Campus Babe, Episode 6: The Boy Who Never Chased Her
At six o'clock exactly, the countdown clock hit zero.
Blessing had not slept. She sat on the top bunk with the blanket around her shoulders and her phone in both hands, watching the little white numbers drain away. Below her, Tolu lay with her back to the room, wrapped in a wrapper, breathing too evenly to be asleep. They had not spoken since the cafeteria. Not a word, not a glance. Two girls sharing eleven square metres of silence.
The screen refreshed.
The ledger photograph came first, sharp now, every line of it legible. A schoolgirl's handwriting, blue ink on lined paper. Mrs. Adeyemi, Bodija Market. Advance on shop money. Overdue. A column of figures followed, and at the bottom, circled twice, a total: ₦38,500.
Beneath it, the caption.
PART TWO: Mama Blessing's Secret. 💸 While the campus babe dines with Chief's son, her mother is hiding from a market woman she owes. Who is really paying for this lifestyle? Hint: not Blessing. #CrestConfessions #SponsorSzn
Blessing read it once. Then she put the phone down on the mattress, very gently, as if it were something that might spill.
She had expected to feel the shame again. It came, a hot flush up the back of her neck. But under it lay something colder and steadier, a kind of focus she had never felt before. Someone was reading her mother's life aloud to forty thousand strangers. Someone had been listening.
She climbed down from the bunk, pulled on her hoodie, and slipped out the door.
Behind her, Tolu opened her eyes.
"It isn't on your phone."
Daniel said it three hours later, in the lab, with a cable still plugged into the green case and a look of tired concentration on his face. The air conditioner had finally died overnight, and the room smelled like a warm laptop. Emeka lay across three chairs in the corner with a hoodie over his face, snoring.
"You're sure?"
"I ran every scan I know. Stalkerware, remote access tools, hidden profiles, rogue certificates. Nothing." He unplugged the cable and handed the phone back. "Your device is clean. Whoever knew about Mrs. Adeyemi did not learn it from this."
"Then how?"
"There are three ways to listen to a phone call. You can compromise the phone. You can compromise the person on the other end." He paused. "Or you can compromise the line."
"The line?"
"The network. The connection between the two phones." He rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "That takes access. Carrier access, or specialised equipment. It's the kind of thing most people can't do."
"My mother has a Tecno keypad phone from 2015."
"Then the easiest target is probably hers."
Blessing sat down heavily on a stool. "Someone is listening to my mother's phone."
"Possibly. Or yours, through the network. I can't tell which without more information." Daniel's voice was gentle. "I'm sorry. I wish I had a simpler answer."
"What about the number? The unknown number that sent me the message about the chain?"
"Emeka traced it last night, before you came. It's a virtual number, registered to a dead SIM that was topped up once, in cash, at a kiosk in Mokola." He glanced at the sleeping figure in the corner. "Dead end. But it tells us the person is careful."
She nodded slowly. She felt, absurdly, a little less alone. A week ago she would have hidden all of this behind a smile. Now she was sitting in a hot room with a boy who didn't flinch at ugly facts, listening to him say I don't know without any embarrassment at all.
"What do I do?"
"For now, you don't say anything private on that phone. You call your mother from a different line, a borrowed phone, a kiosk, whatever you can. And you let Emeka and me keep looking." He met her eyes. "You don't have to carry this alone."
She looked away, because her throat had tightened again.
"I'll buy you both lunch," she said, "as thanks."
"I don't eat lunch before two," Emeka said from under his hoodie.
"You said you were asleep."
"I'm a light sleeper."
It became a routine without either of them deciding that it would.
Mornings, she went to lectures with her chin up and her phone off. Afternoons, she found her way to the library, to the corner table behind the engineering journals, where Daniel was already sitting with a laptop and a notebook, pretending not to have saved her a seat. Evenings, they worked in the lab. Emeka came and went like weather.
