Hello Twenty

Chapter One

As I counted down the days till my twentieth birthday, I wished more and more that the day would never come. Not because I had a desire to die or have anything happen to me but only because I didn't want to grow older.
Every year since I was seventeen, I wished the same thing over and over. That time would just stop and I would be stuck at that age forever. I wanted to be young forever, to stay the same way, to have that youthful glow and live without responsibilities and regret.
However, time had never stopped, not even for a second and with each year that passed, I only grew older and sadder.
It grew worse with twenty.

I would no longer be able to use the "I'm still a teenager" excuse to give reasons why I still hadn't been able to achieve anything with my life and this was one of my greatest fears and regrets. I would need to find a new reason since it didn't seem like my life was going to get better even at twenty.

It wasn't even that I wasn't smart. I was smart. I got admission into the university at the tender age of fifteen and finished at nineteen and at the top of my class even.
To everyone, it seemed I was the only one that my life planned out for the future and would probably be the first to get her whole life together even before the age of twenty-five. Those were just the thoughts of everyone, harmless speculations and predictions. It wasn't working out like that. It didn't seem like it was ever going to work out either.
All my academic achievements felt like nothing as I looked on as the world around me seemed to evolve and revolve leaving only me stagnant, standing in one position.

It seemed with twenty, everything became real.
I wanted a twentieth birthday party. I wanted to hang out have fun with friends and people who seemed like they were friends but were really just mere acquaintances who I probably wouldn't even see or talk to again.
All that didn't matter. I just wanted to do something special to welcome myself into youth.
Even more than a birthday party, what I wanted was to put on some make up and some pretty clothes which I didn't have and take even prettier pictures that I would post all over my social media accounts and send to friends and family to make myself seem relevant or to show some set of people or even everyone that I could sit still and look pretty if I wanted to.

Now that I think about it, maybe it was because everyone was doing it. My friends, my classmates from secondary school, my younger brother's classmates. Those people seemed to have everything they ever wanted. I was especially jealous of my brother's classmates. They were like three years younger than I was and they had the best clothes, the best phones, the best shoes and the best lives. That was everything I wanted. I would look at some of their pictures in the gallery of my brother's phone and say to myself "Why can't I have this kind of life?" He on the the other hand wasn't fazed by all that because he would ask me "Do you even know how they get their money?"
I didn't care about that.
I know some of them had rich parents, some of them were into illegal gigs and some of them were actually hustling. It was those in the first and the latter categories that made me green with envy. Even more than I wanted rich parents, I wanted to make a name for myself on my own. I wanted my own side hustle. I wanted to do something all by myself that would add a whole lot of zeros to my bank account and help me prove myself to everyone around.

