Campus Babe, Episode 8: Best Friends Don't Do This
"She left at seven-thirty," Tolu said. "That's all I know."
It was Saturday morning, and she was standing at the hostel gate in her wrapper and slippers with her arms folded against the early chill. Kolade Balogun leaned against the black Range Rover with his sunglasses pushed up into his hair, perfectly composed, as if he had every right to be there at eight in the morning with the engine running.
"Did she say where she was going?"
"No."
"She didn't mention anyone?"
"She doesn't mention things to me lately." The words came out sharper than Tolu intended. She cleared her throat. "I'm sorry. I haven't had breakfast."
Kolade smiled. It was a warm, easy smile, and it caught her off guard. She had spent three weeks building a case against it. She had prepared speeches. She had practised being cold. But standing on the dusty tarmac in her ugly slippers, with a man like him looking at her as if she were interesting, her defences felt thinner than they ought to have been.
"You don't like me," he said, mildly.
"I don't know you."
"That's fair. Most people only know what they've heard." He took off his sunglasses. "Tolu, isn't it? Blessing talks about you all the time."
"Does she?"
"Constantly. She says you're the funniest person she knows." He tilted his head. "I'm sorry I haven't made the effort to say hello properly. I think I've been so busy trying to impress her that I forgot she has a whole world."
Tolu shifted her weight. He's good, she thought. Everyone says so.
"What do you want, Kolade?"
"To invite you somewhere."
She blinked.
"A friend of mine is launching a lifestyle brand on Friday. A rooftop in Jericho. It'll be media people, fashion people, a couple of editors, some people from Lagos. It's the kind of room where useful people meet each other." He glanced at her. "I thought of you. You're studying Mass Communication, and you're sharp. You should be in rooms like that."
"Does Blessing know?"
"Of course. She's welcome too, if she wants." He smiled again. "But I suspect she's busy this week."
Something small and ugly turned in Tolu's chest. It felt like being handed a plate of food while knowing someone else had been served first.
"I'll think about it," she said.
"Do." He put his sunglasses on. "I'll send you the details. Bring a friend if you like."
He got into the car. The Range Rover glided away. Tolu stood at the gate for a minute with her arms around herself, watching the dust settle.
I'm not going, she told herself.
By Wednesday, she had borrowed a dress from Favour.
The Terrace at Jericho was built on the roof of an eight-storey building, and from its railing you could see half of Ibadan lit up like spilled coins. Fairy lights hung overhead. A DJ played something slow and golden. Waiters moved through the crowd with trays of cocktails the colour of sunsets, and a banner twenty feet wide announced, in elegant gold letters, OLA by Adeleke: Luxury, Redefined.
Tolu stood at the entrance for a full minute before she could make her feet move.
The dress was a deep plum satin that Favour had pinned at the back to fit. Her hair was braided and piled high. She had done her own makeup, carefully, in the stairwell mirror, and for the first time in months had looked at her reflection and thought, not plain, but finished. It was a small thing. It had made her walk differently.
Now she looked at the women around her, with their effortless posture and their thousand-naira laughs, and felt the old feeling surge back like a tide. She was a girl from a three-bedroom flat in Abeokuta. She was wearing someone else's dress. Everyone here seemed to know exactly where to put their hands.
"You're Tolu, right?"
She turned. A tall man in a cream linen shirt stood beside her, holding two glasses. He had a gap-toothed smile and a lanyard around his neck.
"Kolade's friend. I'm Femi Ajayi, I'm an editor at Sunrise Magazine." He offered her a glass. "He told me you'd be coming. He said you have opinions."
"I have a few."
"Good. Nobody in this city does." He grinned. "Walk with me. I want to introduce you."
It was, she thought later, the most dazzling hour of her life.
Femi introduced her to a woman who produced a morning show on a Lagos station. To two boys who ran a fashion blog with half a million followers. To a producer with silver rings on every finger who looked at her over the top of her glasses and said, "Mass Comm? Send me your showreel." Tolu had no showreel. She said she would send her best work. She would find some.
