. “Did you see anything?” she asked, and I said no. That was the last time we ever passed Coker Street.

My mother bagged up Anjola’s purchase but didn’t let her go. From where I stood a few metres away, I saw her mouth move, forming words I couldn’t hear. When she was done speaking, Anjola, too, had something to say. It was like they were acting a film without sound.

I knew they were talking about Fun Embassy. My classmate, Ebenezer, lived on Coker Street, right across the road from Fun Embassy. Every night, he said, they played party music, and a handful of ladies danced in their underwear outside the building. He said it was just like watching a music video on Soundcity, an activity I was forbidden from doing. I had been watching the Top 10 Nigeria Countdown show one afternoon when they played a Wizkid music video. He sat on a velvet couch, smoking a fat cigar. A lady in fishnets was twirling on the floor in front of him; she twisted and untwisted herself, fluid and boneless like a strip of silk. My mother had been asleep for much of the show, but she woke up just as the lady turned her back to the camera and jiggled her buttocks furiously like she was trying to shake the entire body part loose. She turned off the TV immediately.

Barely a month after Fun Embassy opened for business, a fight broke out there between two men. They ran past our street; one held up a broken bottle and called after the other one to wait so he could stab him and turn his intestines to porridge. The other one didn’t wait, but he cursed back in Yoruba; his words—oloriburuku, aye e ma baje ni!—echoed in the evening air like bad news. And then there were the police raids: One happened while I was away at school, the other at midnight, the siren blaring like an abandoned child. It woke me up, and when I went into the living room, I found my mother peeking through the curtains as though she could see Fun Embassy from our backyard. “Since they started this godforsaken business,” she said, “we have not had peace of mind in this area.”

After the second police raid, the landlords of Coker Street gave Fun Embassy new rules: one, the ladies were to do all of their dancing inside; two, they were neither allowed to sell marijuana nor permit its consumption in their establishment; and three, no child was to be allowed inside. “They don’t want us to know what goes on inside there,” Ebenezer said, sounding like someone disinvited from a birthday party at the last minute.

My mother and Anjola were still talking. The sun had gotten to me. My armpits were moist, and I could feel my shirt plastering itself to my back. I returned to the shop.

“Can’t you see we’re still talking?” my mother said. She did not bother to hide her irritation.

“The heat,” I grumbled.

“I should go now, ma,” Anjola said.

“My shop is open for you anytime, dear,” my mother said. “Even if you’re not buying anything and you just want to say hi, I’ll be here.”

Anjola thanked her. As she left, she waved at me but I didn’t wave back.

“Such a young girl,” my mother said. “You can tell that she has gone through a lot.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“She’s working at Fun Embassy,” she said, like that was enough explanation.

“Did she tell you what she is doing there?”

“And if she did, am I supposed to tell you or what?”

“I was only asking.”

“Well, don’t ask me foolish questions. I know what I mean when I said she has gone through a lot. Didn’t you see her eyes? A person’s eyes will tell you more than their mouth can.”

But I had only looked at Anjola’s clothes, the denim skirt that stopped above her knees, and her round-neck blouse with GUGGI scrawled across the chest, the G’s facing each other, looped together as though ready for combat. I’d wondered if she danced in them, or if, like the lady in the mural and the one in the Wizkid music video, she stripped down to her bra and panties and wore fishnet tights. “I wasn’t looking at her eyes,” I said.

“That’s the problem you have,” my mother said, “you open your big eyes to look at everything, but you never pay attention to what is important.”

—

My father worked at the wharf and came home only on the weekends, reeking of exhaust fumes, his overalls grimy with engine oil, crescents of dirt blooming underneath his fingernails. And yet, the first thing he always did was reach for my mother and bury his face into her neck with a deep sigh. “Go and shower jare,” my mother would say, but she never released herself from his hold. After his shower, the only thing he wanted to do was eat and sleep, but my mother always found a way to recap all the offences I had committed in his absence.

