Aunty Mariam liked to threaten to send her off to military school.

"It's like you want to go to military school abi?" she would say, her eyebrow raised so far above, it seemed to jut out of her face and hang in the air. Dara would do whatever task she was doing more seriously. She would scrub the blackened bottom of the pots with reckless abandon, add extra seasoning cubes to the jollof rice, wipe her baby cousin's buttocks with a little more vigor. She did not want to go to military school. She did not want to go to school at all.

How could she sit in a mind-numbing class and fill her mind with useless information after all that had happened? She would be lying to herself, pretending everything was okay when it was not. She would not have the time to grieve, properly grieve.

Aunty Mariam had not grieved at all. When Dara's mother died, she did not shed a tear. The moment Dara heard her mother had jumped off a six-story building, she cried, the tears gushing out with such violent force, she worried her eyes would run out of water and begin to release blood. But Aunty Mariam did not cry at all, not while the paramedics flung her mother's bloody body into the back of the ambulance, or while she read the eulogy at the funeral, saying, "she will be missed" and "bless her heart" in the most monotone voice. Aunt Mariam was an unfeeling woman. She felt nothing except anger and hatred, and not at moderate proportions.

"You are just like your mother," Aunty Mariam once spat at her when she broke her leg after falling off Mama Femi's fence. "Both of you, stupid, sentimental idiots. Why are you crying now? Can you not be tough?"

"Aunty, but it hurts!"

Aunty Mariam dug her elbow into Dara's dislocated ankle, the hatred in her eyes even more terrifying that the prospect of losing her leg. Dara screamed. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head. She threw her head back as Aunty Mariam pushed more of her weight onto her leg. "Suck it up! You have to learn to be tough, before you grow up to become a weakling like your mother."

Perhaps that was why Aunt Mariam packed Dara's bags the next day and told her she was going to military school, because she did not want her to be like her mother. But Dara was not a fool to believe that. Aunt Mariam did not care about her, or anyone. She had no tolerance for humans. She changed her maids as often as her clothes, either sending them running out of the house with a wooden cane raised above her head, or insulting them until they were left with no option but to leave, so as to preserve the little shred of dignity they had left.

Like the maids, Dara ran away from Aunty Mariam, and she did not stop running until she was certain would not be found. Her final hide-out was at a park. Aunty Mariam, with all her aggression and ferocity, would dislike the languorous, slow pace of a park. She would never find Dara there. For days, Dara slept under a bench, and found the uneven, rocky ground to be more comfortable than bed in her Aunty's home, even though soldier ants feasted on her skin and rain battered her.

She grew to love her new homeless lifestyle. She liked watching the ebb and flow of people from the vantage point of her bench and liked speculating the worst about people's lives, so she would not feel so bad about her own. Even though she did not entirely like it when a family set a picnic in front of her, she'd come to appreciate that too. She never understood what it was like to be part of something larger, to laugh as freely as other children, to look at her parents with love and adoration. She lived vicariously through other normal children.

Her childhood was not a normal one. It stopped being normal after Baba Taofeek relocated to America. That wouldn't have been such a huge problem if he hadn't refused to pay up the debt he owed her father. When her father exhausted all legal means of coaxing his money out of him, he decided to do something less legal. He kidnapped the man's six-year-old nephew and held him hostage until the debt was cleared up. But Baba Taofeek was a vengeful egoistical man who did not like losing, so he unleashed the police on her father.

Her father spent the majority of his life on the run, They never stayed in one neighborhood for more than a month. They never went out of the house for any reason. They were prisoners in their home and hearts. There were bars between them that prevented them from bonding as most families did. Instead of sitting and luxuriating in each other's presence, they always perched their bottoms on the edge of the seat, ready to take to their heels if they caught a whiff of anything that smelt like danger.

Of course, they could not run forever. On her fifteenth birthday, the police handcuffed her father and hauled him away. She watched her mother slowly fade into grieved delirium. She threw her shoes at the police car, rolled her body over the bare gravel, dug her fingers into her eyes. Dara looked away from the scene, because she was afraid that if she did not, she too would lose her sanity.

She opened her eyes and found herself in the park again. The stout park manager was saying something, throwing his small arms all over the place, his fair face turning pink. His lips were moving, but she could hear no words. She did not have to listen, for he had been saying the same thing for months now.

"Young lady, you cannot continue staying here...this is a park, not a charity house...if you don't find somewhere else to stay in the next two weeks, I'll have to inform the proper authorities."

She sighed. "Sir, I already told you. I'm an orphan. Where do you want to go?"

"An orphanage."

*******

Dara forgot to breathe when she saw Brayden Olatunji again. She did not see him as he was, an arrogant boy, but as an angel, a messenger from God who saved her from ending her life. Even though it had been three months since she last saw him, no day passed without thinking of him. She filled her notebooks with sketches of him, his face, noting little details like the crease in between his eyebrows, the way he smiled with just half of his mouth, the long, effeminate sweep of hair canopying his beguiling eyes.

But as time passed, she naturally began to forget these details. Her recollecting of his looks gradually faded, and she grew scared of losing him. He had become her only anchor to life. He was the assurance that she wasn't entirely the waste of space she thought she was. Through him, she saw her worth. So when she saw his tall dashing figure walking across the park, a basketball wedged under his arm, she could not help following him.

All she wanted was to see his handsome face one more time so that it could be imprinted in her memory again, but she ended up staying for longer than she intended. She sat on the highest row and watched him play an entire basketball match. He was just as terrific a player as he claimed he was. He dribbled with the aggression of a lion and the demure flexibility of a cat. When he launched a ball into the air, everything seemed to slow to a halt, the ball twisting dramatically until it fell smoothly into the net with a whooshing sound. As Dara expected, he was not a modest winner. When the buzzer called off the end of the came, he jumped and beat his chest.

"That's me," he said repeatedly, his voice, a deep bass that combed all her anxieties away. She liked him. A lot.

She smiled as she descended the bleachers. She lingered to look at him for a while before whispering, "that's you."

She was about to walk away when he paralyzed her with his gaze, his face softening as recognition dawned on him. Her heart thudded with every step he took toward her. She wanted so desperately to run away, but she also wanted to stay, and throw herself into his arms, and beg him to never leave her again.

"So you're alive," he said, breathlessly, his face glistening under a sheen of sweat

She smiled coyly. "I'm alive."

"Thank God," he breathed a sigh of relief, then pulled her into a hug. The auditorium fell into confused silence. She inhaled his scent and found the mixture of male, sweat, and cologne to be intoxicating. She wanted to melt into him, bind herself to him. But she restrained herself and pulled away from him

He dragged his eyes over her. "You look awful."

"Yeah," she smiled. "I'm sort of homeless now."

He drew her aside and told her to explain. As she did, she could not stop the tears from falling. He comforted her, in the awkward, clumsy way he knew how. Then he held her face and wiped her tears.

"You can live with me," he said. "I have a—"

"No."

He dragged her up and delicately slipped her arm into the crook of his elbow. "You don't really have much of a choice."

He was right. She didn't.