People laughed at her jokes. They asked her opinions. Someone said, "She's sharp, this one," and she felt it land in her stomach like warm tea. For an hour, she was not Blessing Okafor's roommate. She was not the friend, the one in the background of every photograph. She was herself, standing in a pool of golden light, and the room seemed to be saying, yes, you.
At half past ten, she went to find the bathroom.
The corridor behind the bar was narrow and dim, lined with potted palms and dark glass. The music dulled to a thud. She had her phone in her hand, because she had been about to text Favour a photograph of the skyline, when she heard her friend's name.
"...Okafor girl."
She stopped.
Two voices. Male, relaxed, a little drunk. They were just beyond the corner, near a door marked STAFF.
"Kolade's moving fast with her," said the first voice. She recognised it vaguely. One of the boys who usually hovered around the Range Rover. Tobi, she thought.
"Fast?" The second voice was Obinna's, thick and amused. "My guy, he's been planning since last semester. He knew her timetable before he knew her name."
"Serious?"
"He told me himself. He saw her at a departmental week. Said, 'That's the one.' Then he started finding out things."
Tolu's hand tightened around her phone.
"And the jollof thing?" Tobi said. "The post? Nobody expected that."
"Not Kolade. He was angry, to be fair." Obinna laughed. "But honestly? Whoever's leaking has done him a favour. She's softer now. Needier. She's calling him before she wakes. In another month he'll have her moved into the apartment in Bodija, and then..."
"Then?"
"Then it's done. That's how it works with him."
A glass clinked. Somebody coughed.
"What about the boy?" Tobi asked. "The one with the cables?"
"Kolade says he'll handle it." Obinna's voice dropped. "Boys like that have a price or a weakness. Everyone has a scholarship until they don't."
Tolu's thumb moved before she knew she had decided anything. She turned on the voice recorder, slid the phone gently against the edge of the wall, and held her breath.
The recorder ticked. Ninety seconds. A hundred and twenty. The two voices wandered through a conversation about the music, about a girl in a gold dress, about a car. Then, at the end, Tobi said, "Anyway, she's fine. If she'd looked at me, I'd have done the same," and Obinna said, "You'd have done worse," and both of them laughed.
Their footsteps moved away.
Tolu stood in the corridor with her heart hammering and her phone still held out. She stopped the recording. The screen read 2:07.
I should tell her, she thought immediately. Tonight. Now. I should go home and play her this.
But the thought followed itself down a long dark road. Blessing would ask where she had been. Blessing would ask why she was at a Balogun-adjacent event in a borrowed dress. Blessing would look at her with that cold, reasonable face and say, So you went. After everything I told you. And Kolade's circle, the Femis and the producers and the editors who had looked at her as if she mattered, would learn that she had been listening at doors. She would never be invited again.
I'll use it when it matters, she told herself. When she's ready to hear it.
She slid the phone into her bag, fixed her face, and walked back out into the light. The DJ was playing something warm and old. A waiter offered her a glass.
She took it. Her hand did not shake.
"I knew it was you."
Zainab Bello spoke without looking up from her phone. It was Monday afternoon, in the quiet corner of the Law faculty café where students went to avoid being seen, and she was sitting with her legs crossed and a cup of cappuccino untouched at her elbow. She wore a cream blazer and a gold necklace in the shape of a scale.
Tolu stopped three steps from the table. "I'm sorry?"
"The girl in plum, at Obinna's launch. Corridor behind the bar. Phone out like you were taking a selfie." Zainab smiled and finally looked up. "I notice things. It's a professional hazard."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Sit down, Tolu."
It was not a request. Tolu sat.
"I'm not going to pretend," Zainab said pleasantly. "I know you heard something. I know it was about Blessing, because you've been walking around campus like someone who swallowed a lit match. And I know you didn't tell her." She leaned forward. "Which means you're torn."
"I'm not torn."
"Of course you are. Everyone is, in the beginning." Zainab's voice was warm and low. "Let me tell you what I see. I see a clever girl who's spent three years being someone's best friend. Standing in the back of every photograph. Carrying the bags. Saying, 'She's amazing, you should meet her.' And one night you walk into a room full of people who actually want to meet you."
Tolu said nothing. Her pulse had picked up.