All week, her response to everything I did was, “Wait until your daddy comes home and I tell him this.” On Fridays when she closed the shop early to cook, I tried to redeem myself. I would stay with her in the kitchen, handing her Knorr chicken cubes, salt, red oil. When she ladled some soup into my outstretched palm for me to taste, I knew my sins were forgiven. This didn’t always work. Sometimes I would follow her into the kitchen and she would immediately tell me to vanish from her sight. Punishment was inescapable then. When my father returned, I would prostrate in greeting, collect whatever gift he brought me, and disappear into the living room so I could eavesdrop. When called upon to come answer for my sins, I’d immediately pretend to fall asleep. But my mother knew me too well. “I know you’re not sleeping,” she would say, yanking me awake and pulling me into the dining room so my father could dole out the appropriate punishment. Most times, he asked me to frog jump. Or to kneel down, raise my hands, and close my eyes. He didn’t seem to care if I did any of these punishments well, and neither did my mother. What mattered, I understand now, was that she had reported me, and I had been punished, so she could continue loving me.

This time, Anjola was the subject of interest. My mother told my father how, during their conversation, she’d discovered that Anjola was—she lowered her voice—an ashewoat Fun Embassy. “She’s just twenty-five, can you believe that? She left Akure and came to Lagos to find a job, but she couldn’t find anything. One thing led to another and she ended up in that useless place and started selling her body to different men.”

My father cracked a chicken bone, sucked the marrow from it.

“All these diseases, even ritual killers—should I bring more stew for you?—anything can happen to a girl doing that kind of work.”

“What I don’t understand,” my father said finally, chicken bones splintered on his plate, “is why you’re so concerned. This girl is just your customer, not your family member. Has she complained to you about her job?”

“Does she have to complain before we all see that it’s not a good job for a woman?”

My father shrugged. “So far as there’s demand for something, there’ll always be a matching supply.”

“Demand radaradawo? She’s too young for that kind of thing. That’s why I want to help her.”

“Help?” My father scoffed. “So you can complain after one month that she’s sucking you dry?”

“When have I complained about helping people?”

“When have you not? Look, if a person likes you enough, they will come back to your shop. You don’t need to do anything to keep a customer.”

“Who said anything about keeping a customer?” My mother said, stung. “This is my problem with you. I tell you something one time, and you never stop bringing it up.”

“One time?” My father laughed. “One time?”

“Ehen? Even if I say it one million times, can’t I speak my mind in my own house again?”

My mother carried her complaints with her like a bunch of keys, and only she knew what doors they might open. She complained that the drinks and discounts she offered customers reduced her profits, and that these people often wanted to talk without seeming to understand that she wasn’t always in the mood to be friendly. When my father told her she didn’t have to do these things, her response was that he didn’t understand how business worked in the neighborhood. “You have to give something to get something back.” Which was why, when I ran into her customers, my smile was a lightbulb I flicked on and off. I had heard her complain about them, they weren’t as special as they thought they were; in fact, she probably didn’t even like them at all.

“Me, I will help this girl sha,” my mother insisted now. “Maybe I’ll help her find another job or something. She seems like a good girl, and I know she’ll thank me when she leaves Fun Embassy.”

“I have heard you, Mother Teresa.”

My mother hissed. “You have started with your jokes.”

“What jokes?” my father said, but when my mother made to get up, he immediately wrapped her in his arms. “Oya mabinu, I didn’t mean to make you angry,” he said, planting kisses on her cheek, her forehead, and nose, until my mother softened into him.

—

Anjola soon became a regular at my mother’s shop. I would return from school to find her sitting on a bench with my mother, both of them talking or laughing. Sometimes, she wasn’t even there to buy anything. “I didn’t even plan to stay this long,” she would say, getting up and dusting the back of her skirt. “I was just passing your street and I said let me stop and greet you.”

And my mother would say, “You can stay as long as you want, I’m not complaining.”

“Is she your friend now?” I asked my mother one evening after Anjola left.

“And what will you do with that information?”

“Nothing, I was just asking.”

“Go and do your assignment and stop asking foolish questions.”

—

One afternoon, Mummy Qoyum, my mother’s longtime customer, entered the shop, and I immediately felt like a housefly trapped under a drinking glass. Mummy Qoyum was a customer who wanted everything. She had to have a cold drink, even if the day wasn’t hot. She wanted a discount too, even if she was only buying one piece of Shawa fish. And she wanted my mother’s friendship. “Did I tell you what happened to me yesterday?” she would ask, and then she’d immediately begin to tell a story my mother certainly didn’t want to hear. It was a friendship that included me. Whenever I ran into her, she would crush me into a hug, an act more violent than tender, the way my face was slammed against her breasts, my nose assaulted by the sweet-sour whiff of her underarms, the smell of a person sweating in clothes hand-washed with floral detergent.

