The Red Ink of June
The sun had barely cleared the mango trees behind the chapel, but already the courtyard of Greenfield Secondary School buzzed like a hive someone had kicked. Rows of students stood in their houses—Blue, Green, Gold, Red—shirts tucked in with varying degrees of effort, sandals scuffed from a term's worth of hurried mornings. Somewhere near the front, the school band tried to coax a rhythm out of two drums and a trumpet that had clearly seen better decades, and the result was less music than organized chaos.
Oba stood at the very back of the Gold house line, where the prefects rarely bothered to look, and used the flat of her palm as a canvas. With the tip of her ballpoint pen, she traced the jagged roofline of the chapel building—the way it dipped in the middle like a tired smile, the crooked cross at its peak that always looked one strong wind away from toppling. She added shading with quick, feather-light strokes, the kind of instinctive detail she never had to think about, only feel.
"You're doing it again," Chidinma whispered beside her, not even glancing over. She didn't need to. She'd known Oba since primary three, long enough to recognize the particular stillness that came…