"I'm not your enemy," Zainab said. "I think you're wasted. I think a girl with your mouth and your instincts should be somewhere better than a bunk bed under Blessing Okafor's mattress."
"What do you want?"
"A conversation. That's all." Zainab turned the coffee cup a quarter turn. "Crest Confessions is growing. Forty-five thousand followers. I'm getting calls from brands, from Lagos. People who want access to the audience. I could use someone with insight. Someone close to the story."
"You mean a spy."
"I mean a source." Her smile did not waver. "You tell me things. Small things. The kind that are already half public. I tell stories. In return, I introduce you. My uncle runs a production house in Lagos. My cousin edits a magazine. There's a guest list for a Balogun function at the end of the month that you'd never see otherwise. I open doors, Tolu. That's what I do. And I do it for people who help me."
"No."
The word came out quickly.
"No?"
"I'm not doing that to Blessing." Tolu stood. Her voice was shaking, but her chin was up. "I don't care what you offer. She's my best friend. I'm not going to... sell her."
"Nobody's selling anyone."
"That's what it sounds like."
"It sounds like a girl who's been invisible for three years and hasn't noticed that someone's finally holding out a hand." Zainab shrugged, unbothered. "Fine. Walk away. But my offers don't expire, only the guest lists do." She slid a cream card across the table. It carried a phone number and nothing else. "In case you change your mind."
Tolu did not take it.
She walked out of the café with her back straight and her heart in her throat. She told herself she had won. She told herself it was a clean, brave refusal.
It was only later, in the stairwell of the hostel, that she realised she had memorised the number.
"Nine out of thirty."
Dr. Fadeyi did not say it unkindly. He said it the way a doctor says a temperature. He had the test paper on his desk and his finger resting on the red figure at the top, and his face was grave and tired.
"Miss Bakare. You are not a stupid girl. You know this material. I have heard you argue it in class." He took off his glasses. "But you have not submitted your last two assignments, and your continuous assessment is now thirty-one per cent. If this continues, you will not meet the threshold to sit the exam."
"Sir, I can explain."
"I'm sure you can." He sighed. "Is something happening at home?"
She wanted to say yes. She wanted to say it all: the hostel fees, the second-semester instalment, the aunt who had paid for everything until a week ago, when she had said, over a crackling phone line, Tolu, I told you the last time was the last time. I have my own children. She wanted to say that she lay awake every night adding numbers in her head, and that the numbers never came out right.
"I've been distracted," she said.
"Distraction costs money, Miss Bakare. I'd hate for it to cost you the semester." He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk. "Here is a make-up assignment. Hand it in by Friday."
She took it. She thanked him. She walked out into the corridor and read the sheet three times without absorbing a single word.
At three o'clock the bursary clerk told her that unless the outstanding balance of ₦148,000 was cleared by the end of the month, she would not be allowed into the exam hall.
At four, her phone buzzed. Aunty Folake, the screen said. She let it ring out.
At five, she sat on a bench behind the Faculty of Arts with a plastic cup of zobo going warm in her hand, and she took the cream card out of her bag, where she had been carrying it all along, and she looked at the number.
I'm not going to, she thought.
She put the card back in the bag.
She did not throw it away.
On Wednesday night, Blessing came into Room 14 with a paper bag of suya and a face like a girl about to apologise.
Tolu was sitting cross-legged on the lower bunk with her laptop open to a blank document. The make-up assignment was due on Friday. She had written the title. She had been staring at it for an hour.
"I brought peace," Blessing said, holding up the bag.
Tolu looked at her. At the bag. At the small, uncertain smile on a face that had spent three weeks looking away.
"Is it spicy?"
"It's very spicy. I asked them to make it hurt."
Tolu laughed. It escaped before she could stop it, a rough, watery sound, and then Blessing was sitting on the edge of the bunk and the bag was open between them and the whole small room smelled of grilled pepper and onions.
"I'm sorry," Blessing said. "About the cafeteria. What I said was ugly. I called you jealous and it was a cruel thing to say, and it was not true, and I knew it was not true when I said it."
"It was a little true," Tolu said.
"It was not."
"It was a little." She picked up a piece of suya and examined it. "But what I said was worse. About who paid for the face. That was..." She shook her head. "I've been trying to think of how to say sorry for nine days."