They compared lists. Who had attended the gathering. Who had left early. Which waiters had been on shift. Daniel built a spreadsheet with a column for each guest and a column for each possible motive, and Blessing watched with growing amazement as he turned the chaos of that night into rows and cells, as if human betrayal were a problem of sorting.
"You're going to make this a database," she said on Thursday.
"It's the only way to see what's missing."
"What's missing?"
"Opportunity." He tapped the screen. "Almost everyone at that party had a reason to resent you, or to enjoy it, or to profit from your embarrassment. But very few had the opportunity to take your phone. And almost none of those had both the opportunity and the knowledge of that transfer."
"Which leaves?"
"Which leaves a short list I don't like yet." He closed the laptop. "I want to be sure before I say names."
Their conversations changed so slowly that she did not notice at first. The sharpness had gone out of them. The arguments about spilled juice and cold water had given way to something quieter, a dry back-and-forth that made her laugh in spite of herself. He told her the story of his first computer, a hand-me-down with a cracked screen and a keyboard missing eleven letters. She told him about the first time she had pitched a documentary, and how the lecturer had said interesting, but who would watch it?
"I would," Daniel said.
"You haven't even seen it."
"I don't need to. I know you."
She looked at him, and the sentence hung in the air for a second too long, and then Emeka dropped a stack of cables on the floor and the moment broke.
But she remembered it afterwards. She remembered the way he had said it, not as a compliment but as a fact.
On Friday, she followed him.
She hadn't planned to. She had meant only to catch him after his last lecture and ask if he wanted tea. But he walked out of the Computer Science building at three o'clock with a hurried stride and a bag over his shoulder, and she found herself falling in several paces behind him, curious in spite of herself.
He did not go to the library. He did not go to the cafeteria. He turned out of the main gate, crossed the road, and ducked into a narrow lane lined with kiosks and phone repair stalls.
At the third stall, a boy in a yellow vest was waiting with a tray of broken phones.
"Oga Daniel! I thought you wouldn't come today."
"I said Friday, didn't I?" Daniel dropped his bag, rolled up his sleeves, and picked up a screwdriver from the tray like a surgeon selecting an instrument. "Let me see the Itel first. The one with the water damage."
Blessing stood behind a pillar and watched.
For forty minutes, Daniel repaired phones. He opened them with a plastic pick, laid out their small parts on a magnetic mat, and fixed a charging port, replaced a cracked screen, and revived a dead battery with a patience she had never seen him show in the cafeteria. The boy in the vest watched him with open admiration. Customers came and went. Money changed hands, a few crumpled notes, which Daniel took without counting and pushed into a plastic tin.
"Twice a week," a voice said beside her. "He fixes the stuff the shop owner doesn't want to touch."
She jumped. Emeka stood there with a bag of plantain chips and an amused expression.
"You're following him," he said.
"I'm not."
"You're hiding behind a pillar."
"I'm observing the... architecture."
"Right." He offered her a chip. "He does phones on Mondays and Fridays. Wednesdays and Saturdays he does the night shift at a cybercafé off Iwo Road. Tuesday and Thursday evenings, he tutors three JSS3 boys at a church hall. Sundays, he fixes laptops for people who can't afford the shop."
Blessing stared at him. "He does all that?"
"Plus a full course load and the scholarship requirements." Emeka shrugged. "He pays for his own books. His mother's rent. His younger sister's school fees. And before you ask, no, he doesn't talk about it. He thinks it's boring."
"Why would anyone think that's boring?"
"Because he doesn't think of it as a sacrifice. He thinks of it as Tuesday."
She watched Daniel, bent over a cracked screen, the small fluorescent light picking out the stubborn line of his jaw. A woman in a headscarf came to the stall with a cheap laptop and a worried face. He listened, nodded, said something quiet. The woman asked how much. He shook his head. She insisted. He shook it again, smiling slightly, and pushed the laptop back across the counter with a fixed charger cable in it.
"Free?" Blessing whispered.
