DANIELLA✔

Chapter four

"If I wait for you another minute Daniella, I'm going to come in there and beat you mercilessly. Why are you always this sluggish in everything?" Aunty Caro yelled for the third time.

Today being Monday, she was the one to take me to the new school to get me registered, but she simply couldn't just exercise a little bit of patience and understand that I had to first get dressed properly before I come out of my room. It was going to be my first day in school and I hadn't got the school uniform, so I needed to, at least, wear a clean and neatly ironed mufti to look presentable. After all, she was the one who wasted my time, ordering me to do every single thing in the house, leaving Amanda and Annabelle to go to school without doing anything.

Since I came to the city, I noticed those two barely did anything in this house, apart from eating, fiddling with their phones, gossiping about virtually everything and anything, sleeping and watching TV. While aunty Caro and her husband kept disturbing me to run errands for them or do the house chores. But come to think of it, who usually did the chores when I wasn't here?

City life wasn't a bit of how I had imagined it. I thought with aunty Caro, life would be a bed of roses and full of enjoyment— that was why I was so eager to come here— but so far, it had been the complete opposite.

Aunty Caro was a bit manageable but uncle Henry was unbearable. Whenever he was around, he called me regularly to send me on irrelevant errands or tell me to do things for him that he could just easily do, like calling me from my room to get the TV remote from the table in front of him or helping him to scratch his bare back, because according to him, that makes him fall asleep. Sometimes, I wondered if he did it deliberately just to frustrate me. Well, if that was his motive, he was succeeding.

"Sorry aunty, I'm coming." I hollered from my room so aunty Caro could hear me. I was putting on the socks that Annabelle gave me yesterday to wear for the first day of my resumption into the new school before I got new socks for myself.

This whole resumption thing was all too sudden. I hadn't even prepared myself adequately for school. Everything I was going to need for school was given to me by the twins— already used and dumped. Nothing was bought newly for me. The bag, the socks and the shoe I was wearing were Amanda and Annabelle's.

Once done dressing up in a white long sleeve shirt tucked in a black below-the-knee skirt and my white socks and well polished black shoe, I took the empty schoolbag from my bed and wore it on my back. I made a mental note to ask aunty Caro to get me exercise books to take note during lessons. I ran my hands through my hair and I noticed the all-back plait I had made two weeks ago when I was in village was already rough. I also made a mental note to collect money from aunty Caro for my hair.

I walked out of the room, shut the door behind me and made my way to the living room, where aunty Caro was. She was sitting down on the couch, watching a Nollywood movie.

"It looked like you weren't going to come out from the room. You should have slept in there." Aunty Caro said as she turned off the TV and made her way outside. As I saw her leave, I ran towards the light switch and flicked it off and then came out and locked the door. After which, I ran to meet aunty Caro in her car, opened the car door and clambered in.

"Have you locked the gate?" She asked, giving me this look that said 'what are you doing in my car when you haven't locked the gate?'

"No, sorry I forgot. Lemme go and lock it." I rushed down from the car and jogged to the gate. I locked it from outside and jogged back to the car, holding the key in my hand.

When I got back in the car, aunty Caro glared at me. "How many times do I have to remind you to lock the gate first before leaving the house? Do you think this place is like the village where each residence is so opened and people just come into one's house without knocking on any gate? Here, if you leave the gate opened, robbers can just enter and steal everything in the house. If that ever happened, you wouldn't like what I would do to you. I'm warning you now; always lock the gate before leaving the house, especially when nobody is inside." She dragged her right ear, warningly as she said the last statement.