Close Call
It was about fifteen minutes to
midnight, and I was still stuck in that tiny closet. I’d been there for at
least three hours twenty minutes. My heart was pounding and I swear I was
sweating profusely, forget that it was stone cold in that room- well a lot of
things about that house were cold. I was such a fool. Allowed myself to get
entangled with a potbellied man whose sack of a stomach could barely stay put
in the realms of his expensive crocodile skin belt. The way it looked ugly, I
had to know he is moneyed to believe that it wasn’t just one of those fake
belts from the streets. My parents would never have been
proud of me. It was disgusting enough that I was dating men who could easily
call my father son, but being beaten up by a mad woman just because she caught
me sleeping with her frog of a husband would definitely have my mother burying
her head in the sand. Poor woman, thinking her only daughter a saint! I mean, I
go to church every Sunday, even sing in the choir and teach Sunday school. I
rarely miss youth services and attend an average of the annual church
conferences and camps. What she didn’t know was that at school I was a totally
different animal. I need to figure out the excuse I will give her when she asks
me why the clothes she always bought me seemed so new at the end of the
semester, or why I always seemed to be donating stuff to so called poor
friends. She’d be appalled to find out that I go shopping in Dubai and wear
wigs so expensive it could send all my siblings to school. If I could really
give my parents money to send my brothers to better schools, or to help in the
house, I would, because the truth is that we were extremely poor. I hated it so
much. Maybe one day when I got caught I would use that to shift the blame for
my promiscuity to my parents for failing to be rich like Liana’s dad.
We grew up in the same neighborhood
and went to the same church and schools but she drove to university now. Why
did she get to have the looks and the money, and I remained a poor duff person?
I hated so much that Liana got to live the life I was now living except she did
not have to transact her vagina for it. I recall how she used to act like we
are friends and give me handouts. The brat! She thought I would always wait on
her twenty four hours a day as she bulldozed my peace with the endless stories
of her stupid boyfriends and her vow to keep herself for the man she would
marry. The guilt trips associated with the stories she told disgusted me. I
wanted better from life and waiting for a man to marry my poverty- stricken ass
would never cut it for me. Besides, these stupid boys she dated were just as
spoilt as she was and didn’t know what real life was. Half the time when we
hung out those rich boys pretended like I did not exist, and I always just
eventually sneaked out and cried myself to sleep. The only time a boy had
interest in me I did not have to think twice before saying no to his obviously
poor butt. He was so skinny and looked as if he was about to cry. The last
thing I wanted was to bring my parents another instrument for propagating our
poverty further down the generations. If I was to date a boy my age, he would
have to be handsome and rich. Since that did not happen, I found myself stuck
in a stupid closet because this douchebag of a man had told me that he was on
the verge of divorce and his wife did not stay with him anymore! How did my
dumb ass not figure out that we used the spare bedroom because he did not think
it moral to sleep with a girl in his matrimonial bed? SO much for a man who
wanted his divorce to go through so he could concentrate on me. Turned out his
wife had merely been scheduled to fly out for a shopping spree with her
daughter but as fate would have it, missed that flight and decided to come
back.
The stupid old man picked me up soon after his wife called to say she had left the house for the airport. Now all I could hear were shouts and shrieks from a woman who was hell-bent on the suspicion that her husband was hiding something from her. The fact that her matrimonial bed was as she left it seemed to fuel her anger because that to her did not explain the red lipstick I had so generously splashed on her husband’s white shirt. Red lipstick was my trademark, and that kind of made me feel good that if I was to get caught, they would know that he asked for it.
I should be thinking of how to get
out, not masterminding the plan for when I am caught. If I still had a pint of
respect for my poor mother, I needed to make sure that I exit the drama of this
stupid family without my name or face getting caught up in the evidently broken
marriage. Besides that, I needed to make sure that Liana does not see me. It is
one thing for her to have to constantly avoid my parents so that she does not
reveal who I am at school, but find out I was bedding her father too would be
the last straw to the closest to friendship I had ever had in my entire
miserable life. If this proximity to getting caught was not enough a lesson to
get me to fix my life, nothing else would. I was done with this hypocrisy, this
dirty life that I constantly had to cover up. I was done with trading my
womanhood, at least what was left of it, with men that were barely keeping
their families intact. If I wanted a better life for myself and my siblings, I
needed to agree that sleeping my way through life was not going to secure that
life for me. My parents were poor, but I was the first one at university, and I
needed to give them value for the sacrifices they made.
Somewhere around one o’clock in the
morning, I sneaked out through the large windows and used the key that Liana
had given me to unlock gate. The faithful dog Frothy did not even bark at me. Even the dog saw me as family and would have been disappointed to discover that
I was such a fraudster.
wow. this one deserves to be a full book
ReplyDeleteI will think about that definitely.
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