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When Adamma returns home for the holiday, she locks her bedroom door. Adamma never locks her door. Adamma’s mother wrings the handle. She furrows her brows, calls Adamma’s name repeatedly. Then she peers through the hole in the door. There Adamma is: hand moving between her thighs, back arching off the edge of the bed.

Mummy Adamma’s lips part in a round, perfect o. She tightens the loosened knot of her wrapper. The sound of her footsteps ricochets against the walls of the house and thump against the walls of Mummy Adamma’s head as she returns to the living room.

Adamma was eight years-old when her mother caught her in the wardrobe with Elijah, her cousin with the brown teeth and head so bald and oily it shone like glass. Holed in the dark warmth of their secret playhouse, she rolled her blouse over her chest. He pulled at her nipples, and they giggled, and her hand shuffled over his crotch. They were trying and failing to stifle gasps of delighted confusion. They weren’t sure what they were doing, but it involved their bodies so they knew it was bad and they liked it so they knew they shouldn’t like it.

Adamma’s mother yelled her name. Adamma and Elijah’s gazes turned up in panic. Needles of sunlight shot into their eyes as Mummy Adamma flung the wardrobe doors open. Elijah fumbled with his zip. Adamma pulled down her blouse but it was too late. Her mother yanked her by the arm; a blanket of darkness stole her sight for a moment, and Adamma tasted blood as her mother’s hands smacked both her cheeks.

Mummy Adamma yelled for Elijah’s mother who was frying onions in the kitchen, the thick hot smoke of palm oil clouding the rooms, watering Adamma’s eyes and tickling her nose, causing her to sneeze and cough like a cluster of stones had lodged in her throat.

Elijah’s mother came bustling into the room.

Mummy Adamma spoke to her in Igbo. Adamma caught trickles of the heated exchange; red-handed touching themselves, and our enemies will not succeed. While Elijah’s bald head received repeated slaps from his mother’s palm, Adamma’s mother dragged her to the kitchen.

The onions had burned black, strips of it floating in the pan of abandoned oil. Mummy Adamma turned off the kerosene stove. She ransacked the cupboards, patted sachets of age-old condiments that coughed up dust until she found what she was searching for. “Oya, off your clothes,” she said to Adamma, who did so with all the slowness under the sun. Mummy Adamma poured dried red pepper into her palm and sat Adamma on the kitchen stool. She pressed her hands to Adamma’s chest. She plastered Adamma’s breasts and the insides of her thighs. The pain was physical. It shot up Adamma’s spine, hot and wicked, burning her brain like fire.

“Mummy, Mummy please, it is peppering me.” Adamma jumped, screeched, choked on her breath.

“Yes,” Mummy Adamma said. “That is how they catch them young. That is how the devil catch them young, but not my own daughter. Is pepper. That thing you are doing, you think is sweet like sugar, but is pepper. You understand?”

That is how Adamma discovered her body was not her own. As she screeched and danced round and round the kitchen like a mad girl, Adamma nodded. She understood.

Adamma was twelve years-old when she found a drop of blood in her panties. She flushed the toilet and whispered it to her mother who was sweating and turning eba in the stuffed kitchen. Adamma whispered even though it was only both of them in the house because she understood there was something about it that ought to be unvoiced.

“There is tissue in the wardrobe,” her mother said.

When dinner had been eaten and washed away, Mummy Adamma yelled for Adamma. Adamma sprung from her bed and into her mother’s bedroom that she once shared with her father. “You are a woman now, you understand?”

Adamma stood by the door and nodded.

“If you let a boy kiss you, you will pregnant. And to pregnant is sin. You understand? You will go to hell. Do you want to go to hell?”

And that is how Adamma learned the hurdle of womanhood, a fear of kisses and pregnancies, a fear of missing heaven. Adamma shook her head firmly. “No ma,” she answered. She didn’t want to go to hell.

