She frowned, flipping the frying plantain over. She dished out the first batch and placed the hot slices on a plate covered with three paper towels. She picked one up and bit into it. Her mouth filled with saliva as it savored the tangy, sweet fried fruit that was so much like banana but not like banana at all. Perfect.

She focused on making the plantain and not on the talk she planned to have with Sugar Cream tomorrow night. Not on the fact that she had been keeping such deep secrets from her friends. From Orlu, in particular, it was the most difficult. Soon, she’d tell them. All three of them would hit the roof.

She put the plate of plantain in the middle of the table. “You want some?” she asked, placing several on her plate.

Ugonna looked at the plantain, then got up to get a plate. “Thanks.”

They both ate plantain and watched a Nollywood movie on the kitchen TV. Minutes later Chukwu joined them. As they laughed at the stupid woman who was so dumb that she’d left her baby in the taxi cab, Sunny glanced at Ugonna’s drawing. It was of a tricked-out Viper with a sultry-looking woman draped on the hood.

She smiled and enjoyed her plantain and her brother.

That night, Sunny lay on her bed, gazing at the photo of her grandmother. Her grandmother, the only one of all her relatives who was a Leopard Person, the only person she could have talked to about all things Leopard. Where Sunny was albino, having pale skin, hair, and eyes, her grandmother was indigo black with closely cropped black hair. Sunny held the photo closer and looked at the juju knife her grandmother held to her chest.

It was particularly large, almost like a pointed machete, and looked made of a heavy raw iron. And both edges were notched with many sharp teeth and etched with deep designs. Did they bury you with it? Sunny wondered. Did you even have a body to burn after Black Hat murdered you? She shut her eyes. It was late and she was tired. This was not a place to go in her mind right before bed. She put the photo aside and unfolded the only other item that had been in the box with the letter from her grandma, the thin piece of paper with the Nsibidi symbols on it.

Sunny tried to read it yet again. When she felt the nausea setting in, she folded it back up. She shut her eyes, willing the nausea to pass. The first time, she hadn’t heeded her body’s warning; she kept trying and trying to read it. She wound up vomiting like crazy. It was so much that her father was overcome with wild worry no matter how much her mother, who was a medical doctor, assured him that Sunny was okay.

“What’s wrong with taking her to the hospital, anyway?” he kept angrily asking, as he stood at her bedside with her mother. “Kai! This is a regular illness, isn’t it? Then the cure is regular!” Eventually the nausea did pass, leaving Sunny with the nagging question of what the Nsibidi on the piece of paper said. She’d have to get better at reading Nsibidi in order to find out. She glanced at the piece of paper just for a brief second. Then she put all her grandmother’s things away and grabbed her book Nsibidi: The Magical Language of the Spirits instead.