"He does that a lot," Emeka said. "There's a first-year Pharmacy girl failing Chemistry. He tutors her on Saturdays. She tried to pay him last month. He said, 'Pay me when you're a doctor.'" He shook his head. "I've known him for four years. I still don't know where he finds the time."
On the way back, she tried to tell herself that nothing had changed. But she kept seeing it: the screwdriver, the tin, the woman with the laptop. And she kept thinking of how much of her own life she had spent making sure that nobody saw the work behind anything.
"You followed me."
It was Saturday night, in the library, and he did not look up from his notebook as he said it.
"Emeka told you."
"Emeka tells me everything. It's a character flaw." Daniel capped his pen. "Why?"
"I was curious."
"About what?"
"You." She sat across from him and folded her hands on the table. "You work all the time. You fix things for free. You never complain. I thought maybe it was an act."
"And?"
"It isn't."
He looked at her, a long considering look. Outside the window, the harmattan haze had turned the lamps into soft yellow smudges. Somewhere below, a door slammed.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You usually do."
"Your phone. The dress. The perfume bottle on your shelf that you never open." He said it plainly, without accusation. "How much of what you wear, do you actually own?"
The question landed like a pebble in a still pond. For a moment she considered lying. It was an old instinct, so familiar that it felt like breathing.
"Very little," she said.
He waited.
"The trousers I wore the first day were borrowed from a girl in Faculty of Law. The sunglasses are fake. The red dress belonged to Favour. The emerald one was..." She stopped. "A gift."
"From?"
"Don't ask."
"I'm not." He wrote nothing. "Go on."
She took a long breath. "My mother sells food. You know that, the whole campus does. But what nobody knows is that I send almost everything I earn back home. Anything I get from modelling, from sponsored posts, from favours. I keep enough for transport and data. The rest goes to my brother's school fees, my mother's rent, the clinic when he's sick." Her voice was steady, but her hands were tight. "I started dressing like this in first year. I realised that if I looked like I didn't need anything, people stopped asking questions. They stopped looking at my shoes. They stopped wondering why I never ate out. They saw the dress, and they stopped seeing me."
"Does it work?"
"Until it doesn't." She laughed, a little brokenly. "Until someone puts your mother's table on the internet."
Daniel was silent for a while.
"I used to be ashamed of my father's hands," he said at last.
She looked up.
"He was a very clean man. An accountant. He wore a tie every day, even at home. But after everything happened, he started working with his hands. Painting walls. Fixing fences." He looked at his own, ink-stained and scarred. "I used to hide when he came to pick me up from school. I'd tell my friends he was my uncle. I was eleven. I thought if no one knew, then it wasn't real."
"What changed?"
"A teacher told me something." He smiled faintly. "She said a person's worth is not what they hide. It's what they carry. And I realised I'd been hiding the one thing that made him someone I was proud of."
For a long moment, neither spoke. The library hummed. A page turned in the next aisle.
"I'm not going to tell you to stop," Daniel said. "Looking the way you look, dressing the way you dress. It's not wrong. It's a kind of armour, and some days you need it." He met her eyes. "I only want you to know that you don't have to wear it in here."
Blessing opened her mouth, and found nothing to put in it.
It was, she realised, the first time in three years that someone had looked at her without being dazzled, without wanting something, without needing her to be anything. He had simply listened, and she felt something loosen inside her, slowly, like a knot undone by patient fingers.
I'm understood, she thought. Without trying.
It frightened her more than anything else that had happened that month.
Kolade saw them on Monday.
He was sitting in the Range Rover outside the library with the engine running and the air conditioning on, scrolling through a message from his father's secretary, when a movement at the top of the steps caught his eye.
Blessing was laughing.
It was not the camera laugh. He knew that one. It was a soft, helpless, unguarded sound, the laugh of a girl who had forgotten that anyone was watching. Her head was tilted back. Her hand covered her mouth. And beside her, shoulders slightly hunched, glasses sliding down his nose, a boy in a faded grey shirt was saying something Kolade could not hear, with a small, pleased smile on his face.