That afternoon, there was a contained quietness about her. She did not yell, “Iya Tomiiwo!” as she often did coming in. Her response to my greeting was a nod. When my mother offered her the plastic chair, she sank into it like a pillar of sand.

“Is everything okay?” my mother asked.

“They called me from home,” she said. “My father died this morning.”

My mother did the unexpected: She reached for Mummy Qoyum and hugged her. Mummy Qoyum sobbed into my mother’s chest, and still, my mother held her. Afterwards, my mother told Mummy Qoyum not to pay for her fish, offered her an extra drink, and asked if there was anything she could do to help.

“I’ll be travelling home soon,” Mummy Qouym said, “but I need someone to take care of my farm while I’m gone. I won’t be long, just two or three weeks.”

She had just planted some watermelons which she sold in bulk to mallams who cut and sold them in slices. She would not have bothered to ask if we were in the rainy season, but it was June: The earth was sucked clean of moisture and the plants needed consistent watering. “I’ll pay the person. Do you know anyone?”

“No,” my mother said. And then she stopped herself. “Wait, I think Anjola can do it.”

“Who?”

“This girl I’m trying to find work for. She’s working at a place I don’t like. I’m trying to help her save money so she can leave there and do something better with her life.”

“I’m not paying big money,” Mummy Qoyum said, “but if she does well, I can talk to people about her.”

“Let me call her now,” my mother said. I did not know she and Anjola were close enough to have exchanged phone numbers.

—

“You’re sending someone you don’t know to your customer’s house?” My father said, cocking his head to get a better look at my mother.

“Anjola is not like that, honestly. She’s a nice girl. She comes to visit me in the shop sometimes and the both of us talk.”

“And so? Do you know her family? Do you know her hometown?”

“It’s not as serious as you’re making it out to be, Daddy Tomiiwo. Is it not just to water the ground?”

“Why don’t you send Tomiiwo then? He’s old enough.”

“He has school.”

“Okay-o, Anjola’s divine helper. If anything goes missing in that woman’s house, I hope you know it’s not just Anjola they will arrest. You will also be handcuffed and thrown inside the Black Maria, and I won’t even come to bail you out.”

My mother snapped her fingers over her head. “God forbid.”

“You just wait and see.”

“So if they arrest me, you won’t come to bail me out? Me, your wife, the mother of your child?”

My father didn’t respond.

“Sometimes I wonder if you even love me,” my mother said, petulant.

“Don’t start that now. You know I’m telling the truth.”

“Looku-looku,” my mother said when she caught me staring. “Should you not be sleeping?”

“Leave the boy alone.”

—

Because my father had mentioned the possibility of theft and arrest, my mother suddenly became hesitant about sending Anjola off to Mummy Qoyum’s house alone. “I hope your father isn’t right about this girl. I’m only helping her because it’s a nice thing to do, you know? She’s too deep in that bad work she’s doing at Fun Embassy, and I know she won’t leave unless someone shows her the way out. Some people don’t know how to leave a bad thing until it destroys them completely.”

She was inviting me to talk, but I knew better than to contribute. She herself had once punished me for contributing to a discussion involving adults. This happened when I was eight. She’d been narrating an episode of Papa Ajasco to a customer and I had been staring, interested, when she turned to me and said, “Tomiiwo, why don’t you continue the story, since we watched it together.” So I took over while she smiled and nodded. As soon as the customer left, my mother slapped me so hard the world lost color for a second. “Even if I called your name and asked you to talk,” she said, “can’t you say no, thank you, and get up from there? Have I not taught you anything?” This was the beginning of my home training, my ability to discern my mother’s eye and body language. It wasn’t just about her words, it was the common sense to read above and beyond them, to understand that when my mother said it was okay to go, what she meant was for me to stay and not move an inch. To understand that my mother could say yes with her mouth but mean no with her entire body.

And so, as she talked and talked, holding up her hesitation to the light like a counterfeit coin, I focused on my school work.

“You will follow Anjola to Mummy Qoyum’s house,” she said suddenly. “When you come back, you will tell me everything that happened. Maybe now you’ll finally put those big eyes to good use.”

“But I have school.”

“School closes by three, doesn’t it?”

