Amy, Thandie and Jane had been friends for as long as they could remember. Even though they did not play in the sand as toddlers, they just could not remember when they did not have each other or what they did before their friendship began. The three girls met in secondary school when they were in their first or second year. Theirs was a Federal Government Girl's College. Jane was the smallest among them back then but, she had a knack for getting in trouble with the seniors, and she was easily the most popular junior in the school.
Apart from being so little when her mother sent her out to the boarding school, Jane was also one of the youngest, having skipped two classes in primary school. So, she had neither the capacity nor the willingness to participate in the process of having her ready for school. Armed with the school prospectus, Mrs. Angela Olu went to the market to buy the essentials listed in the brochure for new students. Among them were sanitary pants. Mrs Olu must have had some difficulties finding sanitary pants for an eight-year-old or perhaps she just found it more convenient to buy her daughter a set of multicoloured children's pants. For whatever reasons she bought those pants, they were the reason for Jane's popularity when her schoolmates discovered those pants. The pants earned her nicknames like Multicolour, Coloured Pants, Small Pants, Jane the Small Pants. At first, she protested that her name was none of those but each time she did so, the girls would go through the list. The person that liked the names more than everyone else was Thandie.
"Multicolour," Thandie would call out.
"My name is not Multicolour," Jane would respond.
"Jane the Small Pants," Thandie would try again and she would not stop until Jane answered. Jane could not tell who created the name but since Thandie would not call her anything but any variance of the names, and since she liked it so much, she decided that Thandie must have been the originator. Before the end of the first term, Thandie and Jane agreed, though unofficially, to stick to Small Pants. After a few weeks, Jane did not find it offensive to be called Small Pants since most of the people who called her that were people she could have sworn really loved her. Thandie proved her right one night.
It was a Saturday night and it was time for prep. Most students were in class reading when Jane asked Thandie to follow her back to the dormitory. On their way, Thandie whispered in Amy's ear and Amy joined them. Behind the class was a garden shielded by mango and cashew trees. The three decided to follow that route so they can avoid detection by the seniors. As they tip-toed with their small torch, right in the middle of that garden were two seniors, Amaka and Stevie. The garden was pitch black and the girls did not expect to find any person there by that time of the night. Jane had the torch so as they turned a corner and flashed it, there they were; Amaka and Stevie seated at the base of a mango tree. It was not clear to Jane and her friends what the seniors were doing there but the seniors seemed to think they have been caught off-guard by a junior that was in a place she was not supposed to be. Jane took a while to process what was happening and by the time she looked back, her friends had run away.
"Come here, you little rat," Stevie called out to Jane even though she was only a few feet away from her and Amaka. "Who were those girls with you?"
"I don't know. The girls saw me as I was walking and followed me because I had a flashlight," Jane lied.
The seniors took Jane back to the class where they supposedly read. Jane was asked to go under the desk and ensure that no mosquito would bite either of the seniors until they decide to return to their dormitory. They promised her a much bigger punishment if she allowed any mosquito to bite either of the seniors. And she was expected to do that job while huddled under the small desk and she must kill the mosquitoes without touching the legs of those seniors. She was about twenty minutes into the punishment when her friends showed up and offered to take turns. It did not make any difference to the seniors so Thandie took Jane's position under the desk and Amy after her. When the night was over, Jane asked Thandie why they returned and she just answered, "You got caught."
Jane, from that moment, knew that she had found herself loyal friends. Years later, after they had completed their undergraduate degrees, hers in optometry; Thandie in electrical engineering and Amy in law, they reunited again in Lagos and decided to live together. Thandie's boyfriend had rented a luxury apartment for her in the heart of the city.
"Small Pants, come oh! I have an apartment now. No, this one is a house. Come and stay with me," was the text Thandie left Jane. Jane had only started her internship at a military hospital. Her salary was not enough to pay rent close to work so she lived with her brother about an hour drive from work. So when she heard that her friend had an apartment some walking distance from the military hospital she had to see it. It turned out that Thandie was not lying when she said it was a house. Jane was blown away by the quality and beauty of the apartment; no expense was spared. She knew that Thandie could afford it since she worked for a multinational oil exploration company but it seemed to her that Thandie went a little bit overboard with the furnishing. By the time Jane closed from work and found the apartment on Friday evening, Amy was already there. When Thandie returned from work with three friends, it became a party. Within an hour there were more than fifteen people in the room, among them were four guys: Sammy, Eugene, Kosi, Max and Andy. According to Thandie, it was Andy that got her the apartment as a birthday gift and it was not even her birthday.
Jane was never much of a talker so, most times, she just sat and observed people. The body language of the men in the room suggested that they all wanted Thandie or were somehow romantically involved with her. She could not understand it: how could a girl have four men that wanted her in the same room while flaunting one of them as her boyfriend, whereas someone like herself did not even have a boyfriend? She went to the mirror and looked at her image. She wore a white gown with brown-and-green stone embroidery on the neck. She thought that she looked beautiful. After they had a few drinks, Sammy tried to flirt with Jane.
