Momo

i

MOMO

    Ever since the day that floor-to-ceiling shelve fell on her, Tiwa forgot she was my enemy. It was as if the real Tiwa never made it through. Her body remained intact, but her soul had been squashed beneath the weight of a thousand books, and when she screamed that ear-piercing scream that echoed through the formidable walls of Eastcost high, it had not been a scream of pain, but surrender, to a new person I could not identify.

    I knew Tiwa was not herself when she sat beside me in chemistry class. Tiwa never sat beside me. She'd always thought of herself as superior to me. It was the week after she'd been discharged from the hospital. Physically, she looked okay. She was still the same conventionally pretty girl, save for the purple bruises circling her eyes and her heavily bandaged neck.

    But I could tell something about her had changed. Her mannerisms were altered. She had become overly expressive, her emotions written freely on her face for everyone to read, an open book. The Tiwa Bedemosi I knew had been the closest book I'd ever read. Her expressionlessness cast an aura of mystery around her. You always wanted to know what she thought, felt, yet no matter how deep you probed into her, you always met a dead end, which only made you dig deeper and deeper until you found yourself stuck in the darkness of her mystery, completely purposeless except for the singular purpose of unravelling her.

    "Hello, Morayo," were the first words she said to me in chemistry class. She had said my name with a guileless smile. It occurred to me then that Tiwa had forgotten everything. She'd forgotten who she was, who I was, forgotten that I was the one who had pushed the bookshelf against her that day...