—

Mummy Qoyum’s house was on Odusote Street. On our way there, Anjola and I walked past clean gutters, houses with bright pink bougainvillea spilling over their fences. Concrete electric poles held up power lines that stretched from house to house. Two children ran past, laughing. A woman tossed a tray of vegetable stalks onto the road, and almost immediately, a herd of goats emerged bleating. “Do I owe you money?” Anjola asked, catching me unawares.

I had been stealing glances at her, hoping to see why my mother insisted on helping her, what she saw in Anjola’s eyes that she claimed told more than her mouth did. So far, all I had seen was one side of her face, which revealed nothing.

She turned, and her entire face was open to me, but it was an open book I found impossible to read. Her face was powdered, her lips shiny with gloss. Even her eyes were just that—eyes. If I hadn’t known beforehand that she worked at Fun Embassy, she could easily have been one of the ladies I walked past on the street. She did not look to me like someone who needed help.

“You keep staring at me,” she said. “Do I owe you money?”

“I wasn’t staring at you,” I lied.

“If you say so,” she said.

Mummy Qoyum’s house was a small bungalow enclosed within a large fence, like a dollhouse packaged in a box three times its size. The house itself was locked, and everything Anjola needed to work was kept outside on the balcony: a wide-brimmed raffia hat, rubber boots, gloves, pesticide in a spray bottle, and a rusty aluminum watering can. What could Anjola possibly steal here? Unripe watermelon? Farm boots? Pesticide? My mother had sent me here for nothing.

Anjola put on the hat and the gloves. Next, she stepped into the boots. Then she picked up the watering can and went to the tap to fill it up. “Should we do it together?”

“Leave me alone,” I snapped. I was tired, hungry, and sweaty, and while I couldn’t act out towards my mother, I could take it out on her.

She recoiled. “No need to be rude, I was only trying to be friendly.” And then she padded into the farm, leaving me to stew in shame.

When she came out of the farm about an hour later, finally done with her work, I apologized. “I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said.

She eyed me from head to toe, and I felt small, scrutinized. “Apology accepted. Just don’t try it again next time.”

We walked back to the shop in silence. After Anjola bade my mother goodbye, my mother faced me.

“How was it?”

“Fine,” I said.

“What do you mean fine? What did you do?”

“She just watered the farm, that’s all.”

“Did she steal anything?”

I tried to hide the irritation in my voice. “The door was locked, so we could not enter. There was nothing to steal.”

“Are you sure she didn’t hide anything in her underwear or anywhere?” she asked.

“What? Don’t look at me that way,” she said. “I told you to pay attention and tell me everything.”

—

After that first day, talking to Anjola was easy. I told her I attended Shining Star Academy, was in SS1, and hated that there were so many assignments. “You better enjoy it,” she said. “One day you’ll look back and miss it. I know how school can be.”

“You went to school?” It came out before I could stop myself.

She stared at me, eyebrows furrowed. “So because I work at Fun Embassy, you think I didn’t go to school? See this boy oh. I finished from Federal University of Technology, Akure. Have you ever heard of that?”

“No.”

“It’s a big university. You finish from there, you get a big job.”

“So why are you working at Fun Embassy then?”

“Because I want to,” she said. “If I leave Fun Embassy today, I’m sure it won’t take me up to a week to find a job. Graduates of FUTA are in high demand.”

I stared at her. This wasn’t what my mother said.

“You look confused,” she said.

“I’m just surprised, that’s all,” I said.

“Surprised about what?”

“You said it won’t take you up to two weeks to find another job.”

“Yes?”

“I thought you were working at Fun Embassy because you couldn’t find any other job.”

It was her turn to stare. “Who told you that?”

I stopped then, realizing I’d said too much. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“Your mother told you, didn’t she?”

“No,” I said, which was partially true. My mother told my father, not me; I was only eavesdropping.

“I know she did. There’s no other way you would have known that.” Anjola folded her arms, the plants temporarily forgotten. “So, what else has your mother been saying about me?”

“Nothing,” I said, although that was a lie.

The last time we were there, I’d been helping her fill the watering can when it slipped from my hand and fell on my shin. Blood, bright red and thick like a glob of toothpaste, leaked from the broken skin. Anjola held it under the running tap, and when we got to the shop, she told my mother what happened. My mother smiled and said it was no trouble, she would put some methylated spirit on it, but as soon as we were alone, the first thing she asked me was if Anjola’s blood touched it. I said no, confused, because what did Anjola’s blood have to do with mine? “Do you know what that girl does at Fun Embassy?” she asked. “She sells her body to men, different men. Who knows what disease they might be carrying? I haven’t asked her if she has done an HIV test yet, so you should be careful. If she has it and her blood touches yours, it’s over for you. I don’t know why I have to teach you everything when you’re not a baby.”

