Campus Palaver (A short short story)

The room was already tensed. Chima tried to deny being responsible but his face betrayed him. Within him, he knows Oburuoma has been faithful to him for the one year they have dated. But this. How can he accept now, after all he did to ensure this never happened.

'I don't care!' he said in a rage. 'If you like cry all day’

'Chi,' Oburuoma called Chima, for that's what she fondly called him.

'Chi,' she called again, 'how can you say this? Have you forgotten so soon how you refused to use a condom, saying you don't enjoy it without a condom?'

This time Chima was quiet, his mind flowing in a sea of thoughts.

'Have you forgotten?' Oburuoma continued. 'Instead of you to calm down and let's think of what to do...'

This touched him, but he didn't say anything. He was still pacing around the room thinking.

He remembered how one of his friends, Gozie, had boasted that the best girls to date on campus were the nursing students. ‘They know how to take care of the mess when it gets messy!’ Gozie said in his usual 'bossy' laughter. This got stuck in Chima's head. That was long ago. So, even before Chima gained admission into Fine Arts and Design at the University of Port Harcourt he had made up his mind to date only nursing students.

And now Oburuoma couldn't take care of the "mess"!

‘You are supposed to be a nursing student,’ he finally said, looking furiously at her. "You should have known how to stop this for Judas's sake!" With that, he collapsed on the bed.

Oburuoma stood, stupified. She couldn't believe her "Chi" could be this callous. Is it not this same boy that said he would die if she failed to say yes to him? Is it not this same boy who said he loved her more than his own life; who sent her various portraits of herself without her requesting for them? She remembered the days in which Chima with his long pestle, pounded on her mortar till his pestle points back to the earth, seeming to acknowledge its guilt. How he promised her heaven and earth just to allow his pestle crack inside her mortar. At this final thought she broke down in tears, cursing her recklessness and naivety.

Like one pierced by a needle, Chima quickly got up from the bed, went to his table and picked up his phone. He knew if anybody can be of help, that person is Gozie. So he quickly dialled his number. Gozie didn't answer. He called again, this time Gozie answered.

‘Gozie! Gozie! Shit has happened!' Chima said. ‘There is trouble o!’ Chima said so much more before he realized Gozie hasn't said a word. ‘Hello, Gozie, Are you there?’ he asked.

At this, Gozie finally spoke. His voice cracking like a wife who cried at the death of her husband.

‘What's wrong,’ Chima asked, ‘you don't sound like your usual self?’

‘Chima, am just coming from the health centre.’

‘And so. Is that what's making your voice crack?’

‘I just tested positive to Hiv and...’

Chima knew Gozie said some other things. His consciousness left him when Gozie uttered that dreadful sentence. Chima's mind shuttled back to his present predicament and his friend's. He was in a dilemma. He didn't know whether to thank God that his was only a "mess" or still cry. Like a flash, it occured to him that he too may not be free after all. In that same second, he matched to where Oburuoma was cloying on the floor sobbing, dragged her up, held her by the neck and asked "What's your Hiv status?!"