It’s the sight Nifemi squeezing through the crowded dance floor that draws my eyes to the wall clock. Pulsing blue and red lights bounce against the glass, but I make out the hour-hand between eight and nine. Rema’s Yayo kicks the walls from the home stereo. My head throbs. Can’t recall how long the party has lasted.

Nifemi wrests a bottle of vodka out of my hand. Her lips round for a shout but all I hear is a whisper. “It’s late.” Or “it’s loud.”

I do not argue. Nifemi’s too smart to be argued with. She says alcohol will interfere with my recovery. It’s exactly what I need, I want to tell her. But she’ll render a minute-long speech about my fractured leg and the negative effects of drinking, so I clamp my lips.

The song howls into silence. Nifemi hurls the home stereo plug into the corner behind the TV. The party fizzles out with people searching for their shirts or partners under the chairs and in the adjoining rooms. They leave in pairs, bodies glued, and their voices cracked between laughter and liquor.

My homeboys on the school football team stagger around me after everyone else has left. Femi makes a joke about getting a medal without kicking the ball. Everyone laughs. I tuck the gold medal hanging around my neck in my shirt.

The team captain is Bassey. He tells off Femi, and asks when I’ll return to the pitch. I tell him I don’t know. Lying is easy now. I do it to everyone. Mom, dad, coach, the school counsellor, my teachers, my friends, and Nifemi maybe.

Yesterday’s visit to the doctor estimates my recovery to take six more weeks. Makes it thirteen weeks, considering the seven weeks I already spent sidelined. I’ve been injured since our Round of 16 game in the Eleko Tournament. Haven’t played football since then. My feet barely move.

The conversation swans a little longer. Bassey delivers Coachie’s regards. The message misses my excitement. Okon is Coachie’s new favorite. He won the player of the tournament. Before my injury, everyone had tipped me for the award. Especially after my hat trick in the last match I played.

Nifemi returns to the sitting room with a broom and dustpan. “Are you leaving now,” she says to the boys, “or are you helping me clean this mess?”

“Is she your girlfriend?” Okon whispers, rolling his eyes. He’s smart enough not to utter a negating comment—they all are.

The once-over tells me all I already know about Nifemi. Clearing the mess early to shed chores of her mother’s shoulders. Although she never asked me to do anything, she had that mean stare Bassey’s sister has whenever he brings us over.

“More like his mom,” Femi says.

Everyone laughs. I don’t.

Bassey gets me to pose for a picture biting my medal. Says the team wouldn’t have won the cup without me. I scoff. They say their goodbyes. I follow them in my wheelchair, Femi kicking disposable cups out of the way. I sit on the patio and watch them disperse into the moonlit night.

My eyes sting. My throat itches. Nifemi won’t let me near the fridge.

The moon creams the clouds, and the gray sky fades into silver. I think of my Literature teacher reciting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s To the Moon. “Wandering companionless.” Like me, wandering companionless in a sea of clouds and stars yet none speaks to its soul.

Of all the apartments to throw a block party and celebrate the trophy win, the boys chose mine. To rub their win in my face. Like “see how far we made it without you, so-called star player.” Or because my place is always empty, and Dad is rarely home to quell the blowout.

The divorce fooled me into thinking Dad would spend more time at home. After mom left, he spent only three weeks at home before he began his string of business trips across the world. Mom’s in the U.S. with her new husband. It’s just me. With Nifemi and her mom, Mrs. Joseph who live in the boys’ quarters behind the duplex.

Nifemi joins me on the patio. She sits on the bench, silhouetted by the lamp on the wall. She props both hands by her sides and leans forward. The posture reminds me of Rose. She’s the only one who didn’t attend the party. Which I find weird considering the chemistry we share—or shared.

She always watched our training sessions from the bleachers. She smiled and waved when our eyes met. After the group stage matches, when we got drawn up against the Anglican College for the Round of 32, we both walked down the hallway chatting about their team’s tactics. She also sent me a get-well-soon card dotted with pink hearts while I was hospitalized. The boys think we look good together. She’s popular. I too am.