Adamma was fourteen when her lesson teacher with the gold-rimmed glasses and shorts that hung from the middle of his belly tickled her as punishment for failing her Maths homework. Mr Effiong’s fingers wandered to the sides of her breasts and to the insides of her thighs. Adamma coughed her laughter and crossed her legs tightly.

On their way back from the market the next day, Adamma told her mother that she wanted another lesson teacher.

“Mr. Effiong is a good man,” her mother said, shifting in the bus choked with heat, her body pressed between Adamma and the other passenger. “And he is charging us very cheap. Very cheap. He is a good man.”

It was true that Mr. Effiong was doing them a favor. He was an old Church member who’d offered to teach Adamma for half the usual pay after Adamma’s father had boxed his properties and driven off to his new wife with her bouncing twin baby boys.

Adamma’s mother had refused the doctor’s strong recommendation for a Cesarean section. So after Adamma’s birth, she’d been unable to conceive again despite washing her belly with salt water at the crow of the cock every day for six months and dancing naked on the top of the mountain while the prophet slapped her back with long strips of vegetable leaves. Fourteen years later, no other child from Mummy Adamma, and everyone said Daddy Adamma had tried -- the neighbors and the in-laws -- when he presented her with divorce papers because he was a good Christian and wouldn’t take a second wife.

So Mummy Adamma received a sparse allowance from Daddy Adamma every month. Adamma dropped out of her quasi-private school for the public school across the street, and Mr. Effiong entered the picture to make up for the notorious academic mediocrity that the public school system had to offer.

Mr. Effiong stayed. He slapped Adamma across the face when she failed his tests, and oftentimes across her bum too. As Adamma’s legs grew longer and her body fuller, he joked around with her after Maths and English lessons. “Big girl like you, you don’t have a boyfriend?” He would say, and Adamma would say, “No sir, I don’t have a boyfriend, sir.” His eyes would roam her body like an exotic bird collector eyeing his latest bird.

When he asked for water, she would spit into his cup and keep from smiling as he gulped and smacked his lips. Mr Effiong would pack his books after lessons, and encourage Adamma to stop by his place whenever she was in his neighborhood. “Just across that red filling station, just on your way back from Oju Ore.” And so Adamma learned that not all men nice men were good men.

Adamma joined the choir at sixteen because it was the closest she would come to music. Her mother had smashed the Celine Dion and R. Kelly CDs her father had left behind with a pestle, the one good thing about his departure. Mummy Adamma had always complained about the way Adamma’s father defiled their ears with worldly music. She had also seized Adamma’s phone (and later, sold it off along with the TV and DVD and the standing fan because they could only manage so much with the monthly allowance Daddy Adamma’s sent).

Adamma wanted any excuse to be away from her mother, too. So she joined the choir and became Sister Adamma, and Sister Adamma’s skin hummed and her eyes watered when she sang Great Is Thy Faithfulness. She threw her hands in the air and swung her hips as she sang along to I Know Who I Am.

After choir practice, Master Obiora, with his Fanta-yellow skin and Cocacola-black knuckles snapped his wallet shut and gave Adamma crispy notes -- “for transport.” Adamma never asked. The money was always thrice what she needed for transportation, and her fingers quivered as she took it from him.

Everyday he snapped his wallet shut. Everyday Adamma’s fingers quivered. Master Obiora asked of her mother; of school; of her upcoming WAEC exams. After rehearsal Adamma hopped on a bus home and one day she left her WAEC study-questions book behind, so she ran back to Church which was devoid of people now, loud with a quiet Adamma had never heard, and there Master Obiora was, his footsteps ringing in the void, stuffing his laptop into his bag.

He turned and picked up her study-questions book.

Adamma thanked him.

Master Obiora’s hands wrapped over hers and he said, “You’re a special girl, Adamma.”

Adamma took a step back. Master Obiora took a forward. He held her wrists with one hand and unbuckled his belt with the other. “Please, please, my mother will kill me,” Adamma begged, and he said, “Shhh, I’ll take care of you.”

Adamma shut her eyes. But even with her eyes closed, the tears burned.

