Chapter 1
“Can you swear there is nothing going on between you and Aysha?”
My dad’s voice didn’t just bounce off the unplastered compound walls; it vibrated right inside my chest, and a deep, oily feeling of disgust welled up in my throat. I didn’t answer. Instead, my eyes tracked a fat green bottle fly landing on the edge of a nearby plastic bucket before shifting to the gallery of spectators. They were all there. The university boys from upstairs leaning over the rusty balcony railings, my mother tying and untying her faded wrapper, my two older brothers staring at the floor, and about five elders from our street who had suddenly found a reason to anchor themselves by our gate.
“I promise you, sir! I swear on my life, sir!”
Kunle was on both knees now, his jeans scraping against the sharp granite gravel of our yard. He was sweating through his oversized graphic tee, staring up at my dad, whose right hand was wrapped tightly around the wooden handle of a freshly sharpened cutlass. The steel caught the harsh 4:00 PM sunlight and threw a blinding glint right across my face.
Kunle kept going up and down, promising heaven and earth that nothing had happened and I stared at the back of his neck, pitying him. He was a university student studying computer science in the federal university just a few distances from our house who was getting dragged into our family’s messy, loud business all because of my stubborn curiosity.
I swallowed hard, my tongue tasting like dry copper. I wanted to speak up at that moment and vindicate Kunle right there by telling everyone that the only reason I had been sneaking into their off-campus hostel to sit on his plastic chair was because he owned a sleek, silver HP laptop. He was showing me lines of magic on a screen, but we had been caught just ten minutes ago because my younger brother, the family snitch, had spotted us from the street and run home to report.
And why? All because we didn’t own a single piece of computer technology in our household.
Not having a personal computer had never bothered me before. It was just an abstract luxury until three weeks ago when I followed a classmate to that same hostel to pick up a hair extension gift for her sister from a university student who sold them in one of the rooms there.
Passing by an open door, I saw Kunle. His fingers were flying across a keyboard so fast it looked like a blur. In the few American movies I’d watched at a neighbor’s house, I always thought actors just mashed random keys to look smart.
Then I poked my head through his doorway.
The screen wasn’t a movie; it was alive. Rows of neon green and white text were stacking up against a pitch-black background. Numbers, curly brackets, and commands I couldn’t read were scrolling upward, and my mind went completely daze. It felt like my brain had been shocked by almost the first thing that had genuinely excited me in my fifteen years of existence since I became a teenager.
I must have leaned in too close because I accidentally bumped my shoulder against his doorframe. I cleared my throat, forcing myself to look him in the eye as he stared back, completely weirded out by the random teenage girl in school uniform invading his space.
“Please... can you explain what you’re doing?” I had asked, my voice dropping an octave so I wouldn’t sound like a child.
Maybe it was the desperate, wide-eyed hunger in my expression, but his defensive posture softened. He leaned back in his chair and explained that this ugly, text-heavy screen was actually the backend interface, which was the skeleton that made apps like Facebook and WhatsApp function. He called it coding. Right then, the world outside that small hostel room shrunk, and I was purely hooked. I begged him to let me come back just to watch, and he gave a half-hearted, dismissive nod, probably figuring a young girl from the neighborhood would forget about it by morning.
But I didn’t. I came back the very next day after I had returned from school and barely changed out of my school uniform.
I told him my name, my class at the secondary school down the road, and that I wanted to learn how to do what he did. It was confusing at first. He showed me a project he was building, which was a simple website application for ordering local market purchases, and I made him break down the very basic syntax.
I was just getting past the initial hurdle, and I had finally learned how a single string of typed letters could trigger a functional response on a live webpage when my brother decided to ruin it. Instead of finding out why I was there, he made sure I was dragged back to stand in front of my mother’s small provision shop, under the judgment of the entire street.
