Purple Hibiscus

even more on the man’s face as he frowned and pushed Aunty Ifeoma aside.
    “How you go just come enter like dis? Wetin be dis?” Obiora said, rising, the fear in his eyes not quite shielded by the brazen manliness in his pidgin English.
    “Obiora,
nodu ani
,” Aunt Ifeoma quietly said, and Obiora sat down quickly. He looked relieved that he had been asked to. Aunty Ifeoma muttered to us all to remain seated, not to say a word, before she followed the men into the rooms. They did not look inside the drawers they flung open, they just threw the clothes and whatever else was inside on the floor. They overturned all the boxes and suitcases in Aunty Ifeoma’s room, but they did not rummage through the contents. They scattered, but they did not search. As they left, the man with the tribal marks said to Aunty Ifeoma, waving a stubby finger with a curved nail in her face, “Be careful, be very careful.”
    We were silent until the sound of their car driving off faded.
    “We have to go to the police station,” Obiora said.
    Aunt Ifeoma smiled; the movement of her lips did not brighten her face. “That is where they came from. They’re all working together.”
    “Why are they accusing you of encouraging the riot, Aunty?” Jaja asked.
    “It’s all rubbish. They want to scare me. Since when have students needed somebody to tell them when to riot?”
    “I don’t believe they just forced their way into our house and turned it upside down,” Amaka said. “I don’t believe it.”
    “Thank God Chima is asleep,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
    “We should leave,” Obiora said. “Mom, we should leave. Have you talked to Aunty Phillipa since the last time?”
    Aunty Ifeoma shook her head. She was putting back the books and table mats from the sideboard drawers. Jaja went over to help her.
    “What do you mean, leave? Why do we have to run away from our own country? Why can’t we fix it?” Amaka asked.
    “Fix what?” Obiora had a deliberate sneer on his face.
    “So we have to run away? That’s the answer, running away?” Amaka asked, her voice shrill.
    “It’s not running away, it’s being realistic. By the time we get into university, the good professors will be fed up with all this nonsense and they will go abroad.”
    “Shut up, both of you, and come and clean up this place!” Aunty Ifeoma snapped. It was the first time she did not look on proudly and enjoy my cousins’ arguments.
    AN EARTHWORM WAS slithering in the bathtub, near the drain, when I went in to take a bath in the morning. The purplish-brown body contrasted with the whiteness of the tub. The pipes were old, Amaka had said, and every rainy season, earthworms made their way into the bathtub. Aunty Ifeoma had written the works department about the pipes, but, of course, it would take ages before anybody did anything about them. Obiora said he liked to study the worms; he’d discovered that they died only when you poured salt on them. If you cut them in two, each part simply grew back to form a whole earthworm.
    Before I climbed into the tub, I picked the ropelike bodyout with a twig broken off a broom and threw it in the toilet. I could not flush because there was nothing to flush, it would be a waste of water. The boys would have to pee looking at a floating earthworm in the toilet bowl.
    When I finished my bath, Aunty Ifeoma had poured me a glass of milk. She had sliced my okpa, too, and red chunks of pepper gaped from the yellow slices. “How do you feel,
nne
?” she asked.
    “I’m fine, Aunty.” I did not even remember that I had once hoped never to open my eyes again, that fire had once dwelt in my body. I picked up my glass, stared at the curiously beige and grainy milk.
    “Homemade soybean milk,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Very nutritious. One of our lecturers in agriculture sells it.”
    “It tastes like chalk water,” Amaka said.
    “How do you know, have you ever drunk chalk water?” Aunty Ifeoma asked. She laughed, but I saw the lines, thin as spiders’ limbs, around her mouth and the faraway look in her eyes. “I just can’t afford milk anymore,” she added tiredly. “You should see how the prices of dried milk rise every day, as if somebody is chasing them.”
    The doorbell rang. My stomach heaved around itself whenever I heard it, although I knew Father Amadi usually knocked quietly on the door.
    It was a student of Aunt Ifeoma’s, in a tight pair of blue jeans. Her face was light-skinned, but her complexion was from