Because of her, he had joined the debate club, and after she spoke, he clapped the loudest and longest, until her friends said, “Obinze, please, it is enough.” Because of him, she joined the sports club and watched him play football, sitting by the sidelines and holding his bottle of water. But it was table tennis that he loved, sweating and shouting as he played, glistening with energy, smashing the small white ball, and she marveled at his skill, how he seemed to stand too far away from the table and yet managed to get the ball. He was already the undefeated school champion, as he had been, he told her, in his former sch
ool. When she played with him, he would laugh and say, “You don’t win by hitting the ball with anger o!” Because of her, his friends called him “woman wrapper.” Once, as he and his friends talked about meeting after school to play football, one of them asked, “Has Ifemelu given you permission to come?” And Obinze swiftly replied, “Yes, but she said I have only an hour.” She liked that he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt. Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.
CHAPTER 5
After Kayode’s party, Ginika was stilted; an alien awkwardness grew between them.
“You know I didn’t think it would happen that way,” Ifemelu told her. “Ifem, he was looking at you from the beginning,” Ginika said, and then, to show that she was fine with it all, she teased Ifemelu about stealing her guy without even trying. Her breeziness was forced, laid on thickly, and Ifemelu felt burdened with guilt, and with a desire to overcompensate. It seemed wrong, that her close friend Ginika, pretty, pleasant, popular Ginika with whom she had never quarreled, was reduced to pretending that she did not care, even though a wistfulness underlined her tone whenever she talked about Obinze. “Ifem, will you have time for us today or is it Obinze all the way?” she would ask.
And so when Ginika came to school one morning, her eyes red and shadowed, and told Ifemelu, “My popsie said we are going to America next month,” Ifemelu felt almost relieved. She would miss her friend, but Ginika’s leaving forced them both to wring out their friendship and lay it out newly fresh to dry, to return to where they used to be. Ginika’s parents had been talking for a while about resigning from the university and starting over in America. Once, while visiting, Ifemelu had heard Ginika’s father say, “We are not sheep. This regime is treating us like sheep and we are starting to behave as if we are sheep. I have not been able to do any real research in years, because every day I am organizing strikes and talking about unpaid salary and there is no chalk in the classrooms.” He was a small, dark man, smaller-looking and darker-looking beside Ginika’s large, ash-haired mother, with an undecided air about him, as though he was always dithering between choices. When Ifemelu told her own parents that Ginika’s family was finally leaving, her father sighed and said, “At least they are fortunate to have that option,” and her mother said, “They are blessed.”
But Ginika complained and cried, painting images of a sad, friendless life in a strange America. “I wish I could live with you people while they go,” she told Ifemelu. They had gathered at Ginika’s house, Ifemelu, Ranyinudo, Priye, and Tochi, and were in her bedroom, picking through the clothes she would not be taking with her.
“Ginika, just make sure you can still talk to us when you come back,” Priye said.
“She’ll come back and be a serious Americanah like Bisi,” Ranyinudo said.
They roared with laughter, at that word “Americanah,” wreathed in glee, the fourth syllable extended, and at the thought of Bisi, a girl in the form below them, who had come back from a short trip to America with odd affectations, pretending she no longer understood Yoruba, adding a slurred r to every English word she spoke.
“But, Ginika, seriously, I would give anything to be you right now,” Priye said. “I don’t understand why you don’t want to go. You can always come back.”
At school, friends gathered around Ginika. They all wanted to take her out to the tuck shop, and to see her after school, as though her impending departure had made her even more desirable. Ifemelu and Ginika were lounging in the corridor, during short break, when the Big Guys joined them: Kayode, Obinze, Ahmed, Emenike, and Osahon.
“Ginika, where in America are you going?” Emenike asked. He was awed by people who went abroad. After Kayode came back from a trip to Switzerland with his parents, Emenike had bent down to caress Kayode’s shoes, saying “I want to touch them because they have touched snow.”
“Missouri,” Ginika said. “My dad got a teaching job there.”