"Hello, sweet thing," he said, standing a bit too close for Jane's comfort.
"Hi," Jane replied, torn between telling him that she was not a sweet thing and, letting it pass. She let it pass. Her friends had told her more times than she cared to recount how much she needed to "loosen up".
Well, Small Pants has loosened up, she thought.
"How are you doing?" he continued, feeling his odds were getting better.
"Oh, wonderful. How are you?" Jane asked.
He did not answer, instead he just kept looking into her eyes, and suddenly he suggested they should both go out to the balcony and get some air. Jane agreed. But as soon as they both left the room, Jane realised that going out to the balcony was a bad idea. She felt a bit queasy due to the few glasses of wine she had drunk. In the landscape, she could see Hotel Bellissimo with beautiful neon light. The sea breeze coming from the Atlantic hit her face as soon as she stepped out on the balcony and it felt so good that she quickly forgot her feeling of discomfort for coming outside with that fine specimen of a man.
For the first time, she really looked at him: he was very handsome. He had a strong well-shaven jaw and smelled of a woody perfume. His strong shoulders were visible through his red-and-brown checkered shirt and he stood a good three inches above her. She should be attracted to him but she did not feel anything. Physical proportions had never done it for her. She needed time to get to know someone before she could decide whether or not she liked them. She was lost in thought and did not realise that Sammy had leaned in to kiss her. She felt the heat of his body and turned around as their lips brushed against each other. She gave him a gentle push to create space for her to go back into the sitting room. She left him without a word. As she was leaving, Thandie opened the door from one of the bedrooms that led to the balcony.
"Baby, there you are," she said to Sammy. They kissed.
"Am I not the luckiest man alive?" he asked. Thandie laughed and linked her arm to his as they walked back in.
Thandie insisted that Amy and Jane stayed for the weekend. They were not prepared for it but she provided everything they needed and, they were in no condition to drive that Friday night. Over the course of the weekend, Jane learned that Sammy was really Thandie's boyfriend, which was confusing because the guy just tried to kiss her the night before. She wanted to tell Thandie about her experience with Sammy but she considered how her friend would feel and decided that nothing really happened. She let it go. Jane went home on Sunday morning and returned to Thandie's place on Sunday evening carrying her suitcase. Amy moved in a week later.
Thandie's job seemed to keep her very busy or something else was, because she was seldom home to enjoy her beautiful apartment. As weeks turned into months Amy and Jane confirmed what they suspected; Thandie was romantically involved with all those men that came to that party, in one way or the other. That love web did not seem to lose her any sleep because she saw each man when she wanted, where she wanted. They were not allowed to sleep over in her apartment especially as her friends moved in.
After breaking up with her boyfriend from her university days, Amy had difficulty connecting to anyone else except some of her old male friends that she could talk to sometimes. Most men she met were just not the kind of people she was used to. She deeply suspected that they did not care about her. She wondered if that had anything with most of them being ex-patients and patients since they were all made to know her due to circumstances and not by choice. Since she moved in with her friends, only one seventy-year-old man had been asking her to dinner. He kept going on and on about how he loved young people, about how Jane would love to meet his son, Kay. Against her better judgement, Jane decided to have dinner with the man, hoping that he would bring his son along. He came alone. Jane endured the dinner amongst sniggers from neighbouring tables in one of Lagos's most luxurious restaurants. When she thought she had successfully managed the situation without an outburst, the man placed his hands above hers and pleaded:
"I would like you to be my girl. Make an old man happy and I promise to take excellent care of you."
Jane lost it and could not contain her anger.
"You are the most self-absorbed, selfish old man that I have ever seen. Instead of you to introduce me to your grandson, you are here looking for a girlfriend my age. Shame on you!" she screamed as loud as her voice could carry, dropped the napkin and stormed out of the restaurant.
That night, Jane returned home to find her friends both jumping on top of the couch and shouting at the top of their lungs. Sammy proposed to Thandie and she said, "Yes!"
As she joined the celebration, she could not help but feel a little jealous of her friend who seemed to have everything she wanted. By the next morning, she decided to speak with Thandie about Sammy.
"Do you really think he loves you?" Jane asked.
"Does it matter? He is rich and his family is loaded. He can take care of me, so it matters not if he loves me or I love him."
Jane did not speak more on the matter. She was happy for her friend but she was also a bit worried because, even though she was also searching for a life partner, she would not settle for someone like Sammy knowing what she knew. The wedding happened very fast with lots of fanfare and camaraderie. Amy and Jane cried tears of joy as they watched their friend and her new husband drive away to their honeymoon.