Kolade turned off the phone.
He knew the boy. Or he had seen him: the cables, the corridor in Bodija, the clumsy confidence of someone who thought he was too clever to need an introduction. He had not thought about him again. He had thought of him as furniture.
Now he watched Blessing take a book from the boy's hands, glance at it, and smile in a way she had never smiled at the gifts, the roses, the dress.
His hands tightened slowly on the steering wheel.
"Obinna," he said, into his phone, ten seconds later. "I need a name. Computer Science. Four hundred level. Glasses. He fixes phones outside the gate. Find out everything."
"Stay away from her."
It was Tuesday, and the quad was crowded. Students moved in loose currents between lectures, laughing, arguing, eating from foil packs. Daniel was crossing the grass with a laptop bag over his shoulder when a shadow fell across his path.
Kolade stood in front of him in a crisp white shirt, flanked by two boys in designer sneakers. He wasn't smiling. For once, no one was holding a phone.
"I'm sorry?" Daniel said.
"You heard me."
"I'm not sure I did."
"Blessing." Kolade said the name like a hand on a table. "Stay away from her. You've been spending time with her. Every day, in the library, in your lab, on the steps. People talk."
"People always do."
"I'm not asking."
Daniel considered him. He did not step back. He did not raise his chin. He simply stood where he was, letting the silence stretch, and the boys beside Kolade shifted uneasily.
"She's a friend," Daniel said. "I'm helping her with a technical problem. That's all."
"Then find another friend."
"That's a decision for her, I think."
"You don't understand who you're dealing with."
"I understand perfectly." Daniel's voice was quiet. For the first time, something flickered behind his glasses, cold and old, like a pilot light that had never gone out. "You're Chief Balogun's son."
Kolade's smile returned, thin as paper. "So you know the name."
"Everyone does."
"Adebayo," Kolade said slowly, as though testing the word. "That's your surname, isn't it? Where is your family from?"
Daniel did not answer. But a muscle moved in his jaw, once, and Blessing, who had come around the corner of the Faculty building at exactly that moment and stopped dead, saw it.
"Why do you ask?" Daniel said.
"Curiosity." Kolade's gaze sharpened. "It's an interesting name."
"It's an ordinary name."
"Is it?"
"Kolade."
They both turned.
Blessing stood on the path with her bag over her shoulder and her heart in her throat. She walked forward until she was standing precisely between them, a pace from each. She did not look at Daniel. She looked at Kolade.
"What are you doing?"
"Blessing." The smile switched on, warm and instant. "I was only having a conversation."
"It didn't look like a conversation."
"I worry about you. That's all. You've had a difficult week."
"And you think Daniel is the difficulty?"
"I think you've been spending a lot of time with someone you hardly know."
"I can choose my own friends," Blessing said.
She had not planned to say it. It came out low and clear, and it surprised her as much as it surprised him. For a moment the quad seemed very quiet.
"I'm not telling you who to talk to," Kolade said, with a little laugh.
"Good."
"I'm only asking you to be careful."
"I am being careful." She held his gaze. "Daniel has been helping me find out who is leaking my life to the internet. That's more than anyone else has done."
Something went still behind Kolade's eyes. "I told you I'd handle that."
"And have you?"
He did not answer. The two boys beside him exchanged a glance.
"I'll walk you to class," Kolade said, and held out his arm.
"I can walk myself."
She turned and walked away, her back straight, her hands shaking in her pockets. She did not look back, and so she did not see Kolade watching her go, or the way his smile slid slowly off his face.
She did not see Daniel, either. But she felt his eyes on her until she turned the corner.
"I have a proposal," Daniel said, on Friday.
They were standing at the base of the library steps. The sky was the colour of weak tea. A boy was selling roasted corn from a cart by the road, and the smoke curled up in the dusk, sweet and sharp.
"A proposal?"
"Dinner. Tomorrow. Not on campus." He held up a hand before she could speak. "It isn't a date. It's a nutritional intervention. You've been eating like a bird since the second post. Emeka and I are worried."
