I met Mikun on Facebook. We had been speaking for close to six months, and even without him asking or me confirming, he was my unofficial official boyfriend. We talked about everything and anything clueless eighteen-year-olds talk about. Stupid or not, I loved him. He was my first ever introduction to dating, and like they always say, your first love is always your worst.
I was nineteen, privileged, and contrary to my actions, a smart enough teenager. I was on my way back from my programming learning center, laptop, power bank, and phone all safely tucked into my HPPOWER bag, in the bus to my house, when the journey actually began.
Mikun suggested coming to visit me at Iyana-Ipaja, where I stayed with my parents. I didn't think too much about it, after all, we both stayed in Lagos, well, to the best of my soon-to-be-discovered lacking knowledge. I was so excited to hang out with my boyfriend. Thinking about it felt like a dream. I wasn't particularly prepared to see him, but somehow luck turned in my favor, because my mom decided to make her signature beef stew with amala. I knew immediately I had to starve myself to keep enough for Mikun, and at the same time avoid my mom noticing the soup had reduced drastically.
I packed more than enough for him — all types of assorted meat, ponmo, anything I could, except the amala, of course. Mikun didn't like amala, so I got him an affordable replacement: fufu. Sneaking out of the house, I was satisfied, knowing I was ready to see him.
We were already in transit for about twenty minutes when, all of a sudden, the middle-aged woman sitting beside me raised alarm, she had forgotten her bag at the bus stop where we all boarded. The driver, being the difficult man, he'd presented himself as from the start, refused to take anything less than ₦200 to turn back, and went straight to yelling about how he didn't care about finding her bag. In a blink, they were in a screaming match, and after hitting a few impossible decibels, they decided to check the boot. Nothing prepared me for the screams and urgency they both had running back to their seats. Tense air, locked doors, dilated pupils, and our journey started again.
For our first meeting, Mikun was so underdressed, first disappointment. He didn't hug me or hold me, just stared, until he noticed how uncomfortable I got.
"Femi, how are you?"
Hearing him say that made me cringe, not just because I didn't like being called my second name, but because his dialect was so strong I couldn't place it. All I knew was that I didn't like it.
Sweetening my voice, I answered, "I'm fineee, I brought you food, see, fufu and soup."
"I don't like fufu."
Ehn!
Deflated, I responded, "I didn't know that, you didn't tell me na."
"Sorry."
Cause of irritation number two. I shouldered the disappointment and tried again. "So, what did you bring for me?"
"Nothing."
Having had enough of the slowness building around us, I found an excuse to check whether my mom had noticed I wasn't home. "I'm coming, let me drop the food back, since you don't want it."
"So you're going to leave me, how will I know you'll come back?"
"I'll come back na."
"Drop your phone, so I'll know you're coming back."
"My phone?"
"Yes na, don't worry, I'll just wait here for you."
"Okay, I'll come back."
We, the passengers sat tensed, waiting for either the driver or the woman to speak again, and at the same time I was worried by the speed he was driving at. I was close to losing my calm when another passenger took up the role of voice of reason and said what I was thinking: "Oga driver, e wa farabale o, ere yii o da." [driver, please calm down, this speeding isn’t good.]
Still with urgency, he replied, "E jekin sare o, ti eyin na ba ri nkan ti iya yii gbe si inu oko mi." [Let me hurry, if only you all knew what this woman put in my car.]
The woman, who had held her tongue all this while, suddenly burst out yelling at the driver again: "Nitori owo le se wan gbon bayii, oga o." [It's because of money that you're shaking, see you.]
Collectively, and individually, we decided we'd had enough, and turned to our voice of reason again to press for details. When I say I was shocked by what I heard, and by the swiftness with which it was decided for us, one minute we were on our way to Ojo, the next we were headed somewhere else entirely, to take an oath not to expose the hundred million naira the driver had "miraculously" found in his boot.
None of us had seen any money, and yet we were all so eager, especially me the most clueless, and unfortunately the youngest. After close to an hour of driving, we arrived at our "destination." Somehow the attention landed on me for the first time since we'd started.
"Oya, aunty, pray for us."
I wanted to object not only because the "aunty" label was overcompensating, but because it was hypocritical, especially coming from someone who'd spent half the ride convincing the driver to drop me off, insisting I was too young to be here. I ignored him, my once-recognized voice of reason, now my nemesis, who'd decided on everyone's behalf that I didn't deserve a share of the money and went on with my prayer. I'm sure if my mom had witnessed it, she'd have cried at how beautiful and lovely my words were, sad that it was only possible because of my own obvious greed.
I snuck back into the compound just to find everyone occupied with themselves, happy for the distraction, since it meant more time with Mikun. I ran down the stairs, excited, nothing holding me down, ran down the street eager to get back to him, like I'd never left. First gate, second, third, no sign of Mikun. Strange.
I walked back a bit, thinking maybe he'd sat somewhere shaded, away from the sun or the road. No sign of him. Nervous he might have left in anger; I dug my hands into my pocket to text him. Empty. Other pocket. Empty.
And then, in the most painful flashback of the day, I remembered exactly where my phone was, and I froze, not because my mom would kill me, or because my sisters would never let me live it down, but because the night before I had spent two hours begging my aunt for resumption money, and now not only had I lost my phone to my missing boyfriend, but my entire first university allowance was gone with it. We'd shared all our passwords once, as a test of trust, and stupid me had given him all the right ones.
I'd had enough already. We'd prayed, we'd dropped all our belongings, and now we were locked out of the car, waiting for nothing.
For the first time since the journey started, I spoke without being asked a question. "Please, can I go?"
"Go where?" asked our former voice of reason.
"Home."
"All these children and their impatience, you better wait and get something for yourself and your family."
"Please, I don't want it anymore. I want to go."
"Mtchew, sebi mo so, oya ka ti ja sile ka to de ibi bayii." [Didn't I say it; we should have dropped her off since.]
He must have still had a bit of reason left in him, because he spoke to the others, and they agreed to drop me off. I just didn't know the condition of the drop-off. The journey ended, and this apparently was it. We all got back in and started the ride. Twenty minutes in, mid-doze, I was shoved awake and told to get off. Confused, still half-asleep, I stepped down, and just as fast as everything else that day, the door slammed shut in my face and the bus drove off.
I'm not sure if the daze was some residue of whatever they'd used on us, or just pure exhaustion and quiet acceptance of defeat. I turned, found a seat on the roadside, cried, the way you cry when you finally have permission to, when the danger is over and your body remembers that it could have been worse.
It was almost seven when a woman selling groundnuts by the road asked if i was okay, and I lied and said yes, and then immediately un-lied and said no. She let me use her phone to call my sister, the only number I had memorized, and my sister's first words were "where is your phone," which is how I knew, even through my own tears, that I would survive being asked that question a hundred more times before the night was over. I got picked up an hour later, and the ride home was silent in the specific way that means everyone has already decided not to talk about it until we're safely behind a closed door and ready to unleash in their individual ways.
I never heard from Mikun again. Not that night, not the week after, not ever. No apology, no explanation, no "sorry I disappeared with your phone and your allowance." I used to imagine he'd resurface with some story that he'd been robbed too, that he panicked not like it would make any sense.
For a long time, I told the stories of how I got scammed in two unique ways, once by a boy and once by a busload of strangers, and laughed about which one hurt worse. The truth is neither of them hurt more than the other, it was never about the things i lost that day but how easily I could be told what to feel by people I decided to trust even with clear signs of harm and deceit and even possible danger laid out in front of me.