Since my second year of senior secondary school, I had started learning tailoring. My parents said it was the best option for me since I had taken a huge liking to sewing dummy clothes for my dolls.
Thinking back, I feel that was where all the problems in my life started. When I felt I had to prove something to my parents. With everything I did, I needed their approval. Every tiniest achievement had me running to them just for them to oooh and ahh all over me.
They turned every single one of those achievements in my life to their pet project. I was their child who seemed to be so talented, they just had to build on it. I never got a hang of tailoring, so I stopped going to the shop for training. Time and time again, they would force me to go back saying that they wouldn't let me leave until I had fully mastered the art of sewing.
Even when I finished secondary school and we moved to a different part of Lagos, they made me continue at an even worse place. She was a church member in our new church and my mum was so enamored by the designs and the fancy clothes she used to wear that she said to my dad "Ife has to go and learn with that woman."
It wasn't all that bad when I started but soon, the novelties wore off and I began to hate it all over again. I still didn't get the hang of it. I hated it even more than ever the more time I spent there. I was miserable and the other apprentices weren't all that nice to me because they felt I was receiving special treatment because I had my 'rich and educated' parents behind me. I get why they felt that way. Most of them didn't even complete secondary school talkless of getting into the university like I did, the house I lived in was a very comfortable one and the one time they had to come there to deliver my mum's dresses to her, they came back to the shop talking. It wasn't even all that big. It was a normal four bedroom apartment in a spacious compound with no special features.
It got even worse when my dad told my boss that he wouldn't let me work nights with the other apprentices because he wasn't a fan of his children staying out. Which was quite ironic because for my six years in secondary school, I stayed in the hostel.
That only out me in the bad books of even the boss herself. From that day onward, she took to ignoring me, not even bothering to ask if I understood correctly what she was explaining in the shop. I couldn't ask questions either because I was scared. Being the people pleaser I always have been, I didn't want to give them even more reasons to hate me so I kept my mouth shut and learnt nothing.
The straw that broke the camel's back was when I refused to eat with them.
The girls at the shop had this thing where a person would bring food from home and then everyone else would eat out of it regardless of whether they were invited to eat or not.
Each time, I refused to join them to eat. Not because I felt too high and mighty to do so but because it just wasn't what I was used to.
I was raised to be extremely careful. I was raised to see the world as a very dangerous place where one spoon of rice could have your destiny ripped away from you and leave you destitute for the rest of your life.
I couldn't even walk over random pools of water on the street because there was no telling if the person who poured it there had done it with an ulterior motive.
To me, everything was spiritual. That was the way I saw the world. Well, that was the way I was taught to see the world.
For that reason and also for hygienic reasons, I didn't join them to eat.
They felt I was too proud to join them and talked bad about me when they felt I wasn't listening.
They said they were going to get at me for that. They wanted to push me to to the wall.
They didn't even say it out loud because they knew I would hear. Instead they wrote notes and passed it around for everyone to read but me.
Smart as they felt they were, they weren't smart enough to dispose the paper and when I read all that was written in it, I felt really pained. I took the paper home and showed my mum and what did she say?
"Don't worry, they are just playing with you."
I didn't want to play with them if that was their own way of playing games and joking around.
The next day, while I was eating lunch at the shop- beans and garri from the last night's dinner, one of them from nowhere came with her spoon and scooped a portion of my beans, ate it and then dipped the spoon again into my cup of garri. I was disgusted.
I heard the others snigger behind me. I wanted to flare up and say my worst but I knew I didn't have the courage to do that.
Instead, I stood up and left the food for her to eat.
"Aren't you eating again?" She called after me.
"No, thank you. I'm full." I replied.
"Are you sure?" She asked again.
"Yes".
"Okay o." She said eventually, while digging into the food again.
I heard another person say "Wait o! Don't finish the food na! Remain for me!"
The rest of them descended on the meal and I was left hungry till I eventually got home.
Again, I told my mum what had happened and the only thing she said was "I hope you didn't eat the food again?"
I was hoping she could see how much I was suffering and then tell me to stop going there.
It wasn't like I was learning anything anyway.
That was the day I knew I was stuck there and it was only resuming school that could save me.
School wouldn't resume for a month so I had to survive their jabs and side talk for that long.
Little did I know that it wasn't the end. Every holiday, my parents would force me to go back to the shop. Not much changed but I had grown a thicker skin. I continued the training and forgot about leaving but of course turning twenty would change that.

Like I said, my brother's classmates made me jealous but it didn't hit all that hard. At least not the way my secondary school classmates made me feel. In secondary school, I was an introvert. I was that girl who stayed in the hostel (most of them were day students) Most of them didn't even know my name till we got to our last year. The few who knew my name were the ones in my actual class who had one point or the other needed my help in one subject or the other or my other introverted friends in other classes. I had a few popular friends I was close to though but I still didn't feel at home even around them. I felt like an impostor even.
With the birthday pictures I wished I could take, I wanted them to see the pictures and wonder who it was and then a random person would remember my name name and they would awe and wonder how they didn't notice that such a beautiful person went to school with them.
Basically, all I needed was approval. I just wanted people to shower compliments on me so that I could feel good about myself.
That was the only thing about birthdays that I actually liked. Friends, family and random people would send you birthday wishes and post your pictures on their social media pages and then say nice things about you. I lived for that.
My twentieth birthday had that and a whole lot more. I got something that I hadn't even expected at all. Something that changed my life but trapped me in the process.

*Garri- basically cassava flakes. I'll add a picture if anyone requests it!

Please leave comments and let me know what you think and how I can make the story better.
I'm Nigerian, so it's mainly about a typical African teenager/youth but not to worry, everyone can read it without feeling left out. All words that seem cultural will be explained. I hope you love this!
It isn't edited yet but with your suggestions and your comments, I'll shape it into the best novel ever.
Thanks for reading!