“Your mother is an American, abi? So you have an American passport?” Emenike asked.
“Yes. But we haven’t traveled since I was in primary three.”
“American passport is the coolest thing,” Kayode said. “I would exchange my British passport tomorrow.”
“Me too,” Yinka said.
“I very nearly had one o,” Obinze said. “I was eight months old when my parents took me to America. I keep telling my mom that she should have gone earlier and had me there!”
“Bad luck, man,” Kayode said.
“I don’t have a passport. Last time we traveled, I was on my mom’s passport,” Ahmed said.
“I was on my mom’s until primary three, then my dad said we needed to get our own passports,” Osahon said.
“I’ve never gone abroad but my father has promised that I will go for university. I wish I could just apply for my visa now instead of waiting to finish school,” Emenike said. After he spoke, a hushed silence followed.
“Don’t leave us now, wait until you finish,” Yinka finally said, and she and Kayode burst out laughing. The others laughed, too, even Emenike himself, but there was, underneath their laughter, a barbed echo. They knew he was lying, Emenike who made up stories of rich parents that everyone knew he didn’t have, so immersed in his need to invent a life that was not his. The conversation ebbed, changed to the mathematics teacher who did not know how to solve simultaneous equations. Obinze took Ifemelu’s hand and they drifted away. They did that often, slowly detaching themselves from their friends, to sit in a corner by the library or take a walk in the green behind the laboratories. As they walked, she wanted to tell Obinze that she didn’t know what it meant to “be on your mother’s passport,” that her mother didn’t even have a passport. But she said nothing, walking beside him in silence. He fit here, in this school, much more than she did. She was popular, always on every party list, and always announced, during assembly, as one of the “first three” in her class, yet she felt sheathed in a translucent haze of difference. She would not be here if she had not done so well on the entrance examination, if her father had not been determined that she would go to “a school that builds both character and career.” Her primary school had been different, full of children like her, whose parents were teachers and civil servants, who took the bus and did not have drivers. She remembered the surprise on Obinze’s face, a surprise he had quickly shielded, when he asked, “What’s your phone number?” and she replied, “We don’t have a phone.”
He was holding her hand now, squeezing gently. He admired her for being outspoken and different, but he did not seem able to see beneath that. To be here, among people who had gone abroad, was natural for him. He was fluent in the knowledge of foreign things, especially of American things. Everybody watched American films and exchanged faded American magazines, but he knew details about American presidents from a hundred years ago. Everybody watched American shows, but he knew about Lisa Bonet leaving The Cosby Show to go and do Angel Heart and Will Smith’s huge debts before he was signed to do The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. “You look like a black American” was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids. Manhattan was his zenith. He often said “It’s not as if this is Manhattan” or “Go to Manhattan and see how things are.” He gave her a copy of Huckleberry Finn, the pages creased from his thumbing, and she started reading it on the bus home but stopped after a few chapters. The next morning, she put it down on his desk with a decided thump. “Unreadable nonsense,” she said.
“It’s written in different American dialects,” Obinze said.
“And so what? I still don’t understand it.”
“You have to be patient, Ifem. If you really get into it, it’s very interesting and you won’t want to stop reading.”
“I’ve already stopped reading. Please keep your proper books and leave me with the books I like. And by the way, I still win when we play Scrabble, Mr. Read Proper Books.”
Now, she slipped her hand from his as they walked back to class. Whenever she felt this way, panic would slice into her at the slightest thing, and mundane events would become arbiters of doom. This time, Ginika was the trigger; she was standing near the staircase, her backpack on her shoulder, her face gold-streaked in the sunlight, and suddenly Ifemelu thought how much Ginika and Obinze had in common. Ginika’s house at the University of Lagos, the quiet bungalow, the yard crowned by bougainvillea hedges, was perhaps like Obinze’s house in Nsukka, and she imagined Obinze realizing how better suited Ginika was for him, and then this joy, this fragile, glimmering thing between them, would disappear.