Now, Kunle was trying to explain the concept of software programming to five elderly men in traditional Agbadas who didn’t even know how to send a text message and that it was what he was showing to me, but they weren’t listening. Their faces were set in expressions of rigid, irrational anger and they kept hurling all kinds of words. I wanted to step forward to explain better in our local dialect, but I knew if I opened my mouth to defend him, my head would be hanging from a pole before nightfall.
“If we find out that there is anything going on, or that has ever gone on between you and this girl,” my father barked, switching to our heavy native dialect as he pointed the tip of the cutlass at Kunle’s chest, “I swear to you, I will erase your name from this earth.”
I dropped my gaze, my right index finger instinctively scratching at a rough patch of skin on my left elbow. I started mentally drawing lines of code in the dirt with my toes—if parent_anger == True: syntax_error. I didn’t even care about his threats anymore.
After another twenty grueling minutes of back-and-forth interrogation, my father finally lowered the cutlass and let poor Kunle scramble out of our compound. My mother gripped my upper arm, her fingers digging deep into my skin, and ushered me inside the dark, stuffy living room. The air inside smelled of stale palm oil and old upholstery that was falling apart already
I hadn’t even fully cleared the violent drag when a heavy, blinding slap cracked across my left cheek. The force staggered me sideways, my shoulder slamming against the doorpost. For a brief three seconds, my vision went completely black, and sparks danced behind my eyelids.
It was my mother.
“You useless girl!” she screamed, her voice cracking as she shook her fists at me. “You want to make a mockery of my womb in this neighborhood, right? Is that what you want?!” She was livid, and all I could do was lean against the wall, staring at her chest heaving under her lace blouse.
I understood why she was taking this so personally because it was better for her to start lashing me before my father came in. If she left him to discipline me, then I was gone.
Before I could even steady my footing, the front door slammed open, and my father stormed inside, the cutlass now leaning against the exterior veranda. He didn’t even look at me; he went straight for my mother.
“You have trained this child terribly!” he roared, his finger nearly touching her nose. “Have I not told you to watch her? She is the most difficult, stubborn creature out of all these kids! Look at how she has brought insult to my name. Look at how she has given worthless street elders the right to cast dirt at my family!” My father lashed at her endlessly, his spit flying in the dim light. I just stood there, my back pressed against the concrete wall, completely unfazed.
This wasn’t a new script. We had performed this play a hundred times before.
According to them, I was the black sheep of the house. I had two older brothers, two older sisters, and one younger brother, but I was the only one who consistently demanded to know the why behind every single rule. I never took an order at face value, and if they told me the sky was blue, I wanted to dig into the science of it until I was personally satisfied. I refused to look at existence through their narrow, traditional lens.
But my father was a proper, authoritarian, and traditional man, who demanded total submission from everyone under his roof, whether it was convenient or not, reasonable or completely absurd. Honestly, I loathed everything about his mindset, but that was a long-standing issue.
“And you!” He finally whipped around, his bloodshot eyes locking onto me. “You are a despicable child! You go to an unmarried man’s quarters when you are not even betrothed to him? To sit down and hold useless conversations?!”
Betrothed. The word tasted foul even just hearing it.
I was fifteen years old, for goodness’ sake. What century was this man living in?
“What assurance do I have that you are not frolicking with boys at your school? How am I sure you are not already sullied?!” My father kept screaming, his chest expanding under his linen shirt and I stood perfectly still, mentally calculating the exact sequence of words that was rounding up in my head. I was exhausted, drained, and honestly, entirely done with the theatrics.
“I apologize, sir,” I said, my voice eerily calm as I barely looked at him because I was still scared of him, ““I will never go to a young student’s house, someone who is almost my age, just to learn how to operate a basic thing like a computer, simply because we do not own one in this house.”
The silence that followed was instant, and it felt like the air had been sucked out of the room as everyone stood in bated breath.
I was apologizing, but it didn’t sound like an apology at all. I was directly insinuating that everything he was saying was utter trash, because the boy he kept calling a man was only eighteen. Furthermore, I was pointing out that the exact reason I went to another person’s house was that they were too poor to afford a personal computer in our own home.