“What have you been up to?”

I twist my lips but words evade me. Nifemi will call it unhealthy if I tell her I’ve spent the past few days fantasizing about seizing the neck of the defender whose tackle cost me my tibia. Many have blamed me for holding the ball at my feet longer than necessary. But it’s what I do. Romance the ball on the edge of the box to lure the defenders. Then our striker Adam makes a run between the lines for the goal. That day I dribbled past the two center-backs. When I cut back, one was quick enough to follow, but too slow to get the ball. His heel caught my shin. His elbow caught my head. I woke up bloodied in an ambulance.

“You finally wrote that poem?”

My friends always ask what living with Nifemi’s like. In school, she’s the bright-eyed girl with long, oily braids sitting in the front row and putting up her hand to all of the teacher’s questions. We’re classmates, but in different departments. She’s in Sciences because Mrs. Joseph thinks the medical profession offers a mouth-watering pay. I’m in Humanities because Mom wants a doctor and Dad wants an accountant.

Nifemi wants to be a writer like Chimamanda, so she takes Literature as an elective. She’s Mr. Salami’s favorite. Reciting Shakespearean sonnets with the British accent she picked from watching British murder mysteries. Her poem featured in the school mag last year. Withal, she makes straight A’s in her science subjects.

Dad says she’s the only one who understands what a privilege it is to attend Emerald High. Everyone knows Nifemi is a student there because Dad’s generous. None of the other millionaires in our neighborhood send their housekeeper’s children to the same school their children attend.

I answer Nifemi’s question. “No.” Truth, maybe. Lie, maybe.

Poetry is difficult. Maybe more than football. My hand deadens each time I pick up the pen. When I use my phone or laptop, my fingers hover above the keyboards but never click. I tried voice-recording the poem but stopped before the first word. It’s a whirling spiral in my head, countless words fighting for space.

I can’t show Nifemi my one-liners deprived of subsequent lines and my metaphors starved of images. Mr. Salami says Shakespeare would look up to her if he was born in 2010. Staring at this moon, she can perhaps conjure words truer than “wandering companionless”. Maybe say the moon is constant, and the sky of stars and clouds is a curlicue of chaos. Like me and everyone I glean love from.

“How much did you drink?”

She’s lunging hard at a conversation. We’ve run out of things to discuss. Not even the usual trade of banter about teachers and classmates can save us. I haven’t been in school since the injury. The doctor says it’s fine as long as I don’t worry my knee, take the leg out of the cast, or kick stuff.

“You know alcohol isn’t good for you.” She delivers the lecture anyway. I’m supposedly distressed. I need professional help. Deactivating my socials and burying myself in comic books, junk food, and booze are no good.

“You need to inform your mom, so she can contact her therapist friend,” Nifemi said. She and her mom wants to help. They always do. But I had them promise not to tell my parents about the injury.

Nevertheless Mrs. Joseph has hidden all of Dad’s drinks. I wouldn’t have gotten vodka if the boys hadn’t brought some for the party. Plus I don’t need a therapist. When Nifemi lost her dad two years ago, she never got one. The therapy sessions I had after the divorce did nothing but fuel my hatred for mom and dad.

“How did you do it?”

Nifemi’s lashes fluttered. “Do what?”

“You know…”

Nifemi’s dad used to be our gardener. When he died, Mrs. Joseph drowned the lilies and hibiscus, hoping to save them from death. The five months she took previously to mourn took its toll on the plants. No one had tended to them in her absence. Dad barely came home. Mom chased him with phone calls, demanding a response to the papers her lawyer had served. There was no Nifemi to tutor me, and I flunked my exams so hard Dad had to see the principal to save me from repeating the class. Dad boiled. Mom steamed. I withered in a corner, plants never surfacing in the inventory of my troubles. Despite weeks of watering, they yellowed and browned and blackened. Mrs. Joseph withdrew completely. She still hasn’t recovered.

