“Mommy, I am not a virgin anymore.”

Ayo stood by the door. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She tried to think of other things, other places, of being the one who led green house to victory. Everyone had concluded that green house was jinxed. Green house had only had red house as contender for the last position. She had been miserable at being in green house until she saw that Uduak was assigned green house for the session. Not even Uduak could really look fine in the pumpkin-leaf colour that passed for green.

And now, today, it did not matter that she had led green house to glory. That her report card was a uniform blue... This instance, she had shrunk to the size of her hymen. Her mother, the custodian of the passageway between her daughters’ legs held court in the master bedroom. When her sister came out and hurried to the room they both shared without looking at her eyes, she knew her sister had passed the most important exam.

That result was more important than the report card that was still on the table, unchecked. It was only after they lay with their legs splayed opened on their parents’ bed and passed the test that the homecoming could really happen. Before then, they were suspended halfway like vagabonds. Today, when Ayo went in, she didn’t know what came over her. She merely blurted out: “There is no need to check. I am not a virgin anymore.”

First, there was the shock, the slaps, the teeth and all. Not once did she feel the urge to say she lied. As she lay there, bruised and pained, she stood straight in her mind, proudly stripping off the straitjackets of the good daughter and there had never been greater joy in stripping than at that moment. Where she stood, she was happy knowing she would never be raped that way by her mother anymore. It had always felt the way she imagined rape would feel. At that moment, she basked in the joy of knowing that the next time she would strip, it would be of her own choosing.