I first met Funmi when I was fifteen, in my fourth year of secondary school. My parents had been separated for two years by then, and I’d returned from London with my father the year before—someone I hated with fervent intensity. I loved my mother dearly, however, and I didn’t want to burden her with a sulking teenage son. So, in quiet martyrdom, I resigned myself to a new life in Lagos.

***

The heat was all I could think about once I stepped off the plane. My body produced more sweat than I’d thought possible, and I felt my reality shift the moment the wheels left the runway. England had been safe; the rules were familiar. Nigeria was not. People were loud, messy, and took up space in a way that made me flinch instinctively. I’d grown up around adults named Dave and Sharon who only got loud when excessively drunk. Nigerians were loud as a matter of course. They felt strange to me, and with a sinking stomach, I began to realize the gravity of my impulsive decision.

My father immediately placed me in boarding school to help me “adjust.” He’d just started dating a girl closer to my age than his, and I suspected he wanted me out of the way. I was summarily dropped off at my new home in the dead of night with a suitcase, a driver’s number, and the vague promise of help if I needed it.

The hostel showers used buckets, the generators hummed constantly, and the water always smelled faintly metallic. On my first night, a high whining filled my ears, and I panicked until I realized it was just the mosquitoes. A small thing, but it felt like a warning.

To my housemates, I must have been an easy target. I was skinny, squeaky-voiced, and obsessed with obscure anime. They took joy in stealing my towels mid-shower, eating my carefully hidden snacks, and laughing whenever I complained. Any report to the housemaster earned me stories of his own schoolboy pranks, remembered with unsettling fondness. After three months, I had carved out a quiet space for myself as the outcast. I didn’t care about football, or music, or girls, or fitting in. I was content to be alone—until I met Funmi.

She was the kind of girl other girls didn’t know how to handle. She was pretty enough to invite jealousy, but so genuinely kind that no one could hate her. Our school uniform was a colonial costume: tartan skirts that had to reach past the knee, stiff white shirts, and heaving blazers in 30-degree weather. Most girls were swallowed by fabric.

Not Funmi.

She wore the same uniform, but with a kind of effortless confidence that made it look like she’d designed it. She floated through the school with a hypnotic self-assuredness, and, lonely as I was, her unassuming kindness called to me like a moth to flame.

Our first meeting was accidental. I’d been sent out of class by a geography teacher, and instead of waiting to be let back in, I walked to the gym bathroom to be alone with my frustration. She was sitting on the steps, sketching in a notebook.

“Hey. You alone?” I asked. I don’t know what gave me the courage to call out to her. I imagine it was a rare moment when my loneliness outweighed my pride.

She looked up, then around her. “Yeah?”

It was the first time I’d heard her speak. Her voice carried a foreign accent, and it filled me with a strange sense of camaraderie. The rumors said she’d lived in America before moving to Nigeria. That fact alone made her cooler than most.

“What are you doing?” I asked, because I didn’t know how else to talk to a girl.

She stared at me for a moment, then set down her sketchpad. “I finished my assignment early. Mr. Ayo told me to start the next one. Landscapes.” She flipped the notebook to show me a rough drawing of trees.

“I got kicked out of my geography class,” I said, feigning indifference. “Decided to take a detour and avoid the principal.”

“That’s stupid,” she replied. “His office is closer to the gym than the geography classroom.”

We started hanging out after that, for reasons that never fully became clear to me. I must have been an odd sort of curiosity. Her other friends treated her like a goddess, trying too hard for her attention. I tried hard too—probably harder than anyone—but I was too uncool to disguise my desperation. She saw me as I was: a strange, needy boy with a talent for overthinking.

We spent time together doing nothing. We read in silence, lay next to each other on the gym floor during lunch, sharing movie trailers, and listening to music. I tried to impress her with useless facts. She laughed at my jokes, corrected my trivia, and gently deflated my attempts as a matter of daily ritual.

We went everywhere together. She waited outside my classes, and every time I saw her it felt like the first—a jolt of disbelief followed by warmth spreading through my chest. She was good at listening. Or maybe I was just desperate to be heard. I told her everything: about London, my mother, my father. I talked endlessly, words spilling out in nervous streams, terrified that one day she would stand up, say she’d heard enough, and disappear.