"Emeka is worried?"
"Emeka has never been worried about anything in his life. But he agreed to say so."
She laughed. It escaped before she could stop it. "Where?"
"It's a surprise. Wear something comfortable." He paused. "I mean it. Not the dress. Whatever you'd wear if no one was looking."
The tricycle rattled through the dusk with Blessing wedged against the metal frame, one hand clutching her bag, the other holding down her hair as the wind whipped it. Beside her, Daniel sat with the infinite calm of a man who had taken keke napep rides every day of his life.
"Is it far?" she shouted over the engine.
"Twenty minutes!"
"You said ten!"
"I lied!"
She wore jeans and a loose cotton top, and her hair tied in a scarf. She had put on no makeup except a little lip balm. In the mirror before she left, she had looked like a stranger. A younger, quieter girl, a girl she half remembered.
The place was a small roadside canteen under a tin roof, at the end of a lane in Sango. Plastic tables. Mismatched chairs. A kerosene lamp hanging from a nail. Behind a wooden counter, a heavyset woman in an apron stirred an enormous pot with a wooden paddle, and the air smelled of smoke, pepper, and something warm and old and deeply familiar.
"Iya Basira!" Daniel called.
"Ah! Daniel! My son!" The woman's face broke into a grin. "You brought somebody!"
"This is Blessing."
"Blessing! Welcome, welcome. Sit, sit. I have the amala hot and the ewedu fresh." She winked. "He never brings anyone. You must be special."
"I'm just a friend," Blessing said.
"Mm-hm. Sit."
They sat. Blessing looked around, and her chest tightened. The plastic tablecloth, the stack of enamel plates, the pot on the fire. It was not her mother's stall. But it was so close to it, in sound and in smell and in the shape of the light, that for one dizzying moment she could not breathe.
"You chose this on purpose," she said quietly.
"I chose it for the food."
"Daniel."
"Okay." He folded his hands on the table. "I chose it because I wanted you to see it's a place you don't have to hide from. Nobody here is going to post your photograph. Nobody here cares what you're wearing. Iya Basira has fed half of the engineering department through its worst semesters, and she once told a lecturer to sit down because he was complaining about his plate." He smiled. "I thought you might like to eat somewhere that felt like home."
She looked down at the table. Her eyes had gone hot. She pressed her thumbnail into the plastic until the sensation steadied her.
"Thank you," she said.
"Eat first. Cry after."
"I'm not crying."
"I didn't say you were."
The food came on thick enamel plates, mounds of brown amala beside bowls of green ewedu and rich, dark gbegiri, with chunks of stewed goat. Blessing hesitated, glanced at the cutlery on the table, and then pushed it aside and washed her hand in the bowl of water. She tore off a piece of amala, rolled it between her fingers, dipped it, and ate.
It was perfect. It was so perfect that she shut her eyes.
"Better?" Daniel asked.
"I haven't eaten like this in months."
"I know. I can tell from how you eat the chicken at the cafeteria. You hold it like a bank statement."
She almost choked. She laughed so hard that Iya Basira looked up from the pot and shouted, "Make that boy buy you another!"
They ate. They talked. The conversation drifted through everything and nothing: lecturers they hated, books they had loved, the first time Daniel had seen a computer and the first time Blessing had seen the sea. He told her about his sister, who wanted to be a pilot. She told him about Nedu's fierce, stubborn kindness, the fight at school, how he had hit a boy for her.
"I like him," Daniel said.
"You'd like him. He argues with everything."
"Then he's smarter than you."
"Watch it."
Somewhere between the second helping and the third, she realised she had stopped performing. She hadn't tilted her chin or arranged her hands. She had put her elbows on the table. She had licked a bit of stew from her thumb. She was laughing, unguarded and loud, and she did not care who heard.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"You usually do."
"Why didn't you ever chase me?"
The question dropped into the warm air between them. Daniel set down his spoon. For a moment he looked almost shy.
