“Guy! This is very good!” Eze said. He always spoke as though each sentence ended in an exclamation mark. Eze, who knew so much about everything, who could talk with adults about politics and history, was saying his poem was good. He began to leave pages of poetry on the table in Eze’s room when he visited, and Eze would return them later, sometimes with comments written carefully on the sidelines. This sounds forced. Wow. Beautiful. It was Eze who made him submit his poem to the campus literary magazine in their first year of university, and Eze who bought beers for their friends to celebrate the poem’s publication.

Eze, bold, interesting Eze. Even his family was bold and interesting. His mother was a doctor working somewhere in the Middle East and came home once every few months, a short, round woman who seemed mismatched next to her tall, slender husband. Eze’s father normally spoke like Eze, in bursts of words, full of proclamations, but whenever Eze’s mother was home, his exuberance was quelled. He became almost meek, asking Eze to please not play loud music so as not to disturb her, making different juice mixes and health concoctions with ginger and lemon and carrying tall glasses to her in her study. His mother emerged once in a while and would go out to the garden with a net to catch butterflies. She’d dry them and place them in a display case, which was strange but also exciting to Obinna. Obinna’s family was ordinary, his mother a headmistress, his father a barber, both of them unremarkable and dutiful. It thrilled him to be close to a family whose shelves were full of dead butterflies. He spent so much time at their house that their houseboy began to set a place for him at lunch and dinner, when Eze and his parents ate together, the father solicitous, asking if everyone was fine, if the food was okay, and the mother chewing slowly, reading a newspaper or a magazine and saying very little.

Once, after lunch, Obinna was out in the backyard with Eze, Eze on his knees fixing his bicycle tire, while Obinna ate a fresh cashew he had just plucked from the tree in their garden. The juices from the fruit ran stickily between his fingers, and he licked at them.

“Don’t be so uncivilized, Obinna!” It was Eze’s father. Obinna didn’t know when he had appeared at the back door to stand watching them. “Don’t lick your fingers like a bush boy. How will you find a wife with this kind of behavior?”

Obinna, taken aback, said, “Sorry, Uncle.” He didn’t know what else to say. He was used to Eze’s father’s harangues about finding a wife, but they were always directed at Eze and never at him, until now.