Anjola pulled off her raffia hat and fanned herself with it. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Your mother talks a lot. I know she must have said something about me.”

“I’m serious, she didn’t say anything.”

“Okay. If you say so.”

We finished that day’s work in silence, and I soon began to see it as part of our routine, short conversations, long silences. And so I decided to bring my textbook with me the next time we came to Mummy Qoyum’s house. Anjola would do her work and I would do mine; that way, I wouldn’t have to risk saying too much.

But it was the textbook, New General Mathematics, that brought us closer. I was trying to solve an equation one afternoon when Anjola peered into my work. “You’re doing it wrong,” she said. And then she asked me to tear out a sheet of paper, give her my pen, and she worked it out. When we checked the back of the textbook, hers was the correct answer.

Mathematics wasn’t the only thing she enjoyed. She also remembered some passages from the Junior English Project textbook. As she worked, I trailed behind her and read some stories out to her, and sometimes I watered the plants while she read some of the stories herself and asked me if we had been taught certain sections in class. We had become friends, or at least something close to it.

—

“Can you take me to Fun Embassy?” I asked her one afternoon. It was the only thing I wanted, and Ebenezer encouraged me to ask since I told him that I was now friends with one of the ladies from Fun Embassy.

An unseen wall immediately rose up between Anjola and me. “No,” she said firmly. “Children are not allowed.”

“I’m thirteen,” I shot back. “I’m mature enough.”

“You don’t have to tell me you’re mature.”

“But I am.”

“Forget it, Tomiiwo. I won’t take you to Fun Embassy.”

We were done for the day and were ready to go back home. Anjola stepped out of the boots and placed them side by side on the balcony. “My mother said you’re a thief,” I blurted out.

Anjola whipped around. “What?”

My heart began to pound. “If I tell you everything she said, will you take me to Fun Embassy?”

“Tell me first, then I’ll decide.”

“No. Promise me first.”

“All right, I promise,” she said.

“Every time we come back, she always asks me if you kept anything in your underwear,” I said.

“So you’re here to monitor me,” she said. As soon as the words left her mouth, I realized I did not have enough security. That we were solving equations or reading stories to each other did not rule out the possibility of her going to my mother. “Go on,” she urged. “Tell me everything.”

“Will you report me?”

“Everything I told your mother, I’ve now heard from you. Why would I trust her with anything else?”

I remained silent.

“Trust me,” she said, and that settled it.

“My mother said I should not let my blood touch your blood because you might have HIV.”

Anjola froze, and I saw something like anger flash across her face.

“She said you’re selling your body to different men,” I added, hoping it would be the final blow.

“What else did she say?” She seemed to be waiting for something vital, unforgivable, and I believed if I didn’t give it to her then, she wouldn’t take me to Fun Embassy and everything I’d done so far would be a waste. I had to give her what she wanted.

So I made up stories. I told her my mother said she was going to burn in hell fire, that her eyes would pop out of their sockets and explode like popcorn in hot butter. I told her she was an ashewo, a cheap prostitute who sold her body to different men. I told her that she would probably drop dead the next year because the disease would have eaten her inside out, like termites hollowing a log of wood.

Anjola chuckled, and suddenly I was afraid that she saw through me, that she knew where my mother’s words ended and where mine began. “I’m not lying,” I said.

“I didn’t say you were lying,” she said. “I’m just surprised you would do this to your own mother.”

I shrugged, a weak attempt at nonchalance.

She shook her head: pity, disbelief, I couldn’t tell. “Your mother is a hypocrite,” she said. “But you, you’re—” she stopped, as though unable to find the right word for me.

“So will you take me now?” I had given her what she wanted. It was her turn to give me something in return. “You’ll take me, right?”

She said nothing. But after we locked Mummy Qoyum’s gate, she grabbed my hand and turned me towards Fun Embassy.

—

When Anjola parted the curtains at the entrance, a burly man appeared. “Get out!” he barked, but Anjola stopped him. “Rosco, free him. He’s with me,” she said, and pulled me inside.

