“Yes. The basic one everybody knows. A frog does not run in the afternoon for nothing.”
“No. I know serious proverbs. Akota ife ka ubi, e lee oba. If something bigger than the farm is dug up, the barn is sold.”
“Ah, you want to try me?” she asked, laughing. “Acho afu adi ako n’akpa dibia. The medicine man’s bag has all kinds of things.”
“Not bad,” he said. “E gbuo dike n’ogu uno, e luo na ogu agu, e lote ya. If you kill a warrior in a local fight, you’ll remember him when fighting enemies.”
They traded proverbs. She could say only two more before she gave up, with him still raring to go.
“How do you know all that?” she asked, impressed. “Many guys won’t even speak Igbo, not to mention knowing proverbs.”
“I just listen when my uncles talk. I think my dad would have liked that.”
They were silent. Cigarette smoke wafted up from the entrance of the guesthouse, where some boys had gathered. Party noises hung in the air: loud music, the raised voices and high laughter of boys and girls, all of them looser and freer than they would be the next day.
“Aren’t we going to kiss?” she asked.
He seemed startled. “Where did that come from?”
“I’m just asking. We’ve been sitting here for so long.”
“I don’t want you to think that is all I want.”
“What about what I want?”
“What do you want?”
“What do you think I want?”
“My jacket?”
She laughed. “Yes, your famous jacket.”
“You make me shy,” he said.
“Are you serious? Because you make me shy.”
“I don’t believe anything makes you shy,” he said.
They kissed, pressed their foreheads together, held hands. His kiss was enjoyable, almost heady; it was nothing like her ex-boyfriend Mofe, whose kisses she had thought too salivary.
When she told Obinze this some weeks later—she said, “So where did you learn to kiss? Because it’s nothing like my ex-boyfriend’s salivary fumbling”—he laughed and repeated “salivary fumbling!” and then told her that it was not technique, but emotion. He had done what her ex-boyfriend had done but the difference, in this case, was love.
“You know it was love at first sight for both of us,” he said.
“For both of us? Is it by force? Why are you speaking for me?”
“I’m just stating a fact. Stop struggling.”
They were sitting side by side on a desk in the back of his almost empty classroom. The end-of-break bell began to ring, jangling and discordant.
“Yes, it’s a fact,” she said.
“What?”
“I love you.” How easily the words came out, how loudly. She wanted him to hear and she wanted the boy sitting in front, bespectacled and studious, to hear and she wanted the girls gathered in the corridor outside to hear.
“Fact,” Obinze said, with a grin.