"You just did."
"That wasn't very good."
"It was perfect."
They ate in silence for a minute. The fan rattled. The harmattan wind pressed against the window. It felt, Tolu thought, like coming up for air after being underwater too long.
"I need to tell you something," Blessing said. "A lot of things, actually."
"Okay."
"Promise you won't judge."
"I promise nothing. I'm a terrible person."
"Tolu."
"Fine. I promise."
Blessing took a breath. She told her about Daniel. All of it, from the beginning: the lab, the library, the keke ride to Sango, the plate of amala, the sentence at the end of the table. Someone who just stayed still. She told it with her hands, fast, her eyes bright in a way Tolu had not seen in months. By the time she described the lamplight on his ink-stained fingers, she was laughing and blushing at once.
"I think I like him," she said. "I mean, really like him. Like, I think about him when I wake up. I don't know what to do with it."
"You tell him," Tolu said.
"It's complicated."
"It's always complicated."
"There's Kolade."
Tolu's hand stopped halfway to her mouth.
"I've been thinking about that," Blessing said, more quietly. "A lot. Bisola warned me. She told me things, and I didn't believe her, and then I started noticing. How he always knows where I am. How he sounds when I don't answer." She turned a skewer over in her fingers. "I think I want out. I think I've wanted out for weeks."
"Then end it."
"I can't. Not yet." Blessing's voice cracked. "Nedu's tests aren't finished. He still needs the follow-up. I need to be standing on my own two feet before I cut Kolade off. When the bills are paid, when I've paid back the school fees somehow, then I'll end it. I'll tell him it's over. But I can't do it now. I can't be that girl who takes his money and then spits in his face."
"Even though he..."
"Even though." She wiped her eye. "I know how it sounds. I'm using him. It's the one thing I hate most about all of this. But I don't know any other way to get through the next month."
Tolu looked at her for a long moment. She felt, in turn, tenderness, anger, and something thin and sharp that she did not want to name.
She tells me this. She tells me everything. Now. After weeks.
"It's okay," she said. "I understand."
"You do?"
"Of course." Tolu smiled, and the smile felt like a mask someone else had fitted to her face. "I'm so happy for you. About Daniel. He sounds perfect."
"He's not perfect."
"Well. Close enough."
Blessing threw her arms around her. Tolu held her, one hand patting her back, and stared over her friend's shoulder at the wall where the perfume bottle stood in the shadows.
I'm happy for her, she told herself. I am.
She tried the sentence three times. It never quite fit.
It was a little after six on Thursday morning when Blessing's phone began to buzz.
She was already half awake, curled under the blanket in the top bunk, dreaming of a lamp and a plastic table. The first vibration she ignored. The second, a few seconds later, pulled her out of sleep. By the tenth, she was sitting upright with her hair tangled and her pulse racing.
She did not need to open the app. She knew.
Crest Confessions has posted.
The picture was a screenshot of the previous post, the one with the ledger, now scrawled over in red marker. Over it, in the account's heavy white font:
PLOT TWIST. 🎭 Our favourite campus babe is playing a long game. A source close to Blessing says she's been planning to dump the Chief's son "once the bills are paid." Meanwhile, the Computer Science boy is cooking her dinners, and she's been seen sneaking off with Kolade's ex. Is this a love story or a business plan? #CrestConfessions #UsingHisMoney
Blessing's stomach dropped through the mattress.
She read it once. She read it again. Her eyes snagged on a phrase, as if on a nail.
Once the bills are paid.
Last night, in this very room, over a plastic bag of suya, she had said those exact words.
When the bills are paid, when I've paid back the school fees somehow, then I'll end it.
She had said them to one person.
The wind rattled the window. The post counter ticked upward: four thousand likes, five, six. Already the comments were breaking like waves. So she's a gold digger after all. Using the Chief's son?? Brave. Poor Kolade. I mean, can you blame her?
Her phone buzzed in her hand. Kolade: Four missed calls. Kolade: We need to talk. Kolade: Is it true?
She did not open them.