Each time Ebenezer and I talked about Fun Embassy, we pictured it like a music video set: ladies, a lot of ladies, in nothing but bra and panties, or maybe fishnets and bum shorts, all of them twerking, shaking every part of their body and inviting us to touch. We imagined ourselves as music stars, young men with iced-out gold chains, snapback hats, and money, crisp dollar and naira bills that we would fling into the air so they would rain down on us like feathers let loose from the exposed belly of a pillow. We pictured disco lights flashing, bolts of neon colors blinking against our dark skin and making us look like aliens from a faraway universe.

But to begin with, there were no dancing ladies at Fun Embassy, no disco lights, not even music. There was a bar, but the lady in charge of it was asleep. At a table nearby, a man nursed a bottle of STAR Lager beer. At another table, a woman sat with a wrapper tied around her chest, while another woman stood behind her with a comb to help undo her braids. The woman whose braids were being undone scrolled through her phone, and the one with the comb had her gaze fixed to the ceiling where a TV hung, suspended. They were playing, of all things, a Nollywood film.

Still, I believed there was more. There had to be. “Is this everything?” I asked.

Anjola chuckled. “What were you expecting?”

I shrugged. “Nothing, I was just asking.” I looked around again. I felt as though my time was running out. “Can I try some beer?” I asked.

“No,” Anjola said. “I can’t let—”

“Just a little,” I begged. “I just want to know what it tastes like.” I imagined telling Ebenezer this. Fun Embassy was a stupid place, but at least I got to try beer. “Please, just small.”

“Actually, why not?” Anjola said, her tone turning pleasant all of a sudden. She led me to the bar where different bottles of liquor—Calypso, Smirnoff Ice, Campari, Skyy Vodka—sat, arrayed like a family posing for a photograph. Anjola tapped the counter and the sleeping lady jerked awake.

“Wetin?”

“Give me one bottle of—” Anjola turned to me. “Which one?”

“STAR,” I said quickly. I didn’t want the grumpy bar lady to change her mind.

The lady looked from me to Anjola. “Money?”

Anjola reached into her pocket, pulled out a five hundred naira note and tossed it on the counter. “I’ll come back for my change.”

When the beer was brought out, Anjola and I reached for it at the same time. The bar lady held it back, but Anjola snatched the bottle, opened it with her teeth and handed it to me. “Enjoy,” she said, and I lifted it to my mouth.

I wasn’t expecting it to be sweet, but I wasn’t expecting the taste that flooded my mouth either. It tasted like what I imagined fermented urine must taste like. Anjola was watching me, and I knew I could not let my true feelings show.

“Not bad,” I said, trying for casual indifference.

“Really?”

“Yes.” My eyes went to the man at the table. He lifted the tumbler to his lips again, took a gulp and licked his lips. Surely he had to be pretending. “Not bad at all,” I said to Anjola again.

“In that case, you have to drink more,” Anjola said and smiled sweetly. “You have to finish it, you know I paid for it.”

“Sure.” I lifted the bottle to my mouth again, took more gulps and swallowed without allowing myself to think of what I was doing. This didn’t make it taste better, but it was bearable.

We walked over to one of the empty plastic tables, and even though our chairs scraped noisily against the cement floors, nobody paid any attention to us. Once, Rosco glanced in our direction, but that was it. The man finished his beer, put on his Kangol, and left.

“I’m thinking of smoking a cigarette,” Anjola said, slowly, tentatively, as though floating the idea before me.

“Okay,” I said.

“Don’t you want to try it?”

“No. It’ll smell on my clothes.”

She waved my protest away. “That’s because you don’t know the technique. Hold on, I’m coming.”

She got up, went to the bar, and came back with a pack of Rothmans cigarettes, a lighter, and two matchsticks. She lit the cigarette, then held it between both matchsticks, and held it out to me. “Hold it like this,” she said. “Don’t bring it close to your clothes at all, just hold the matchsticks. I think you should remove your shirt.”

I took off my shirt, and Anjola eyed my bare chest. I hugged my arms to my body and she laughed.

“Careful,” she said, as I lifted the crude cigarette holder to my mouth. “Don’t inhale too quickly.”

I inhaled, and warm mint flooded my throat.

“Hold it in your mouth before you blow it out,” Anjola said, but it was too late. I exploded into a coughing fit, expelling wisps of smoke from my nose and mouth all at once. My nose stung. My throat burned. My eyes watered.

