When I got home, I was chastised by my mom for staying out too long and I immediately began doing house chores.
I didn't know why, I felt like a part of Azim was still alive.
I didn't know why but I felt so.
This wasn't ordinary.
It was something more....
Azim, as I knew him, had a reason for doing every single thing.
He was a heavy thinker (not sure if that's a phrase) and that made me suspicious.
Why would he purposely go sad?
Was it to get attention?
Of course not.
He already had enough attention.
Everyone around knew him as a very happy and nice person.
That's why he was my best friend anyways.
So he did he suddenly start a dark arc?
We all knew one of his biggest weaknesses.
Females.
That's why we had used girls to question him, hoping they would find out when we couldn't find out ourselves.
Waste of time.
By the way,
He had had a huge crush on Sally.
Her pictures were his wallpaper, display picture and even his phone theme.
He had several pictures of her: both soft copies and hard copies.
I often joked and called him paranoid for doing so but he didn't seem to care.
To be honest, I never actually had a crush on Sally.
First of all, I don't like girls that many guys are after.
It just makes me feel weird.
Last of all, she was way out of my league.
I was just a 6'5 kid with a lot of jokes.
I was both the class clown and the class weirdo.
Undisputed!
But Azim liked her so.
Even when he was going through his Dark Knight phase, he was secretly ogling her.
So there I was, asking question upon question but no answers.
And then, Azim was dead.
Who killed him?
What happened to his body?
Who were those seven men?
Why didn't they chase us when they saw us?
Why did one of them look familiar?
There were way more questions then answers.
I decided to get my mind off it by burning out a little steam.
I opened my workout app and realized I was five months behind in my "New year New me" resolution.
But who cared anyways?
I was busy feeling pain but it felt good to neutralize the pain with exercise.
I think I finally understood that nonsense my Chemistry teacher had been saying for three years.
'for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.'
I resolved to finish working out then finish my assignments.
I had 12 assignments I had been postponing.
Well, it was time to get busy, heh?
AT ADEWALE'S APARTMENT
While I was busy trying to understand what Isaac Newton had postulated years ago, Adewale was at his apartment.
It was 8:30 pm and Jumai had left hours earlier.
Whether they did anything together, he did not reveal. (Damn!)
He was sitting down on the sofa holding a torch.
There was no power supply (isn't that how they say it in fancy English?)
He had finished a meal and was preparing to go to bed.
But something snapped inside him and he opened the drawer and looked at the head.
It was quite frightening and he regretted stealing it.
He was about to start soliloquizing about apologizing to Azim.
That was when he heard a noise.
He turned just in time to see the seven men staring at him through the window.
The torch dropped from his hand.
THE NEXT DAY.
I was in my room at 3pm doomscroiling through YouTube.
Someone had sent me 5GB worth of data.
I didn't know who.
Although I was suspecting Sally, Miranda or Hadiza.
Oh yeah, Miranda was just a classmate but she was a content creator and had quite a sizable number of followers.
And like every Tiktok girl, she didn't have bones in her waist.
She could twist her waist five times in a second (not kidding).
She previously wanted me to act as her boyfriend on her Tiktok page.
When I asked her why me, she said that she needed a guy with my height and stature.
What stature? Girl, I looked like a bone that had been mutilated by a rabid dog.
And I told her that.
She laughed and said I was quite a comedian.
Long story short, she had been trying to coax me into doing it but I didn't agree.
She tried several tactics to make me say yes.
From sending me a puppy video of her to asking her friends to convince me.
I reckoned that the data was just one of her latest tricks.
Hadiza was also a classmate but the seventeenth child of some pregnant Alhaji who married new wives everytime he breathed.
Azim hadtold me earlie rthat she had a crush on me but I was baffled.
Why would a beautiful work of art be in love with a mold of wet concrete?
I reckoned she was the one because she had rich parents and they were literally drowning in money.
Nah, it doesn't work like that.
Then, I got a text from Sally saying emergency meeting.
I immediately rushed out, grabbed my bike and rode out forgetting my helmet.
After all, big boys don't wear helmets.
Well, I rode into a large stone and landed on my head.
Well, so much for being a big boy.
And... I was late again.
I had already rehearsed the funny statement I would say when they asked why I was late.
But their faces held nothing but expressions of horror.
Now, what was going on?