Saint Patrick's College

Chapter Fifteen

When it came to her turn, Adaeze didn't scream, that didn't mean she made it easy on the nurse that was drawing her blood. Jerking her arm back and apologizing and repeating the cycle again was only a glimpse into what Adaeze put the poor nurse lady through.

"Relax, it's over now." Ayomide said and Adaeze ignored her. Not only did she not apologize, she completely invalidated Adaeze's feelings. She was not winning any points in Adaeze's book. Until the girl acknowledged where she was wrong and took accountability, Adaeze was only going to tolerate her.

"Does she have to be here?" Adaeze asked, still cradling where the nurse had stuck the needle. There was already a bandage over the spot.

"Yes." Segun said simply as he led the way back to class. "We're a team, whether you like it or not." He walked up the stairs. "I don't care who started it, I don't care who did what, what I care about is that you two are friends. And I don't think you should let anything get between that."

"We were friends."

Adaeze glared at Segun as they ascended the stairs, her annoyance etched on her face. Ayomide trailed behind, aware of the tension but choosing to stay silent for the moment.

Segun halted abruptly, turning to face Adaeze with a stern expression. "You still are," he insisted, his voice unwavering. "Friends fight. Friends argue. But you work through it. Ayomide messed up, and she knows it. Just talk to her, Adaeze. Clear the air."

Adaeze shot a skeptical look at Ayomide who looked anything but apologetic.

"You know what, I'm out of here." Adaeze said stopping in her tracks in the middle of the stairway. If Ayomide wasn't going to put in the work to win her back, she wasn't going to be the one to fight for them and what they once were.

"What about Math class?" Segun asked.

"I'll be late."

. . .

Adaeze glanced over her shoulder to make sure she wasn't being followed not that she thought that Segun or Ayomide would follow. She knew she didn't have much time. One of the reasons she'd been eager to leave that conversation was to get her hands on the leather-bound book that had been burning a hole in the back of her mind. She'd been postponing this for too long.

The only place she felt safe enough to read the book was in the girl's bathroom. It was the only place she didn't have to worry about Femi materializing or Ayomide asking questions about where she vanished to—not that she cared what the girl thought of her.

It was the perfect place even though at times it smelled like urine.

She took the stairs two at a time and walked quickly through the halls.

She pushed the bathroom door open.

Two girls were by the mirror reapplying lip-gloss. Makeup wasn't prohibited at Saint Patrick's College; the school couldn't be bothered about inconsequential things like that.

She didn't know how she was going to get rid of them or if she even had to get rid of them. It wasn't as if they were going to sense that she was reading in the stall and barge in.

She picked her usual stall, the last one by the high up windows and locked the door behind her.

Closing the toilet seat, she set her bag down on it and rifled through it. She planned to read at least two pages before the warning bell for her next class. The book felt like gold in her hands.

She flipped through it.

He's the guy everyone hates. The kind of guy that would get under your skin. Everyone knows him. Everyone has an opinion of him, what's yours? You have to have met him by now and if you haven't what are you waiting for? Michael Nnamdi is Saint Patrick's College's worst of the worst. From an influential family of lawyers, he's the seventeen-year-old who always has a drink in his water bottle, the one who is never sober no matter the time of day because to him life is a party. But don't get too close unless you might get sucked into his world, you might lose yourself in his ways. And if you need proof, well, we all know where to get that. Bottoms up.

This she could believe because she'd met Michael. However, she didn't know he came from a family of lawyers. It would explain why he was at Saint Patrick's College, why he fit right in. It then clicked to Adaeze that he must have been one of the friends Ogechi had mixed with. He had to be. The book was about their clique. Ogechi had written about her new friends. Ogechi must have gotten sucked into his world of alcohol and drugs. Strange was only one way to describe him from when she met him. He had to be the one Daniella and Elizabeth were talking about.

The main question left lingering in Adaeze's mind was how this tied into what happened to Ogechi? Could they have in some way influenced her to take her own life? Is that what the book was going to reveal?

She wondered if she could fit one more page before the bell. It was worth a shot.

She flipped the page. When she read the next name in the book, her heart skipped a beat.

Femi Babalola.

There was a knock at the stall door.

"Are you done in there, I really need to pee!" A girl said. Why was she at Adaeze's door? Weren't there other stalls? Adaeze refused to believe they were all filled.

Nevertheless, Adaeze shoved the book back in her bag and swung it over her shoulder. "Yeah, I'm sorry." She pushed the door open.

She rushed out of the bathroom.

Of course, he had a secret. Of course, they all did. The book was written about the four of them. About his clique. Which meant Femi was no exception. She didn't feel like it was proper for her to read his secret. She felt like if he had something to hide there was a reason, he was hiding it and if he wanted to tell her he would tell her.

They all had a part to play in what happened to Ogechi Nwafor. They must have. The book told a story, a chilling one. It was told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, someone with a vendetta against Femi and his clique of popular kids. But if Adaeze was going to find out what really happened to Ogechi, she needed to keep reading to find out what role they had to play.