Anjola rubbed my back in circular motions. “Easy, easy,” she said, but I was still coughing, so she lifted the beer to my mouth and poured more down my throat. With the swallowing came a wave of disgust and I knew I was done—not just with cigarettes and alcohol, but with Fun Embassy. If this was what the adults were trying to keep us away from, then maybe they were right. I handed the cigarette back to Anjola who put it out immediately. She did not smoke it at all.

“Are you okay?” she asked, smiling, stroking my face gently. Her palms felt cold against my skin.

“I’m fine,” I said, pulling away from her.

“Good,” she said. “Put on your shirt and finish your beer, there’s more.”

“I can’t finish the beer,” I confessed. I had gone halfway through the bottle, and even that had taken sheer will and stupid courage.

“You didn’t even drink much,” she said. “Are you afraid your mother will smell your mouth?”

At the mention of my mother, panic lanced through me like a bullet. We had spent longer than usual, and my mother would be waiting for us—for me—at the shop. I cupped my hands in front of my mouth and tried to smell my breath.

Anjola laughed when she saw my panic. “Don’t worry,” she said sweetly. “I have TomTom that you can lick. She won’t even smell anything.”

“Okay, thank you. But I think I want to go now.”

“Wait. We’ll go together. If you go alone, she’ll ask about me and she might suspect, don’t you think?”

I didn’t know what to think or how to think. Something was happening inside me, but I was not drunk. I knew what drunk men looked like: they wobbled, they slurred their speech, they hiccupped, they vomited. I was none of that. I only felt a little lighter.

“How are you feeling?” Anjola asked, reaching out to stroke my head.

“Fine,” I said. But that was inadequate. I wanted her to let go of me. I wanted to tell her that I had seen enough, that I knew that Fun Embassy was special only because my mother and all the other adults were keeping it away from us. I was here now and it was nothing but preciously guarded emptiness. Was this what it meant to be mature? Sitting in a dark room and pretending to enjoy everything?

“You look confused,” Anjola said, laughing.

“I’m not.”

“I can see your face,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s more.”

—

She pulled me by the hand and led me into a narrow corridor with rooms on both sides. One of the rooms was unlocked, the door yawning open like a mouth. Anjola led me inside.

“This is where I sleep,” she said. “With men,” she added, mockery sweetening her voice. A mattress sat in a corner of the room. On the wall was a picture frame of a white dove caught mid-flight. Below it were the words, The Lord is my shepherd—Psalm 23:1.

Anjola tapped me. When I turned to face her, she was holding a condom. “See?” she asked. “A man wears this before I do anything with him. I also get tested regularly, so I don’t have HIV. Make sure you tell your mother that.”

I nodded, although I knew I wasn’t ever going to tell my mother anything about what I had experienced that afternoon. It was mine alone.

“We should go now,” Anjola said, and herded me back towards my real life. When we pushed past the lace curtains at the entrance and stepped out into the afternoon, the brightness of the sun struck me like a hand. I stumbled, and Anjola held my hand to steady me. In my mouth, the TomTom candy she’d given me earlier was a melting rock, flooding my mouth with sweet mint taste. I felt nauseous.

“I’m not drunk,” I said.

“No, you’re not,” Anjola said.

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, you are.”

—

“We’re back!” Anjola said cheerfully when we got to my mother’s shop.

“Ah, finally,” my mother said. “I was wondering what took so long.”

“We had to clean up some things—” Anjola started to say when my mother cut in.

“Is he okay?” she asked, looking at me.

“Yes, he’s fine,” Anjola said. Turning to me, she asked, “Are you not fine?”

“I’m fine,” I said. My mother looked from me to Anjola. “We went to Fun Embassy,” I added quickly. I suddenly wanted to tell her everything.

“You did what?” My mother yanked me away from Anjola so quickly I became dizzy.

Anjola burst into loud laughter.

“Why did you take my son to Fun Embassy?” my mother asked, her hands palming my chest and neck as though inspecting me for unseen damage. I belched and she screamed. “Jesu Kristi! This boy is drunk!”

“Don’t worry,” Anjola said, “I didn’t give him any disease.”

“What disease are you talking about? Are you possessed?”

“You said she has HIV!” I blurted. I knew then that I was drunk. I had to be. I was contributing to a discussion I wasn’t invited to and saying things I’d planned to swallow forever.

