For ten years, Funke has been stuck in a situation she has no control over, a situation no one wishes to be in: to be abused in every form and manner without a hope of a miracle or change.
Fed up, she finally has it in her to stand up for herself. W...
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Yesterday I told him I would run away and he shouldn’t expect me in school the next day. He didn’t believe that I could go through with it. I slightly turned my head to look at him, and he flinched, shocked to see my face like that.
“What the fuck happened to you?” He raised his voice, causing a majority of the students in the class to stare at us.
I looked down at my lap, avoiding his scrutinizing gaze. “I had a lot of fun last night,” now it was my turn to be sarcastic.
He jumped up from his seat and helped me up. He lifted the top of my hoodie over my head so it covered more than half of my face, then placed his hand over my shoulder as he led me out of the classroom. I didn’t know where he was taking me, but I followed him because I trusted him. Luckily, we were seniors in high school, so no student had the guts to question us or say anything to any teacher. Even if the teachers spotted us, they couldn’t do anything. This was one of the most expensive private schools in Nigeria, so touching a student was a taboo.
Adrian and I had been best friends since Junior Secondary School Three (JSS3). Because of my abuse at home, I didn’t bother to have friends because I trusted no one, but Adrian refused to stay away from me and forced his way into my life. Looking back, I was grateful for his persistence. I didn’t tell him the complete story, deliberately leaving out the part that I was being sexually abused.
He always encouraged me to report to the right authorities, but out of fear, I couldn’t. Not only fear of my stepfather but also my mother: I didn’t know how she was going to react to the news. Though Adrian was a guy and I had no initial reason to trust him, he somehow won my trust; call it instincts.
Adrian finally came to a halt and so did I. He touched the edges of my hood, silently asking me for permission, and I nodded. A gasp left his lips when he could fully see my face. He cupped my cheeks, forcing me to meet his gaze.
“Funke,” he breathed. “What happened?”
I fought the tears from slipping as I looked into his eyes. It was hard to speak because it felt like I was in a chokehold, and that brought memories of my stepfather’s sexual abuse. He would pin me to the wall, the couch, the bed and wrap his large fingers around my neck, putting pressure enough to have me gasping for air and my face to redden. Then he’d hustle himself inside me, his pace too fast that it would all become a blur to me. Sometimes I’d pass out from the pressure or sometimes I’d beg him to let me go, which he never did. On the days I was silent, he’d hit me and yell at me to plead for mercy, to plead to be free from him. Like a puppet on a string, I had to obey. It always felt like the walls of our house were too thick for anyone on the outside to hear my cries.
