Purple Hibiscus

I stared at him. I felt that he had missed a line in his script. “I don’t know.”

“Your father told you that.”

I looked away, out the window. I would not implicate Papa, since Father Amadi obviously disagreed.

“Jaja told me a little about your father the other day, Kambili.”

I bit my lower lip. What had Jaja said to him? What was wrong with Jaja, anyway? Father Amadi said nothing else until we got to the stadium and he quickly scanned the few people running on the tracks. His boys were not here yet, so the football field was empty. We sat on the stairs, in one of the two spectator stands that had a roof.

“Why don’t we play set ball before the boys come?” he asked.

“I don’t know how to play.”

“Do you play handball?”

“No.”

“What about volleyball?”

I looked at him and then away. I wondered if Amaka would ever paint him, would ever capture the clay-smooth skin, the straight eyebrows, which were slightly raised as he watched me. “I played volleyball in class one,” I said. “But I stopped playing because I…I was not that good and nobody liked to pick me.” I kept my eyes focused on the bleak, unpainted spectator stands, abandoned for so long that tiny plants had started to push their green heads through the cracks in the cement.

“Do you love Jesus?” Father Amadi asked, standing up.

I was startled. “Yes. Yes, I love Jesus.”

“Then show me. Try and catch me, show me you love Jesus.”

He had hardly finished speaking before he dashed off and I saw the blue flash of his tank top. I did not stop to think; I stood up and ran after him. The wind blew in my face, into my eyes, across my ears. Father Amadi was like blue wind, elusive. I did not catch up until he stopped near the football goal post. “So you don’t love Jesus,” he teased.

“You run too fast,” I said, panting.

“I will let you rest, and then you can have another chance to show me you love the Lord.”

We ran four more times. I did not catch him. We flopped down on the grass, finally, and he pushed a water bottle into my hand. “You have good legs for running. You should practice more,” he said.

I looked away. I had never heard anything like that before. It seemed too close, too intimate, to have his eyes on my legs, on any part of me.

“Don’t you know how to smile?” he asked.

“What?”

He reached across, tugged lightly at the sides of my lips. “Smile.”

I wanted to smile, but I could not. My lips and cheeks were frozen, unthawed by the sweat running down the sides of my nose. I was too aware that he was watching me.

“What is that reddish stain on your hand?” he asked.

I looked down at my hand, at the smudge of hastily wiped lipstick that still clung to the sweaty back of my hands. I had not realized how much I had put on. “It’s…a stain,” I said, feeling stupid.

“Lipstick?”

I nodded.

“Do you wear lipstick? Have you ever worn lipstick?”

“No,” I said. Then I felt the smile start to creep over my face, stretching my lips and cheeks, an embarrassed and amused smile. He knew I had tried to wear lipstick for the first time today. I smiled. I smiled again.

“Good evening, Father!” echoed all around, and eight boys descended on us. They were all about my age, with shorts that had holes in them and shirts washed so often I didn’t know what color they had originally been and similar crusty spots from insect bites on their legs. Father Amadi took his tank top off and dropped it on my lap before joining the boys on the football field. With his upper body bare, his shoulders were a broad square. I did not look down at his tank top on my lap as I inched my hand ever so slowly toward it. My eyes were on the football field, on Father Amadi’s running legs, on the flying white-and-black football, on the many legs of the boys, which all looked like one leg. My hand had finally touched the top on my lap, moving over it tentatively as though it could breathe, as though it were a part of Father Amadi, when he blew a whistle for a water break. He brought peeled oranges and water wrapped into tight cone shapes in plastic bags from his car. They all settled down on the grass to eat the oranges, and I watched Father Amadi laugh loudly with his head thrown back, leaning to rest his elbows on the grass. I wondered if the boys felt the same way I did with him, that they were all he could see.