“Shut up your dirty mouth, Tomiiwo, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My mother pushed me behind her and stood directly in front of Anjola. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said. “I was trying to help you, and this is how you repay me?”

“Help me by calling me a thief? By saying I have HIV?”

“I didn’t say you have HIV, I—”

“I don’t mind when people who don’t know me talk about me. But to have someone pretend they’re my friend and then go ahead and spread lies about me, that’s something I cannot take.”

At this, my mother’s attitude changed. “Okay, but where is the lie? You are sleeping with men for money and getting children drunk. Does that sound like something a good person does?”

“At least I’m not hiding my character. I’m better than you.”

My mother made to slap Anjola, but she missed.

Anjola laughed. “Like mother, like son. Can you see your mother?” she asked, gesturing to me at the corner of the shop where I stood, unsure if my body even belonged to me anymore. “Can you see your mother?” It was not a question of sight; my mother was right there in her iro and buba, standing between me and Anjola like a divider, a barrier I had to push out of my way before I could truly experience real life. As Anjola asked her question for what seemed like the fourth time, I realized I was supposed to pay attention so I could see in my mother what she wanted me to see. But my head was pounding, and I wasn’t sure if I’d swallowed the TomTom by mistake or spit it out. I was also thinking of unnecessary things, like did I zip up my school bag and did the lady at the bar give Anjola her change? It was just like being in class, the teacher yelling, “Focus on what I’m teaching you now, you’ll need it in the future.” But my mind was a sieve and all this was water—no matter how much anyone yelled, I would probably retain nothing.

“Bosita!” my mother said. “Get out of my shop right now!”

“Like mother, like son,” Anjola said one last time.

My mother watched Anjola leave, her gaze on the road for a long time, even after Anjola’s figure could no longer be seen in the distance. On her face was an expression I couldn’t read. For the first time, I felt separated from my mother, like I did not know her at all, even though she was holding me in her arms.

Finally, she peeled her eyes away from the road. “See how you let me make a fool of myself,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Mummy,” I started to say, but she pushed me away and I grabbed the cutting table to steady myself. She was not done. She moved closer to me; suddenly, unexpectedly, she slapped my face. Hard. I held on to my cheek, stunned by the sting of her palm. And without meaning to, I threw up all over her, a warm projectile of badly processed food, beer, and TomTom candy.

“You just wait until your father hears this,” she said, stamping her feet against the cement floor to get my vomit out of her feet and off her toenail polish. “You just wait.”

—

I fell sick afterwards. My hangover grew into a fever that kept me in bed until my father came home. Even in her anger, my mother took care of me. She bought me medicine from the chemist, looked in on me at intervals, and fed me hot pepper soup.

My father did very little: He felt my temperature with his palm against my forehead, pulled down the wrapper my mother covered me with, and turned the standing fan away from me. I listened as my mother narrated everything to him. In her version of events, not only had I lied against her, I had also drunk beer and intentionally thrown up at her feet. Mere punishment wasn’t going to be enough; I was also to be flogged.

“It is well,” my father said when my mother was done talking.

“Is that all you’re going to say?”

“You don’t expect me to flog him while he’s still sick, do you?”

But when I got better and my father called me into the dining room, he merely scanned me with his eyes, a bemused expression on his face. “I’m supposed to punish you,” he said, “but sometimes, knowledge is punishment on its own.”

I waited for him to pull out the belt from wherever he was hiding it, but he simply waved me away. “You can go,” he said. I was surprised by his verdict, but not as much as my mother. “You won’t flog him?” she asked. “You think what he did was funny?”

In the dim light of the dining room, I saw her eyes glisten with what looked like tears.

“If I had known you wouldn’t flog him, I wouldn’t have waited for you,” she said.

My father pulled her to himself, and for the first time since I knew them as my parents, my mother squirmed against his hold. “This is the only thing I want and you won’t do it for me,” she said, pushing him away even as my father tried to kiss her face in an attempt to mollify her.

If I had known it then, I would have begged my father to flog me, would have chosen temporary pain over the lifelong, irreparable crack that would appear between me and my mother. But what did I know of cracks between mothers and sons, affection leaking out in tiny drops until one day there’s barely anything left to sustain them both, what did I know?

All I knew was I had been offered the rare gift of escaping punishment. So I turned and walked away before my mother got my father to change his mind. ■

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