They sat like that for a while. Shoulder to shoulder. Full of questions. But relieved. Relieved to be alive and well and home. When Akunna arrived, Sunny waved at her and got up and went inside.

In her room, Sunny threw her purse on the floor, shut and locked the door, and lay on her bed. She savored the quiet. The stillness. Her brothers were visiting with girlfriends. Her parents were at work or food shopping. They were okay. Everything was okay. But she couldn’t quite smile. She looked at her barely used computer, her dresser and cabinets, her pile of books, the early edition of the Leopard Knocks newspaper on her bed, and the window. Then she hugged herself. She looked around her room again. The effect remained. Her room didn’t feel the same. This place felt cramped, useless. It felt like it belonged to someone else.

She frowned, trying to hold the tears in. She’d gone out to find herself and in the process lost her home . . . and in a way, herself. How had that happened? At the same time, she and Chukwu were closer than ever, she and Ugonna, too. And though her parents felt more distant, a sort of understanding had developed between her and them. They had not stayed home and waited for her to return. But maybe they’d gone out because they couldn’t stand the waiting. So much had changed in the last two years.

Something buzzed beside her ear. “Oh,” she said, sitting up. “Della!!” In all the adventure and trouble, she’d forgotten about her wasp artist! Her entire body tensed up. Wasp artists were known to be overly emotional, especially when neglected. Their response to neglect was stinging their owner/audience with a paralysis-inducing compound. The paralyzed victim was then forced to watch the wasp artist dramatically commit suicide. Sunny had been gone for over a week and when she’d returned last night, she hadn’t had time to check on Della. She frantically looked around the room.

There was a loud buzzing coming from her closet. She crept up to it and paused before sliding it open. If Della was in there, maybe it was better to keep it trapped. But it clearly could get out, since it had just been right beside her ear. She threw open the closet door. For a moment, Sunny wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Then she wondered if she was seeing correctly. Could wasp artists create things like this? Della had indeed been improving in its artistic skill but . . . “Is this . . .” She knelt down and picked it up. “For me?” she whispered. “Is it mine?”

Della buzzed loudly, now hovering above her head, watching Sunny’s reaction closely.

“I was gone for so long,” she said, holding the hair comb. “You knew I was coming back?”

It buzzed again. How did it know that she no longer had the hair comb Mami Wata had given her? Only Chukwu knows, she thought, as she pressed the comb into the side of one of her cornrows. She went to admire herself in the mirror. The comb looked like it was made of tiny shiny multicolored glass beads, even the teeth. Yet it had a way of sparkling yellow orange when she turned her head just so. She took it out and held it to her eyes. When she looked closely, she saw only shiny sparkling pin-sized dots of light. “What is this made of?” she asked.