Della flew circles around her head until she let her question go and laughed. “Yes,” she said. “I love it. I love it so much. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!”

More loop-the-loops, and then Della zoomed into its mud hive on her ceiling and was quiet. “Wow,” Sunny said, admiring the piece of wasp art. She lay back on her bed, smiling as she tucked it into her hair. There was a flash of red on her dresser. A ghost hopper was walking down the side. As it walked, it slowly disappeared.

Now her room felt more like her room.

36

THE ZUMA ROCK FESTIVAL

The Zuma Rock Festival came a month later. All of them went, except Orlu. He and Grashcoatah had gone instead with Taiwo and Nancy the Miri Bird to witness the mass spawning of some sort of butterfly in the Cross River Forest. Sunny missed him, but Orlu’s excitement about going delighted her more than his absence depressed her.

Despite all that she’d been through, she was still able to experience the festival with fresh eyes. The three of them went to the art fair, and Sunny bought a new wrapper and matching top. Chichi bought a bookmark made of shed Eji Onu masquerade raffia. When placed between the pages of a book while reading the book, it made the images one imagined that much more alive. Sasha didn’t buy anything because he was saving all his money for the book fair near the end of the festival.

A jewelry maker was awed by the hair comb Della had made for Sunny. He offered to pay her an insane amount of chittim AND naira for it. He said that it was made of zyzzyx glass, a serum that wasp artists secrete when they reach their first artistic peak. Few wasp artists willingly gave away their zyzzyx glass artwork; it was too beautiful to merely be worn as a “bauble by some young girl.” Insulted and intrigued, needless to say, Sunny refused to sell her zyzzyx glass hair comb.

They moved on to the book fair. It was enormous. They hadn’t been to this last year, and Sunny was kind of glad. The festival had been so overwhelming back then that she’d nearly gone catatonic. If she’d been to the book fair, she would have screamed to go home and never had her amazing experience of playing soccer in the Zuma Cup.

The book fair consisted of row after row of books packed on the field that would later be used for the Zuma Cup soccer match. Here, people argued and sometimes fought over books, and some of the books argued with and fought people. Sasha got into a disturbing altercation with a dark-skinned man wearing a Tuareg-style indigo face veil. All Sasha had done to spark it was reach for a thick, brand-new-looking book with The Great Book burned into the spine in Arabic. To Sunny’s shock, the man had slapped Sasha’s hands and then slapped him hard across the face as he shouted something in Arabic.