After Thandie moved out of her apartment, the rent which Andy paid expired seven months later and the two girls had to fend for themselves. They had underestimated the cost of the apartment. However, Amy was doing well at the law firm where she worked and, Jane had received permanent employment after her internship. Between the two friends they were able to renew the rent, but the apartment had become a desolate place since Thandie left. There were no more parties and the two friends hardly received visitors. It did not take long before they started feeling sad that they had no love in their lives. Between the long working hours and heavy traffic, the girls hardly had time to socialise.
Jane was beginning to lose hope of ever finding someone who would love her the way she knew that she deserved when she reconnected with a university buddy, John. He had not changed at all. She met John when she dated her first love and she never saw him as an object of romance. When they reconnected, she discovered that he had a flourishing business in a city about seven hundred miles from Lagos. They spoke many times every day and maintained good communication. The only problem was that he could not relocate to Lagos and she could not leave her new career. But it was more than she had before and she was grateful.
When Amy broke the news of her engagement to get married to her, Jane was terrified for one moment before she realised how happy her friend must be and quickly congratulated her and showed her excitement. Before that news came, she had the notion that men preferred bad girls. When she heard about the Sherry Argov's Why Men Love Bitches she just couldn't resist reading it because that had been her opinion about men. She had experienced it many times that the girls who were considered wild cards are the ones who get to walk the aisle much earlier.
Jane tried to be that girl. She bought the dress, dressed up and went out with an old classmate of hers that knew the life. That night, they drove to an exclusive nightclub in Ikoyi where you would find the Elite of Lagos. There she met Akin. It was apparent to her that he wanted her. The look in his eyes showed that he had undressed her a thousand times as they danced. She knew that she needed to go with the flow, but she quit that night and ran away from his hotel room. She had asked herself why she did that but all she could come up with was that she just was not cut out for that life.
As Amy got married, it shattered her theory of men loving bad girls. Amy was a kind, gentle girl that believed that romance was sacred. As far as Jane could tell, Amy had been faithful in all her relationships. But why don't these things happen to me? Jane thought. She was twenty-six and did not consider herself old, but the society put so much pressure on young ladies like her that if you achieve everything in life except marriage, all your achievements are often treated as nothing. Now she felt like she had lost another friend because even though they tried to keep in touch as much as possible, she could feel them drifting apart as each one got married and had to build a home with their spouses. She complained to John about this and he said, You guys are now unequally yoked. It is to be expected.
One Tuesday morning, Jane woke up to her ringing cell phone. It was Amy and she was crying so hard that Jane could not make out what she was saying.
"Where are you?" Jane asked.
"I am at Hanks Memorial Hospital," she managed to say.
"I'm on my way," she said and quickly dropped the phone.
Jane wore a pair of jeans and a polo shirt and ran out of the house. She took the stairs three at a time only to realise that she had left her car keys in the room. She called a Taxify as soon as she was on the road, not sure that she was in any mood to drive anyway. As she sat in the car, she wished she could make the driver go faster, but the man politely told her that he had to operate within limits. She called Thandie but her number was not available. She ran into the emergency reception at the hospital and asked to see Amy Thompson. The woman looked through her records and could not find any Amy Thompson in it.
"I am sorry, we do not have that name on record. What is she here for?" the attendant asked.
"Never mind," Jane said as she called Amy. A few seconds later, Amy ran into Jane's arms and sobbed.
"Thandie... Oh Thandie. Oh God, please save her," Amy said as she clung tightly to her friend.
"Oh, my God! What happened? Where is she?"
They both walked hand-in-hand to the room where Thandie laid. There were stitched cuts all over her body, and her head was wound with a bandage. She was barely recognisable. Amy attempted to narrate what she found out about the incident. According to neighbours who heard the fight between Thandie and her husband, Sammy caught Thandie cheating on him. He went into a murderous rage, throwing the man off the balcony of the fourth floor of the building. Before the police arrived he had beat his wife to a pulp. Apart from the bruises on her body, she also lost her baby and one of her fallopian tubes.
As Jane listened, tears flowed freely down her cheeks as she watched her friend barely clinging to life. As she watched Thandie lying there alone with tubes all over her body and machines aiding her to stay alive, suddenly people's opinion about her being single did not matter anymore.
Jane called her medical director to inform him that she would not be coming in to work. After about an hour, she returned John's calls.
Later that day, the police came to ask Thandie some questions but she was still unconscious. They however, informed the two friends that they had Sammy in custody. Amy and Jane thanked them and they left.
John had never heard nor seen Jane as distraught as she was when she called him in the morning. He was worried so he quickly prepared and flew to Lagos. Three hours later, he was standing in the hospital holding Jane in his arms. What do you know, she thought, There is still hope for future happiness. As she looked into his brown eyes, she knew that he could never do anything to hurt her. Even though they had known each other for more than a decade, that was the first time he was holding her so close that she could hear his heartbeat and the words they said were, "Everything is gonna be alright."
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