At school, the young prince and princess spend all their time together and even share a keyholder for their locker-keys; the kind of nonsensical thing that happens when you want to create a reason to be around someone. When you ask either of them how their friendship came about, they will shrug. It just happened. They just happened to be two Alagomeji kids with different versions of the same name sent to the same boarding school in Abeokuta. Their desks just happened to be next to each other. They just happened to want to talk to each other all the time, to balance each other out; his humour, her grace and their integrity matching up and melding.
Their feelings mature faster than their ability to recognise them for what they are. When someone is so woven into your life, you take that warmth and that presence for granted, and the prince felt the chill when the princess started casually courting a friend of his. His tropical island was suddenly overtaken by a cool breeze when, one day at lunch, he saw his friend buy her a Fan Ice. From afar, an iced dairy product probably does not have the same romantic gravitas as a dozen roses or the ability to sweep the princess off her feet, but the prince knew his friend well. He knew it was a statement. It was a statement that made his stomach turn, as if he was the one who had ingested a Fan Ice that had been out in the sun too long, bought from a sweating man with a rusty cart. That particular friend was a known miser. If you borrowed a kobo from him, he would demand it back as soon as you gave it to a seller. If a gust from his window blew on you on a hot day, he’d blame you for his sweat.
The miser was around an inch taller than the prince, and the prince had begun to wonder if he’d missed a trick in not wearing those new heeled loafers that were in vogue then. He hated them, but suddenly he wondered if this was a necessary addition to his wardrobe. It may have afforded him some advantage over the miser. The prince liked the miser, despite his ways, as they had fun together and he was a good laugh, but now? Oh, he hated him. It was a particularly warm day, but our prince felt cold. He almost shivered. The princess smiled at the miser, and though the prince recognised the smile as a thin replica of what was usually reserved for him, he could have sworn the cool breeze had turned into a Baltic blast. It felt as if he might contract hypothermia. His pulse staggered.
That night he couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned as the image of the princess and the Fan Ice churned around in his head as if in his own internal picturehouse, dedicated only to the worst of films. The next day, during a free period, while they were sitting on a crumbling wall somewhere on the school campus, the prince, unable to keep his disconcertion in, interrupted their usually easy, aimless rambling.
‘Why did miser buy you Fan Ice?’
Princess blinked at him, and then laughed. ‘What do you mean? Because he wanted to, na.’
The prince tried to make his voice sound like he wasn’t grumbling. He had a feeling he’d failed. ‘He doesn’t want to buy anything for anyone.’
Princess shrugged. ‘Eh. Maybe he was feeling generous. You know he got three lashes the other day for insubordination. Maybe he had a concussion.’
‘They didn’t lash his head.’
‘Why are you acting like somebody lashed your head?’
‘Forget it.’
Silence.
Princess cleared her throat. ‘He said he wants to take me to the picturehouse next week. You know he is thinking of going to university in England? Like me.’
The prince felt faint. He did not feel like eating at lunch. He always felt like eating. And though the beans the canteen served up tasted like stewed soil at the best of times, it was better than the taste of putrefied Fan Ice that somehow took over his tongue whenever he tried to consume something. He felt as if he was going to topple off the wall. The truth was, he always felt like a frog perched by a flower next to her. This was more a comment on her than him, because he liked himself . . . but her? She made everything feel light and bright. He liked to be around her light and bright. She saw him, directly, clearly, and he’d never felt like he’d been seen before, not really. At home there were too many people for eyes to take in and so, by the time they got to him, they were tired. But she saw him breezily and he bloomed under it, grew taller, like a sunflower stretching for the sky. And she was smart, as we know. Our prince was also smart, but she was smart, life-smart, wise-smart. She saw a problem and immediately knew how to fix it; she saw his bad mood and would make a list of the reasons why he should haul himself out of the pit. She didn’t know it yet, but she was at the top of that list for him. She was the beam of light shining into an abyss of a well.