Valour College, Lekki Phase 1. Tuesday, October 2013.
I. Director Sterling's Office
The note had been in Bisola's pigeonhole since morning registration — a small square of paper in the school's standard cream stock, handwritten in the precise, slightly forward-leaning script that belonged to Director Sterling's personal assistant:
Bisola Oladehinde — Director Sterling would like to see you at 11:00 this morning, at your convenience. Room 1A.
At your convenience was Director Sterling's way of saying it wasn't optional.
Room 1A was at the end of the ground floor administrative corridor — a corner office with two tall windows that looked out onto the courtyard's frangipani tree, furnished with the specific restraint of someone who had strong aesthetic opinions and had decided, at some point, that an office should communicate competence rather than personality. A single framed photograph on the desk: Director Sterling at a conference, shaking hands with someone Bisola didn't recognise. A bookshelf along one wall, the spines organised not alphabetically but by colour, which was either very chaotic or very deliberate and Bisola had never been able to decide which.
Director Sterling herself was at her desk when Bisola knocked — early fifties, British-Nigerian, her mother from Lagos and her father from Bristol, which had produced a woman who spoke with a received pronunciation accent and used Yoruba proverbs when she wanted to make a point she didn't want to argue about. She had been Director of Valour for eleven years. She had also, in those eleven years, developed a specific interest in students whose academic records told one story and whose personal statements told another.
Bisola was, currently, her most interesting case.
"Sit down, Bisola," she said, without looking up from the document she was finishing. "I'll be with you in a moment."
Bisola sat. She looked at the frangipani tree through the window. She waited.
Director Sterling set down her pen, folded her hands on the desk, and looked at Bisola with the expression of a woman who had been doing this long enough to dispense with preamble.
"The preliminary interest form," she said. "Two weeks."
"I know."
"Your father called me yesterday evening."
Bisola kept her face level. "What did he say?"
"That he expects the form to reflect a medical interest. That he wants me to advise you accordingly." A pause. "I told him that my role is to advise you in line with your own demonstrated strengths and stated interests, and that those two things point in a direction he and I are going to have to discuss further."
"He won't have liked that."
"He didn't," Director Sterling said, with the mild composure of a woman entirely unbothered by this. "But that's a conversation for him and me. This conversation is for you and me." She opened the folder on her desk. "MIT. Caltech. Imperial College London. Your competition record, your project history, your AS results. Bisola, there isn't a serious aerospace programme in the world that wouldn't want this file on their desk."
Bisola looked at the folder. Her own record, assembled and laid flat, looking back at her.
"There's something I want to ask you," she said carefully. "About Cian Beaumont-Adeyemi."
Director Sterling's expression shifted — not much, but enough. A small alertness, the look of someone who had been expecting a question and was now deciding how much of the answer to give.
"What about him?"
"He mentioned you spoke before he joined Valour. That you discussed my situation — the form, the timeline." She kept her voice even. "I want to understand why you told him those things."
Director Sterling was quiet for a moment. She looked at Bisola with the expression of a woman doing a specific calculation.
"Cian contacted me in August," she said. "Before term started. He had — and I want to be precise about this — an academic interest in Valour that was partly connected to your work. He'd seen your aircraft project at the national science fair in Abuja last year."
Bisola went very still.
"He was there with his own project," Director Sterling continued. "An early version of the environmental monitoring system. You came second overall that year, if you remember — the judging panel put a robotics entry from Abuja first, which I thought was debatable, but that's beside the point. The point is that Cian was at that fair, he saw your aircraft, he read the technical write-up, and he—" she paused again, choosing the word "—he was impressed. He followed your subsequent work. When his family relocated to Lagos, he looked at several schools and chose Valour specifically."
"Because of me," Bisola said. It wasn't a question.
"Because of the quality of science being done here," Director Sterling said, with the careful precision of someone drawing a line. "Of which your work is the most visible example. I want to be clear — his interest is academic. He's fourteen years old. I told him about your situation because I thought — and I still think — that someone with his profile knowing about your aerospace interest could only be useful to you. The MIT contacts proved that."
Bisola looked at the frangipani tree.
The national science fair in Abuja. 2012. She had been there for three days — her dad had driven her, stayed in a hotel, sat in the audience on the final day with his arms crossed and his expression carefully neutral. She had come second. She remembered the robotics entry that had beaten her — a tracked vehicle with an autonomous navigation system, built by a team of three from a school she didn't recognise.
She had not, at any point in those three days, been aware of a thirteen-year-old with honey-brown eyes watching her from somewhere in the exhibition hall.
"He came to Valour because of my work," she said again. Saying it a second time didn't make it land any differently.
"Among other reasons," Director Sterling said. "His father's relocation was the practical catalyst. But yes — you were a factor."
A factor.