She climbed down the ladder with her hands shaking. Tolu was sitting on the edge of her bunk in the grey light, wrapped in a blanket, her own phone held loosely in her lap. She looked up. Her face was pale.
"Blessing, I just saw..."
"Did you do this?"
The question hung in the air.
Tolu blinked. "What?"
"The post. Did you give them this?" Blessing held up the phone. Her voice was low and quite steady, and it frightened her. "I told you something last night. I told you one thing. I said I wanted to leave him when the bills were paid. And six hours later it's on the internet, word for word."
"I didn't..."
"Who else knew? Who else was in this room?"
"Blessing, I swear."
"The only people in this world who knew what I said were me and you."
"It wasn't me!" Tolu was on her feet. The blanket fell. Her eyes were wide, and not with guilt, Blessing thought, but with horror. "Why would I do that? I would never do that. You think I'd go to Crest Confessions and..."
"Then how?"
"I don't know! Maybe someone heard us. Maybe the room's bugged. Maybe it's the same person who's been listening to your calls!"
"That doesn't explain how it ended up in a post a few hours after..."
"Maybe Daniel told someone!"
"Daniel." Blessing stared at her. "Daniel wasn't in this room."
"Maybe you told him! You tell him everything! You told me you did!"
"I told you about my feelings, not..." Blessing stopped, because her voice had risen and Favour was banging on the wall. She lowered it with an effort. "Tolu, at the cafeteria, you told me you were jealous."
"I said maybe."
"You said you were tired of being invisible. And last week you were sitting up in bed at midnight, watching me come in and not saying a word. I'm not stupid. I know something has been wrong."
"Something was wrong because you disappeared!" Tolu's voice cracked. "You disappeared into Kolade and then into Daniel, and I was the one left in an empty room! I'm allowed to be hurt! That doesn't mean I sold you out!"
"Then why can't you look at me?"
Tolu looked at her. Her eyes were wet and furious. "I am looking at you. I'm looking at my best friend, who thinks I'm a snake."
"I don't know what I think."
"Obviously."
"You were there on the roof. When my mother called about Nedu's tests. You were there when I decided to go to the first party. You knew every private thing about me, Tolu. Everything. And now somebody knows them too."
"That's not fair."
"It's not meant to be fair."
"I would never..."
"Stop saying that."
The silence that followed was terrible. Tolu stood in the middle of the room with her arms at her sides, shaking. Blessing stood by the ladder, holding the phone, holding herself upright by will alone. The grey light was turning gold. Somewhere outside, a rooster crowed.
"I'm going to the library," Blessing said.
"Blessing."
"Don't."
She pulled on her hoodie, grabbed her bag, and walked out. The door slammed hard enough to rattle the shelf. On it, the perfume bottle tipped slightly and righted itself.
Blessing was halfway down the stairs when she realised she had left her charger.
She stopped on the landing. She stood very still, one hand on the cold rail. Then she turned and went back up, because she could not leave without it, and because she needed, desperately, to be somewhere that was not this stairwell.
The door of Room 14 was ajar.
Tolu had gone. The bathroom door stood open on a wet floor. The bunk was empty, the blanket crumpled on the mattress. Blessing walked in, found her charger plugged into the socket by the desk, and bent to pull it out.
Tolu's phone lay beside it.
It was face-up on the desk, charging, its screen lit by a notification. Blessing would never be sure, later, whether she had meant to look. She only knew that her eyes dropped to it the way they would to a fallen glass.
The preview showed three lines.
Z: Saturday's guest list closes tonight. Send me the other thing and your name goes on it.
Z: Crest sees everything, you know. 😉
You: Give me till tomorrow.
The screen dimmed. A second later, it lit again with a final line.
Z: Don't take too long, babe.
Blessing stood motionless with the charger in her hand.
She read it once. Then again, slowly, her lips moving over the single letter that sat at the top of every message, like a name in a locked room.
Z.
Crest sees everything.
Behind her, in the hallway, footsteps approached and stopped at the door. She did not turn around. She did not need to. She could feel the weight of Tolu's presence like a hand on the back of her neck.
"Blessing," Tolu said, very quietly. "What are you doing?"
END OF EPISODE 8
Next: Episode 9, "The Balogun Files."