She Is Blind

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Scandal

My results for the semester came out when I least expected, and although I had expected more from myself, I could only say my GP of 4.42 was lucky enough. At least I was in the Second Class Upper grade, and if I worked harder, I could make it to First Class. I celebrated it with my family, and felt elated when my father said he was proud of me, for climbing the first step to achieving one of his many dreams.

Blessing hugged me tightly when I visited her for the last time that holiday, congratulating me, and when I noticed how completely normal she seemed, unlike our last and short clandestine meeting, I was glad she seemed to have gotten over her initial surprise at AB's quick switch from her to Jane, and I hoped it would stay that way.

The night before I left, my mother called me privately to her room  to advice me against so many things. To watch my company with girls and women, to be careful and prayerful, to concentrate on my studies and attack my books with fervour, and to be like Ayo, as prayerful and calm as she remembered him to be, and at this I smiled, that her angelic cousin was now the Devil.

She surprised me when she told me of how much contact she had had with Ayo all through the First Semester, asking him to be her eye and watch me, and I thanked God for Ayo when she told me the report he gave her was favourable, although I knew I was going to be angry with him for hiding such away from me. And then my mother asked me if I still contacted Gift.

"We are no longer together ma." I said matter-of-factly.

She had been te-teering on the edge of sleep while talking to me, but her head jerked back to full attention when I spoke.

"Since when?"

"It's been about four months now."

"For so long? Why didn't you tell me? No wonder you seemed a bit moody when you arrived from Lagos, but I attached it to the strain of your journey and school stress."

I was genuinely alarmed that she had even noticed it although I hid it as best as I could.

"What happened between the both of you?"

Part of me wanted to tell her the whole truth, that she had fallen for some French guy named Jean and forgotten about me, but I did not want the good image of her my mother had in her head to be soiled, and so I lied, even though it hurt that I was hiding the truth from my own mother, and told her that she had insisted that our relationship was bound to distract her from studying.

"Well that covers that. By the time she's back you should have been mature enough to realize that marrying a blind girl will not bode well for you and this family. It is only in the West that such things happen, here in Africa we don't do such. I'm not telling you to go and enter another relationship oh. The fact that I did not want to hurt your blind girlfriend by not saying anything did not mean I approved."

It took me time to recover from that shock. So my mother did not want our relationship after all? I simply nodded and listened to the other things she had to say.

"And why didn't you tell me?" she asked, her voice sounding more tensed.

"I'm seventeen mummy, and I will be eighteen in four months time."

"But your relationship ended and you came back home looking twice your age."

I smiled sheepishly, thinking of nothing else to use for my defence.

She looked at me intensely before asking me to go and sleep, telling me I needed it for the next day's harrowing journey.
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I was returning to Lagos three days before official resumption, and I was going back more prepared than I had been the previous semester. I now had more clothes, more foodstuff, a new phone, and Gift's locket too. As much as I now disliked the person who was the reason I had it, I could not bring myself to throw it away or dispose of it, and so I kept it with me. I had thought of surprising Ayo and not informing him of my departure, but I did not want to get there and find him with one of his numerous girlfriends and so I called him and told him.