The End of the Affair

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel, Dream Count, is haunted by the idea of what could have been. Here, she tells the story of her own first love.

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My father was a professor, and we lived on the University of Nigeria campus in a house full of books; bougainvillea plants lined our driveway in splashes of purple. This was the small, gated world of my childhood: I went to the university primary school, the university children's library, the university chapel for Sunday Mass. Everyone was similar safe and sedate academic people—our lives circumscribed by the tended campus hedges.

In my teenage years, I walked two streets to the university secondary school, whose reputation attracted people from out of town, especially the children of wealthy traders from Onitsha, the location of the largest market in West Africa, that bastion of unsophisticated chaos. For the first time I knew people who were not like us. Bush was the word we used for their gaudy style, their mixed-up English tenses, their imported school sandals.

Echezona's sandals were orangey brown with wedge heels, and he walked in a comical strut. He wore pomade and braids, a ringleader of boys; he was mischievous and got into trouble with teachers and loitered during class hours. I was utterly uninterested in Onitsha boys like him until one day, I was so aware of Echezona the air pulsed if he passed by. How strange that a feeling can grow unprompted, from nothing, surprising even your own heart. I began combing my short Afro more carefully, looking in the mirror to see myself but myself as seen by him. I was 14 and he was 16. I was an academic star and I had abysmal grades. I wasn't sure he liked me I was his junior after all-until his friends came to me to say, 'Echezona wants to talk to you.'

'Then he should come himself,' I replied, falsely cool.