Bisola filed this carefully, in the part of her brain that handled things requiring further processing, and looked back at Director Sterling.
"The form," she said. "Aerospace engineering."
Director Sterling's expression did something warm and quietly relieved. "Yes," she said. "Aerospace engineering."
"My dad—"
"Leave your dad to me," Director Sterling said. "That's my job. Your job is to put what's true on the form and let me handle the conversation that follows." She closed the folder. "Two weeks, Bisola. Don't make me come and find you."
Bisola stood. At the door she paused.
"The robotics entry," she said. "The one that won. In Abuja. Do you know which school it was from?"
Director Sterling looked at her for a moment. "I'd have to check the records," she said. "Why?"
"Just curious," Bisola said, and left.
She stood in the administrative corridor for a moment, the door closed behind her, the school's Tuesday morning moving around her at its regular pace.
A thirteen-year-old in an exhibition hall in Abuja. Her aircraft on a display table. A technical write-up she had spent six weeks writing, read by someone she had never noticed.
The painting, three months before he arrived in Lagos.
She lets him think he's won because it costs her less than the alternative.
She picked up her bag and walked back toward the main building.
* * *
II. The Photography Studio
Joe had sent her a message at 8:47 that morning, between registration and first period:
Come to the studio at lunch. Got something to show you. Not project-related. Actually important.
This was, for Joe Evans, remarkably direct. His messages were usually longer, more circuitous, and contained at least one joke that required context she didn't have. The brevity of this one made her go.
The photography studio was on the second floor of the Arts Wing — a converted classroom with blackout blinds, a darkroom annex that smelled permanently of developer fluid, and walls covered in prints from current and previous students. It had the specific atmosphere of a space that took itself seriously in a different register from the science block — quieter, more deliberate, the kind of room where people made things slowly.
Joe was at the central workbench when she arrived, leaning over a contact sheet with a loupe in one hand and the focused, unhurried expression she had only ever seen him wear in this room. He looked up when she came in.
"Shut the door," he said. "The light's wrong when it's open."
She shut the door. He returned to the contact sheet for another moment, made a small mark with a grease pencil, and then straightened and looked at her properly.
"Thanks for coming," he said. Which was also, for Joe, unusual.
"You said it was actually important," she said. "That's not a phrase you use."
"Because I usually communicate in subtext," he said. "Which you never pick up on because you're too busy being the smartest person in the room."
"I pick up on it," she said. "I just don't always respond to it."
He looked at her. Something in his expression settled — the performance dropping by one layer, the way it occasionally did when they were alone and he had decided that the joke wasn't the point.
"There aren't many people here who take me seriously," he said. "Like, actually seriously. Not the name, not the story about the donation — me. You do. You always have. I don't think I've ever said that."
Bisola looked at him. Joe Evans, slouched against the workbench in the room where he was genuinely exceptional, saying something true in a place where he felt safe enough to say it.
"I know," she said. "You don't have to say it."
"Maybe I wanted to," he said. Then, before the moment could become anything it wasn't: "Anyway. Look at this."
He turned the contact sheet toward her. It was a series of images — the school courtyard, shot at different times of day, the light varying across the strip. She could see the frangipani tree in several frames, the flagstone paths, figures moving through the space in the blurred, peripheral way of people who didn't know they were being photographed.
"These are good," she said.
"Not what I wanted to show you." He pulled a separate print from the folder beside the contact sheet and laid it on the bench.
It was a single photograph, larger than the contact sheet frames, printed cleanly on good paper. The library entrance. Saturday morning. Two figures coming through the glass doors at different moments — one arriving, one already inside, caught through the glass in the moment before the door opened.
Bisola looked at it.
"I wasn't following you," Joe said. "I was doing a project on the library exterior. Natural light on glass. I didn't realise what I'd shot until I developed it."
The figure coming through the door was her. The figure already inside, visible through the glass, was Cian — caught in the moment before he looked up, his expression unguarded in the way that only happened when he didn't know he was being observed. He was looking toward the door. Toward her.
"Joe," she said.
"I'm not going to do anything with it," he said immediately. "Not going to show anyone. I printed it because—" he stopped. "Because it's a good photograph. And because I thought you should see it."
She looked at the image for a long moment.
The quality of his expression through the glass. The specific direction of his attention. The fact that he was already looking toward the door before she had come through it.
"Burn it," she said.
"What?"
"After I leave. Burn it."
Joe looked at her. Then at the photograph. Then back at her, with the expression of someone who had just understood something he hadn't been trying to understand.
"Okay," he said quietly.
She turned to go. At the door she stopped.
"Joe."
"Yeah."
"The photography. It's genuinely good. You know that, right?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "I know."
"Then act like it," she said, and left.
She was three steps down the corridor when she heard, faintly, the sound of a lighter.