Close Call

It was about fifteen minutes before 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 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 the 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.

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.

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 douche-bag 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.

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.

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 finding 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.