That is how Adamma learned the language of men: to take, and take.

Adamma didn’t show up for Choir rehearsal the next day, nor the day after that. She lay shivering in bed, buried under heaps of bedsheets. Her mother placed her palm over her forehead and forced bitter yellow tablets down her throat and mumbled prayers of deliverance for her. Adamma missed her Igbo language WAEC exam because her head felt like a sack of coals and her mouth smelled like fish intestine and her eyes blurred when she tried to read. She vomited after eating, and she didn’t see her period. “My mother will kill me, I will die,” she told her friend.

But weeks passed and WAEC passed and there wasn’t a curve in Adamma’s belly to show for it. Her mother would not kill her, after all. She would not die, after all. It was Malaria and a coincidentally irregular period, after all.

Finally, Adamma’s panties flooded with blood. She wept into the toilet sink. She wept until her temples, her head, her body felt like glass scraping against glass and the whites of her eyes dulled into a dim red.

Adamma was seventeen when she received her university admission letter. Mummy Adamma tightened the knot of her wrapper and praised Jesus’s name. She praised Jesus’ name louder, and prayed for Adamma as she boxed her clothes for school.

In the motor park, as hawkers cried the names of their goods and conductors shouted bus stops and destinations, Adamma’s mother said, “Look at us. God never fail us. He is the only man we ever need, God.”

Adamma smiled because there was something in her mother’s voice, something new and vibrant. It was in the way she looked at Adamma; it was in her tone, as though she cared for Adamma’s response. And Adamma took off her cap and let her face soak in the might of the sun. She smiled at the hawkers and the conductors, and she imagined this was a new chapter. She imagined this was how mothers spoke to their daughters when they were about to set their foot on campus: like Big Girls. Like friends.

In that moment it did not matter that sometimes she heard her mother’s cries in the middle of the night, cursing her father’s secretary for spreading her legs and cursing her sister in-law, Elijah’s mother for introducing her to the prophet who swallowed her purse and failed to replace it with a child. None of that mattered as Adamma thought of something to say, as she said, “Yes. It’s only God we need.”

Mummy Adamma’s lips stretched in a wider smile. So did Adamma’s. But the body-warming lightness that engulfed Adamma did not last for long: her mother slapped her eye when she caught a boy on the bench looking at her, a boy in white airpods and ocean-blue boots. She grabbed Adamma’s elbow as Adamma boarded the bus. “It is book that you are going to read in that school. Book. You understand?” Adamma’s eyes brimmed with tears from the slap; it felt as though a hand had burrowed into her socket but at the last minute forgotten to pluck out her eye. She nodded; she understood.

The bus cackled to life. Adamma let out a breath she did not know she’d been holding.

Mummy Adamma wiped her eyes as she stood in the middle of the road in her off-white wrapper and loosening scarf, watching as the bus disappeared into the curve of the road.

But Adamma did not know, because she did not look back. She rested her head against the window pane and pulled out a book. She felt a strange sensation in her body, like a water balloon had burst in her chest. It was relief. Adamma had discovered relief.

The boy in the white airpods and ocean-blue boots sat next to Adamma in the bus.

He sat next to her in Phonology class too. They shared his textbook.

Adamma was squatting with her cousin and seven other girls in a self-contain flat shrouded in half-torn mosquito nets, and living on the crumpled notes from the envelops her mother sent to her once a month -- (“Adamma, manage that money very well, you understand?”). She was also living on the crumpled notes her cousin squeezed into her palm after a lecherous night out with one of her married boyfriends.

The crumpled notes went on food, transportation, an old smartphone with a broken screen and a shaky battery, and occasionally, data subscription.

The boy’s name was Toberu. His teeth were a shade of white so dazzling Adamma held her breath whenever he flashed her a smile. After lectures she snapped his textbook shut and extended it to him and he said, “Keep it.” And there he was in their next class, unzipping a new textbook from his bag. He tilted his iPad screen toward her, to show her the news blog he was reading as they waited for the lecturer. He said, “Can you believe this?” as though he genuinely couldn’t believe it and wanted to confirm he wasn’t mad out of his head, surely no one would believe it too. Adamma liked that about him: an innocent curiosity that was not feigned, an effortlessness that lacked pretense.