"Do you want the honest answer?"
"Please."
"Because everyone else did." He looked at her steadily. "Every boy on campus has been running after you since first year. I thought maybe you'd like to have someone who just stayed still. So that when you got tired of running, there was somewhere to stop."
She could not speak.
He did not rush into the silence. He did not reach for her hand. He simply sat there in the lamplight, ink-stained fingers resting on the plastic cloth, and let the sentence stand.
Blessing looked at his hands. At the line of his jaw. At the tired, gentle face she had once called arrogant. Her heart was doing something strange and enormous, and she wanted, with a clarity that terrified her, to lean across the table and put her palm over his.
This is what it feels like, she thought. To be wanted for nothing.
"Daniel," she began.
"Mm?"
She did not know what she had been about to say. She only knew that the world had gone still, and that for the first time in a very long time, she did not want to be anywhere else.
They walked back through the lane under the soft glow of a single streetlight, the harmattan haze turning everything gold. Their shoulders brushed. Neither moved apart. At the corner, a goat stared at them with profound disapproval, and Daniel said gravely, "He knows," and she laughed so hard she had to hold his sleeve.
He dropped her at the hostel gate.
"Goodnight, Blessing."
"Goodnight."
She stood there a second longer than necessary. He did too. Then he nodded, put his hands in his pockets, and walked away down the dark path with his shoulders slightly hunched, looking like a boy who had won something he did not expect.
She climbed the stairs in a daze.
Tolu was in the corridor, leaning against the wall with Favour, laughing at something on a phone. When she saw Blessing, the laughter dried up. Their eyes met. For a long moment, neither said anything. Then Tolu looked down at her phone and Blessing walked past her to Room 14, and the door closed on the whole unspoken weight of it.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. Her cheeks were warm. Her fingers still smelled faintly of smoke and pepper. She was smiling, and she did not try to stop.
I could do it, she thought. I could tell him. I could tell him everything, and he would still sit there. He would still stay still.
She imagined it: Daniel's face in the lamplight, the quiet, level way he would listen. She imagined the relief of saying it all, of laying the burden down. She began to think, carefully, almost shyly, about what a relationship with him might mean.
Her phone buzzed on the pillow.
She smiled and picked it up, thinking it was him.
It was not.
Kolade.
She almost didn't open it. Her thumb hovered. Then, because the old habit was stronger than the new instinct, she tapped.
There was no text. Only an image.
It was a photograph, slightly yellowed, with a date stamp in the corner: twelve years old. It had been taken at some kind of corporate event, a long table, white cloths, a banner reading BALOGUN HOLDINGS ANNUAL AWARDS. A younger Chief Balogun stood at the centre in a pale agbada, his hand gripping the shoulder of the man beside him. The man was in his forties, thin and bespectacled, in a plain grey suit that did not quite fit. He was holding a plaque. He was smiling, but it was the shy smile of someone unused to being photographed.
Blessing stared at him.
She knew the shape of that jaw. She knew the slight stoop of the shoulders. She knew those glasses, or ones very like them, sliding down a nose she had watched slide for weeks.
A second message arrived beneath the image.
Mr. Olusegun Adebayo. My father's chief accountant. Ask your friend about his father. And ask him why he never mentioned my father's name.
The phone dropped from her hand and landed on the blanket with a soft thud.
The room was very quiet. Beyond the window, the harmattan wind moved through the trees. The smell of smoke and pepper still clung to her fingers.
She thought of the corridor, the thin line of light under the door. A student whose father signed those documents. She thought of Daniel in the lab, his jaw tightening at the sound of Kolade's name. That's your surname, isn't it? Where is your family from?
She had been so certain that this boy was the one person on campus who had nothing to do with the Baloguns.
And on the screen, in a photograph twelve years old, the most powerful man at Royal Crest had his arm around Daniel Adebayo's father.
END OF EPISODE 6
Next: Episode 7, "The Ex-Girlfriend's Warning."