Saint Patrick's College

Chapter Ten

"Where did you say we could find these friends of Ogechi?" Adaeze asked Segun.

"They're not her friends, they're her former friends." He clarified as he walked ahead, quick on his feet. Adaeze was getting used to his rapid strides.

The three of them walked past walls of dented lockers, past locked staffroom doors and past students halting around waiting for the next period bell.

He managed to get Ayomide on board with their plan. To say the girl fought back was an understatement. She truly didn't want anything to do with the Nwafor case, it wasn't until Segun dangled another one thousand naira note in the girl's face that she agreed to tag along to see Ogechi's once upon a time friends.

He gave Adaeze and Ayomide a description of the girls they were going to meet. He told them that the girls; Elizabeth and Daniella were the only people who got close to Ogechi when she first transferred.

Segun stopped outside a classroom Adaeze didn't recognize. Room E403.

"What makes you think they're going to be in there?" She asked with a slight frown on her face, her confusion eminent. It's not like he could have met with them ahead of time and talked them into meeting with him... Could he? Could that be where he vanished to when she couldn't find him?

He stopped with his hands on the door handle. "Because I texted them and we agreed to meet here." He explained like it was the most obvious thing.

Did everyone have a phone but Adaeze?

He pushed the door open.

The room wasn't empty, quite the contrary, there were kids in clusters of threes and fours, groups lost in the world of their chatter. The room looked like every other class she'd been in except this one was filthy. There were empty bottles littering the floor, and plastic food containers forgotten on the desks. How come the room didn't get as much attention as the other classes? Adaeze chose to blame it on the kids in the room, they had to be responsible.

Segun walked up to two girls at the back of the room. One had her hair braided down in an all-back hairstyle, the other wore her hair natural, pulled back with a ribbon of some sort.

"Hello, ladies!" He greeted.

He pulled a chair closer to them and sat.

Ayomide did the same.

Adaeze opted to stand with her arms crossed over her chest. She knew she looked menacing, but that was the least of her problems. The semi-permanent scowl on her face wasn't helping her case either.

"We would just like to ask you a few questions." Segun said drumming his fingers over the table. He drummed off a beat before anyone said anything.

"If this is about Ogechi, we don't want any part of it," the girl with the braided hair finally said, her tone defensive.

Ayomide leaned in, trying to appear less threatening. "We're not here to accuse anyone of anything. She set her hands palm down on the table. "We just want to understand what her last days were like. Did she go to class, did she skip, was there anything that stood out?"

The girl with the ribbon in her hair, who Adaeze assumed was Daniella, exchanged a wary glance with her friend, Elizabeth, before speaking. "What makes you think we would know that?"

"Yeah, we stopped being friends with her long before any of this happened." Elizabeth added.

"We know that." Adaeze said "But we also know that neither of you stopped following her on Instagram despite no longer being friends." And the only reason Adaeze knew this was because of Ayomide and her researching ways. Adaeze resisted the urge to high five her new friend. The girl was an asset to their team.