His father was a Yoruba business man and his mother an Ibibio professor. They’d divorced when he was fifteen. Now he schooled in Uyo and lived with his mother in the part of town where coconut trees manned tall houses and flower pots dotted front porches.

When he walked the hallways, the boys clapped him on the back and the girls flicked invisible specks of dirt off his shirt. One night, he ran into Adamma in front of the old woman roasting corn across the hostel gate. He offered to walk her home. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said.”

Toberu plucked out a leaf that had fallen into her hair and tucked it into his own and something about the gesture made Adamma laugh. It was a loud and startling laugh, surprising herself and him. After class the next afternoon Toberu said, “Can I walk with you?” and he did and it rained, fat drops of water slapping down on their heads and pooling into potholes.

He draped his jacket over her. They joined a group of people huddled underneath a mango tree, the sweet-sour smell of the fallen fruits hanging thick in the air. Toberu saved her the last seat and rested languidly against the bark of the tree. “What do you like to do, Adamma?” he asked.

“I like music. Songs,” she said. She didn’t know what else to say.

“I like music too,” Toberu said.

“I can’t sleep with you,” Adamma blurted.

Toberu stared into her face for a straight second -- in retrospect Adamma would realize he was checking to confirm that she was being serious -- before he threw his head back and laughed so hard he coughed and patted his chest and wiped his eyes.

Adamma too would wipe her own eyes when he took her for a riveting outdoor reading under a sky ablaze with stars. As he drove her home in his mother’s car, she unwrung her life before him: her mother, Mr. Effiong, Master Obiora. She spoke of treacheries she could not formerly name. She whispered rages that made her tongue curl and her chest burn.

Toberu made her spaghetti and crayfish stew in his mother’s kitchen. He kissed her. His tongue slid inside her thighs, and Adamma moaned. She did not know that it could be like this. She did not know a body like his could possess a gentleness like this. He made her feel things she did not know should be felt. Her skin caught fire, and her body roared, and she wept.

Adamma’s eyelids drooped close. She buried her face into the sparse mat of hair on Toberu’s chest and felt a betrayal so physical it sliced into her chest, poked at her eyeball. It was a betrayal at the men who took before she knew how to give, at her mother who did not teach her that there was a way to give.

That is how Adamma discovered sex. Sex was the boy in white airpods and ocean-blue boots checking to confirm that she was serious before bursting into laughter. Sex was gentle like his hands and dazzling as his teeth. Sex did not seek to harm her and break her. Sex was stupid great.

Adamma sits at the table and eats with her mother in silence. There is nothing but the clink of metal spoons against metal plates. Her mother heaves and draws breath. Her mother casts sideway glances at her.

Adamma is no longer sixteen. Mummy Adamma cannot seize CDs from Adamma, or seize the phone and computer she did not buy for her. She cannot slap Adamma, or twist her ear, or drag her by the neck. She is hunched and shrunken with age, no longer larger than Adamma, no longer larger than life.

“I am going to church this night,” Mummy Adamma says.

Adamma slurps on hot pepper soup. It is the first time her mother announces her religious whereabouts like a question seeking an answer. Adamma does not know what answer her mother seeks. Adamma does not wish to find out.

“For prayer vigil,” Mummy Adamma adds.

“Okay,” says Adamma.

A pregnant pause fills the room. Then: “You will not come, abi?”

“No, ma,” Adamma says with a quiet finality that makes her mother blink three times, “I will not come.”

Mummy Adamma pushes her soup bowl aside. “I will pray for you.” She gestures to the ceiling. “You will find God again, Adamma.”

“I think I have found God,” Adamma tells her mother. She has found God in the righteous way that a man touches her skin. She has found God in the kind of music that pleases her ears. She has found God between her legs.

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