Чимаманда Адичи - Purple hibiscus

"What are you talking about?" Father Amadi asked.

"Religion and oppression," Obiora said.

"You know there is a saying that it is not just the naked men in the market who are mad?" Father Amadi asked.

"That streak of madness has returned and is disturbing you again, oktvia?" Obiora laughed, and so did Amaka, in that loud way it seemed only Father Amadi could get out of her.

"Spoken like the true missionary priest, Father," Amaka said. "When people challenge you, label them mad."

"See how your cousin sits quiet and watches?" Father Amadi asked, gesturing to me. "She does not waste her energy in picking never-ending arguments. But there is a lot going on in her mind, I can tell."

I stared at him. Round, wet patches of sweat encircled his underarms, darkening the white of his soutane. His eyes rested on my face and I looked away. It was too disturbing, locking eyes with him; it made me forget who was nearby, where I was sitting, what color my skirt was. "Kambili, you did not want to come out with us the last time."

"I… I… I was asleep."

"Well, today, you're coming with me. Just you," Father Amadi said. "I will come and pick you up on my way back from town. We're going to the stadium for football. You can play or watch."

Amaka started to laugh. "Kambili looks frightened to death." She was looking at me, but it was not the look I was used to, the one where her eyes held me guilty of things I did not know. It was a different, softer look.

"There is nothing to be frightened about, nne. You will have fun at the stadium," Aunty Ifeoma said, and I turned to stare blankly at her, too. Tiny beads of sweat, like pimples, covered her nose. She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and clutching itself around my ankles.

After Father Amadi left, Aunty Ifeoma said, "Go and get ready so you don't keep him waiting when he gets back. Shorts are best because even if you don't play, it will get hotter before the sun falls and most of the spectator stands don't have roofs."

"Because they have spent ten years building that stadium. The money has gone into peoples' pockets," Amaka muttered.

"I don't have shorts, Aunty," I said.

Aunty Ifeoma did not ask why, perhaps because she already knew. She asked Amaka to lend me a pair of shorts. I expected Amaka to sneer, but she gave me a pair of yellow shorts as if it were normal that I did not have any. I took my time putting on the shorts, but I did not stand in front of the mirror for too long, as Amaka did, because guilt would nibble at me. Vanity was a sin. Jaja and I looked in the mirror just long enough to make sure our buttons were done right.

I heard the Toyota drive up to the front of the flat awhile later. I took Amaka's lipstick from the top of the dresser and ran it over my lips. It looked strange, not as glamorous as it did on Amaka; it did not even have the same bronze shimmer. I wiped it off. My lips looked pale, a dour brown. I ran the lipstick over my lips again, and my hands shook.

"Kambili! Father Amadi is horning outside for you," Aunty Ifeoma called. I wiped the lipstick away with the back of my hand and left the room.

Father Amadi's car smelled like him, a clean scent that made me think of a clear azure sky. His shorts had seemed longer the last time I saw him in them, well past his knees. But now they climbed up to expose a muscular thigh sprinkled with dark hair. The space between us was too small, too tight. I was always a penitent when I was close to a priest at confession. But it was hard to feel penitent now, with Father Amadi's cologne deep in my lungs. I felt guilty instead because I could not focus on my sins, could not think of anything except how near he was.

"I sleep in the same room as my grandfather. He is a heathen," I blurted out.

He turned to me briefly, and before he looked away, I wondered if the light in his eyes was amusement. "Why do you say that?"

"It is a sin."

"Why is it a sin?"

I stared at him. I felt that he had missed a line in his script. "I don't know."

"Your father told you that."

I looked away, out the window. I would not implicate Papa, since Father Amadi obviously disagreed.

"Jaja told me a little about your father the other day, Kambili."

I bit my lower lip. What had Jaja said to him? What was wrong with Jaja, anyway?

Father Amadi said nothing else until we got to the stadium and he quickly scanned the few people running on the tracks. His boys were not here yet, so the football field was empty. We sat on the stairs, in one of the two spectator stands that had a roof. "Why don't we play set ball before the boys come?" he asked.

"I don't know how to play."

"Do you play handball?"

"No."

"What about volleyball?"

I looked at him and then away. I wondered if Amaka would ever paint him, would ever capture the clay-smooth skin, the straight eyebrows, which were slightly raised as he watched me.

"I played volleyball in class one," I said. "But I stopped playing because I… I was not that good and nobody liked to pick me." I kept my eyes focused on the bleak, unpainted spectator stands, abandoned for so long that tiny plants had started to push their green heads through the cracks in the cement.

"Do you love Jesus?" Father Amadi asked, standing up.

I was startled. "Yes. Yes, I love Jesus."

"Then show me. Try and catch me, show me you love Jesus."

He had hardly finished speaking before he dashed off and I saw the blue flash of his tank top. I did not stop to think; I stood up and ran after him. The wind blew in my face, into my eyes, across my ears. Father Amadi was like blue wind, elusive. I did not catch up until he stopped near the football goal post.

"So you don't love Jesus," he teased.

"You run too fast," I said, panting.

"I will let you rest, and then you can have another chance to show me you love the Lord."

We ran four more times. I did not catch him. We flopped down on the grass, finally, and he pushed a water bottle into my hand. "You have good legs for running. You should practice more," he said.

I looked away. I had never heard anything like that before. It seemed too close, too intimate, to have his eyes on my legs, on any part of me.

"Don't you know how to smile?" he asked.

"What?"

He reached across, tugged lightly at the sides of my lips. "Smile."

I wanted to smile, but I could not. My lips and cheeks were frozen, unthawed by the sweat running down the sides of my nose. I was too aware that he was watching me.

"What is that reddish stain on your hand?" he asked.

I looked down at my hand, at the smudge of hastily wiped lipstick that still clung to the sweaty back of my hands. I had not realized how much I had put on. "It's… a stain," I said, feeling stupid.

"Lipstick?"

I nodded.

"Do you wear lipstick? Have you ever worn lipstick?"

"No," I said. Then I felt the smile start to creep over my face, stretching my lips and cheeks, an embarrassed and amused smile. He knew I had tried to wear lipstick for the first time today. I smiled. I smiled again.

"Good evening, Father!" echoed all around, and eight boys descended on us. They were all about my age, with shorts that had holes in them and shirts washed so often I didn't know what color they had originally been and similar crusty spots from insect bites on their legs. Father Amadi took his tank top off and dropped it on my lap before joining the boys on the football field. With his upper body bare, his shoulders were a broad square. I did not look down at his tank top on my lap as I inched my hand ever so slowly toward it. My eyes were on the football field, on Father Amadi's running legs, on the flying white-and-black football, on the many legs of the boys, which all looked like one leg. My hand had finally touched the top on my lap, moving over it tentatively as though it could breathe, as though it were a part of Father Amadi, when he blew a whistle for a water break. He brought peeled oranges and water wrapped into tight cone shapes in plastic bags from his car. They all settled down on the grass to eat the oranges, and I watched Father Amadi laugh loudly with his head thrown back, leaning to rest his elbows on the grass. I wondered if the boys felt the same way I did with him, that they were all he could see. I held on to his tank top while I watched the rest of the play. A cool wind had started to blow, chilling the sweat on my body, when Father Amadi blew the final whistle, three times with the last time drawn out. Then the boys clustered around him, heads bowed, while he prayed.