All hell broke loose.
My father’s face contorted into something monstrous, and the next slap came so fast I didn’t even see his hand move. It connected with the left side of my head, a sharp, ringing blast that caused my left ear to go instantly deaf, filling my head with a high-pitched whine, and I didn’t wait for a third. I bolted past him, out the back door, and ran out of the compound, hoping against hope that by the time dusk fell, my mother would have done something to calm his temper.
But there was no peace waiting for me when I sneaked back inside later that evening. My older brothers had an endless lecture prepared about family honor, and my older sisters cornered me in the kitchen with an overwhelming amount of unnecessary, submissive advice. Not a single one of them offered to help me find a way to study, nor did they try to understand my fascination. They just treated me like a criminal who had brought a curse upon the house.
By the next morning, my reality became a prison. My younger brother had strict orders from Dare, the firstborn son. He escorted me directly to my SS2 classroom door before walking to his own wing, and during the short afternoon break, his shadow was already waiting at my classroom window. When the closing bell rang, I was marched directly back home and forced to sit on a low wooden stool inside my mother’s provision store, staring at rows of tinned milk and detergent until late into the night.
It was pure torture, and I could barely breathe without permission.
The only thing keeping me sane was a small, torn exercise book I had managed to hide under my mattress. It contained pages of scribbled syntax and notes I had taken from Kunle’s explanations. While my hands manually bagged sugar for customers, my mind was floating elsewhere—looping variables, structuring databases, and mentally designing an app that could break me out of this cycle. I just wanted the freedom of a normal teenager in Senior Secondary School Two.
But the universe wouldn’t allow it, simply because I was born a girl and my dad openly disdained investing in high-level education for females. His philosophy was that we would eventually marry and become some other man’s financial burden, and it was similar to most of the fathers that lived in our area too, except the ones that were very well to do.
And I loathed that ideology with every fiber of my being because it seemed like that foolish rule was for the poor ones.
By the second week of my confinement, my brain was running on fumes, constantly turning over the limited programming concepts I had already memorized. I was seeing strings of code in the shadows on the ceiling, on the wall, and everywhere that I turned, both at home and in class. That was when my mother dropped the anchor that finally shattered everything.
It was late evening when everyone had been called to prayer but I was completely detached from the environment as I sat cross-legged on the worn straw mat, my head bowed in mock reverence while my mind desperately searched for a single spark of hope to escape this suffocating routine. I knew I wanted a bigger life, even if I couldn’t see the path yet.
Everyone else seemed perfectly content with the bare minimum. My two older sisters were perfectly happy learning tailoring and hairdressing instead of aiming for a university degree, and my brothers were already modeling their lives to become local clergymen. I knew we weren’t wealthy, which angered me daily, but I couldn’t understand their lack of ambition. Didn’t they want more out of existence than this small street? Did they want to be so poor like our parents too?
There were literally huge, beautiful houses on our street that made my heart flutter every time I saw them because of the intense, towering architecture, while ours was just a simple, barely completed bungalow, completely unpainted and showing raw grey blocks.
Kunle said doing that could bring me out of poverty and even mentioned some fascinating things, and it seemed like something fun and better than what my parents were doing. They always said they were contented and that it was God’s will, but to me, they were just lying and trying to accept their fate.
God didn’t want me to be poor.
“Aysha,” my mother muttered under her breath, cutting me out of my reverie as she leaned closer so her voice wouldn’t disrupt the loud, rhythmic prayers my father was leading. “Your father has finally concluded with Alhaji’s family. By the time you finish your WAEC exams next year, you are getting married to his third son. The family has accepted,” she added urgently in our dialect, and I thought my head exploded instantly.
The words felt heavier than the slap that had made my ear go deaf days ago, and my fingers that were tightly laced together on my lap froze instantly as I turned to look at her, blood draining from my face.C