The boys in my dorm were jealous, obviously. They couldn’t understand what she got out of me. They were all in love with her—half the school was, I imagine. Including me. Theories circulated freely: I’d saved her life and she owed me; I was paying her; it was some kind of sadomasochistic arrangement. When the bolder ones asked if we were dating, she’d grin and say, “Yeah, so?” before walking away laughing.

I never had the courage to ask if she meant it.

***

I stopped boarding the next year, so she started coming to my house after school. Lagos wasn’t London, where visits required only an Oyster card and a transit map. Here, they required a driver, fuel, and patience for traffic. She said her parents worked during the day and her driver was often free. I didn’t question it. I was grateful—for her company, and for the excuse to avoid my father, who treated my proximity to a girl so far out of my league as evidence of his own greatness.

By then, my father’s girlfriend was long gone. When I asked, he called her an ashaweo, a word he used for women who gladly took his money in exchange making him feel desirable. I assumed she’d simply realized she could do better. My father was a round-bellied rich man who got what he wanted with ease. He spent his evenings drinking beer and disturbing the peace of whoever was nearest. That was usually me.

One evening, he beat me bloody for failing to greet a friend of his at the mall. The man in question had been on the phone, but my father refused to hear it. He said I was “too proud.” When he left, I sat alone in my bedroom, bruised and shaking, shame and self-disgust spinning violently in my chest.

Then there was a knock.

The gateman called to say that a Ms. Funmi was at the gate. My father had gone out, and I knew she wouldn’t leave, so I let her in. She’d seen me like this before, and knew to pretend everything was normal, for the sake of my shrinking pride. Looking back, I imagine that decision ruined everything.

I barely remember what we argued about. She probably corrected something I said. I was already raw, my ego stripped bare, and her flippant charm scraped against me like sandpaper. Someone like her would never have flinched under my father’s hand. I felt myself unravelling.

I raised my voice, rasping and abrupt. The argument spiraled, turning loud and frantic. I said something stupid next, stuttering and incoherent, and she burst out laughing—a shrill, braying thing and then—

And then.

My hand connected with her cheek.

The sound echoed in the stillness. She stared at me, stunned, with an expression I’d never seen on her face before.

The generator hummed. I stared at my shaking hand, the reality of what I’d done crashing into me like a physical blow.

“Funmi. Oh my God. I—I’m so—”

She didn’t let me finish.

She turned, bolting through the door, and disappeared down the stairs.

I spent the night trying to erase the memory. I told myself it was a mistake. A reflex. That it wasn’t who I was. I told myself she’d forgive me. That she was too kind not to.

I was wrong.

I wouldn’t speak to her again until graduation.

She avoided me. Sometimes subtly, sometimes less so. The silence hurt more than insults ever could, and it pleased those around her immensely.

I soon realized that night I had broken something beyond repair. My mother might have forgiven me. Funmi would not.

At graduation, she smiled at me, tossing a casual “congratulations,” and turning sharply to hug another friend who was near-hysterical about leaving school behind. I watched the corners of her mouth stretch wide into a laugh and waited for something—anything—to suggest she still cared. That she still saw me.

But she didn’t look back.

So I walked away.

***

Soon after graduation, I returned to England for A-levels. I was glad to be reunited with my mother, determined, now a man, not to need her support. I returned to the grey and the quiet, to a place where I could hide myself. 

Two months into my first university term, curled in my bed and scrolling on my phone, I almost scrolled past a post on the alumni Facebook page: R.I.P. Funmi. We love you. You will always be in our hearts and memories.

I don’t remember much after that. I woke hours later with my phone still in my hand, dizzy with the words flashing in my mind like an ambulance siren. The obituary said it was an accident. A drunk driver. Wrong place, wrong time.

A tragedy.

A tragedy.

***

Recently, I returned to Lagos for my uncle’s funeral—at my father’s insistence, and perhaps in search of closure from a city that had both rejected and shaped me. At the grocery store, I saw the girl Funmi hugged at graduation.

She met my eyes.

We stared at each other for a second.

Then she turned away and walked past me.