“I know it’s insensitive to compare your loss to mine,” I tell Nifemi. Absent parents might come around. A dead one never would. “But you’re always happy despite what you’ve gone through, and I just want to know… you know?”

I saw the glares that trailed Nifemi when she returned to school after her dad’s death. I heard the jibes. I know the eyes and tongues awaited my return as well. Corridors, stairways, classrooms. There’s no escape route.

She shrugs and stutters. “To be honest, I don’t know.”

I anticipate another spiel about the remedial functions about poetry. Instead, she mumbles stuff, regains her voice, and tells me what she learned in school today: the Japanese Miracle. From a nation ravaged by the Second World War, Japan transformed to the world’s second-largest economy. It took roughly five decades for Japan to recover from destroyed cities, collapsed industries, unemployed citizens, and food shortages. I didn’t suffer bomb blasts; my recovery should take lesser than five decades.

“You’re a footballer,” Nifemi says. “Aren’t injuries part of football?”

I chew on my lower lip.

“When your favorite footballer—” Nifemi traces her neckline in search of the name—“Ronaldo. Ronaldo Nazario. He had knee injuries, but he returned to football then went on to win the World Cup and the Golden Boot?”

She knows my favorite footballer. Knows that I’m scared that I’ll never regain my spot on the football team when I return to school. After my injury, two narrow wins edged the team into the semi-finals. My friends hung out at my bedside in the hospital, imagining how things could have been different if I was on the pitch, and telling me how Coachie missed having me boss the midfield.

The remaining two matches inserted a newfound synchrony, and the team waltzed to victory in the finals. The chitchats switched to awed narrations of the team’s performance in front of the Lagos State Governor and the Minister of Youth and Sports. No one remembers the boy with nine goal contributions in four matches who picked up an injury before the quarter-finals.

“To be honest,” Nifemi says, “after my dad died, I started writing poems because I had no one to talk to.”

Nifemi moved here when we were both six. Ten years ago. We used to be tight until my schoolmates questioned her last name and pointed out that we weren’t siblings. I joined the football team. She championed the press club. Whenever she spoke in the assembly hall, the boys laughed at her gleaming leather shoes and the sparkling socks that rode high to her knees.

Then Rose started waving at me. The boys couldn’t believe my good fortune. Everyone had an input to make sure I dated the most popular girl in Emerald High. To avoid all misconceptions, Nifemi and I stopped speaking in school. Rose needed to know I wasn’t attached.

Footballing, gaming, and partying after school, I barely saw Nifemi and we hardly spoke. The last three weeks at home since my discharge from the hospital contained the highest frequency of interactions we’ve had. When she brought me meals. Or tonight, when she’d come to halt the party.

“You don’t have to write poems,” she says. “Talk to me. I’ll listen.”

I say nothing. She says nothing. A cloud sails over the moon. Or the moon hides behind the cloud. The world dims for a minute and all I hear is the howl of the cold wind and Nifemi’s heavy breathing. She’s sprung a twitch I’d presumed dead in my feet. And now it matters not if Rose watches or smiles or refuses to show up at my bedside or my doorstep, or mom and dad refuse to show up at my “useless” football games, I’ll still run and dribble till I’m swimming in a pool of my own sweat. When I chose football over Sciences, I did it neither for Coachie nor the boys. Not even for my parents who didn’t know me enough to know the best for me.

I play football for me.

Nifemi leans closer and she slides her hand in mine. “Say something.”

I scratch my head to stall but my heart jumps and my tongue slips. “I love you.”

She pulls away, her jaw trembling.

I rid my voice of all hesitation. “I love you, Nifemi.”

Moonlight splits across her smile. She scoops me into a hug, burying my face in her citrus hair. Her damp cheek glide against mine, and I too let the tears fall. I think of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I’ll write a poem tonight. With a metaphor likening a boy to a wayfarer. He’s not wandering because he has a guide. And he is not companionless.