Things turned out alright. Good, not great. I’m doing much better than my Physics teacher said I would, which is not surprising considering she was a bitter ugly woman who had bleached see-through ankles and blue veins. “Gbenga, you’ll study a useless couwse at a college of education and no one will hiya you because no one wants a college of education gwaduate and you’ll become a bus conductor and never mawy and impwegnate sevewal pawaga sellers and your pawents will wish you were never bown.” How wrong the bitch was. Now I’m a malcontent accountant with his own (sexy) secretary in a third-floor office filled with other miserable accountants working for an auditing firm in a building with a permanent stench of blood and broken dreams. My Physics teacher definitely could not have seen that coming; a science student—albeit a not-so-gifted one—studying Estate Management then becoming an auditor. She’d come to class

1to talk about how the new generation of Nigerian teenagers had no culture and tradition and respect. She’d raise one leg up, usually her left leg, and scratch her vagina through her ankle-length mum jeans skirt. Just high enough for the blue veins to take a peep and utter a quick, Hi, which would make us all crack up, resulting in her saying, “Culture, izewo,” making us laugh some more because she always got her Rs wrong, replacing them with Ws, then I would raise my hand, the right one because you never raise your left to someone older, and I’d say, “Zero, ma,” and she’d thank and bless me because she had no idea I was only wilding her—well, until the day she found out and cursed me—then I’d sit and smile and the girl seated in the row beside me would stretch her hairy right hand and rub my left leg through my green trousers and my penis would grow erect and my seatmate would pat me on the back and wink. Great times. Now the biggest action I get is when the woman I married who isn’t really the woman I married because the woman I married was skinny and hot and this one is a fatso with a slacked vagina that has pushed out a girl, three boys and a dead baby. Anyway, now the biggest action I get is when the woman I married rolls to my side of the bed—snoring loud enough for all of our neighbours to hear—pushes her oversized ass against my crotch and flattening my penis in the process. Or when I intentionally drop a file anytime my secretary is in my office for her to crouch and pick so I can peek up her miniskirt. Good but not great. The other day I ran into my seatmate and it was like the Physics teacher’s curse had bounced off me and ricocheted to him instead. I had woken at six a.m., the wife snoring in bed like I imagine a panda would, to go queue for petrol at a very far away from filling station with my eldest and favourite son. I was surprised to find at least thirty cars waiting in line in front of me. The fuel scarcity was direr than I thought.

I walked to the front of the line to see if they had begun selling fuel and after yelling at a motorcycle rider who almost hit me with his motorcycle, probably because he was too blind to see in the dark, considering he had dark shades on, the idiot, I met my secondary school best friend and seatmate selling fuel to people. I had thought to go back into my Camry and drive off to avoid him, but he spotted me before I could decide and shouted my secondary school nickname, Toygun, which made everyone standing around to look in my direction. I just smiled and slunk towards him. As soon as he got to me he grabbed and hugged me, asked how my life was going like he wasn’t just selling fuel to customers a minute ago. I was mumbling something in reply when people started complaining, demanding he come back to attend to them. Instead, Niyi (that’s his name) waved dismissively at them, yelled in Yoruba that he could do whatever he wanted and they could leave if they didn’t like it. The audacity! After he had gotten enough out of me, he hugged me again and asked how far away my car was parked, to which I replied very. He then asked if I had a jerrycan to which I replied that I had two lying in the boot of my car. Then he told me to go get them, that he’d sell to me immediately. Then he hugged me again, this time very tightly that I felt his crotch rub against my thigh. As I walked to my car I remembered back in secondary school when we’d sit through a boring Biology class taught by a barely literate almost-midget called Mr Mabinuori whom we all called Ori considering his rather large head. He’d come to class, unleash his copy of our textbook Essential Biology tucked comfortably in his four-sizes-too-large always-earth-coloured trousers, and sit on a table in front of the class with his summarized leg hovering several inches above the ground. He’d start droning out the words like he was a ghost or something and Niyi and I would busy ourselves by watching two minutes clips of porn starring over-enthusiastic white girls and hard-bodied black men on Niyi’s coloured screen Sony Ericsson and we’d both get hard and we’d feel each other’s large penises under the table, his larger than mine, and I wondered now if he was gay and he thought I was gay too. I should have told him I had a wife and four kids. I contemplated leaving to another petrol station but I knew that meant another endless queue, and that was even if I found one that was actually selling fuel. So I told my son, “Open the boot,” which he preferred to call trunk because of the American films he always watched and fetched my two twenty-five-litre jerrycans, shoved them into his hands, and told him to follow me. When we got back to the petrol station, Niyi spotted me before I got to him. I think he was looking out for me. I introduced him to my son and his facial expression didn’t change, this goofy smile remained plastered on his cheeks with his yellowing teeth on display. But I think I noticed a little falter in his eye, I’m not sure. He sold me fuel amidst complaints from several bystanders who had been on the queue long before me including motorcycle riders and a bus driver who sounded like he was going to get violent and definitely succeeded in scaring me. But Niyi simply ignored them all, continued smiling at me like some lovesick teenager. I paid and tipped him extra after which he asked for my phone number and for some reason I didn’t understand I gave him one I rarely used and was always free. It was when I was walking back to my car with my favourite son, one jerrycan in my right hand and another jerrycan in the left hand of my son who was a southpaw, looking at the orange rising sun looking rather like those on the covers of African novels published by American publishers, that I realized that I maybe gave Niyi that number because I was a little curious to know if his penis was still larger than mine. We met at my place on a Saturday when my children and their mother were out at a wedding party. I was hoping I was right about his intentions. We talked about our secondary school days. He told me about how the most sought after boy in school then, Abbey, had gone into internet fraud and then into drugs and was now rotting six feet under after wraps of cocaine had burst in his stomach at an airport in Brazil I think. I wasn’t really listening. I just wanted to get down to business, had no idea how to initiate it. He told me about how he fucked and impregnated some girl named Nike Matti who had slapped him back then in school when he asked her out but had come running to him when he was in the university studying Biochemistry and had a lot of money from the internet fraud he was into. That was before EFCC arrested him and seized all his assets leaving him poor and hapless as he had flunked out of school after travelling to Dubai and Malaysia and Norway while his mates were writing exams. I listened to that part because I was genuinely curious as to how he got to his current position. I mean, he wasn’t a dullard when we were in school. Not too dull anyway. He went on and on and when it started getting dark and it looked like my family was going to be home soon, I put my hand on his laps and rubbed on them a bit. But he just acted like he had lost feeling on his legs or like his threadbare jeans were too thick for him to feel when I knew they weren’t because they were already ripping at the knees. So I stared at him and maintained eye contact and rubbed on them some more. But he didn’t even act like he noticed, the idiot. He just kept on talking about secondary school mates I didn’t give a shit about until my wife came and he ended up inviting himself to dinner. I was so mad. And horny. It was after he left and I was in the bathroom jerking off with my wife snoring in bed that I sort of had an epiphany about just how sexually frustrated I was and how badly I needed a release that wasn’t provided by my right hand.He called me again after that and I did not answer his call and he continued calling and I continued to ignore his calls until he stopped calling altogether. Until one day I was driving my Camry out of my gate when I saw this guy sitting outside of my house and I didn’t even know he was the one at first. Then I saw that he was the one and opened the door to let him in which he