THE BACHELORS
ONE
“HI, MY NAME IS EJIRO Odavwaro—”
“Can you please try to sound more enthusiastic?” Ajiri interrupted, though she didn’t lift her eyes from the camera’s feedback screen. “And use your full name.”
Ejiro wrinkled his nose. “Is that necessary?”
“Just do it, please.” She gave him a brief glance and flashed an encouraging grin. “And smile small, abeg.”
Ejiro sighed, then smiled brightly. “Hi! My name is Ejiro David Odavwaro—”
“The smile’s too fake. Start again.” That was Blessing, his twin’s girlfriend. She was also staring into the camera’s feedback screen, standing beside Ajiri instead of behind the lens, which was odd; this was Blessing’s project, shouldn’t she be the one filming? But what did he know?
“Starting over again in three, two—”
“Just try to act natural,” Blessing said quickly.
“—one.”
They were making him nervous with how seriously they were taking this. “Does it have to be perfect?”
Ajiri sighed at the interruption. Blessing’s eyes snapped up to meet his, and she clutched dramatically at her chest, one of her hands holding a half-finished lime green smoothie in a tall Adventure Time plastic cup and straw, the other holding a piece of A4 paper with her project’s questions printed onto it. Her lipstick was neon green today, making her warm brown skin pop.
“I can’t believe you even have to ask that. Who do you think I am?”
Ejiro shook his head, but he was smiling, a little more genuinely this time. “Fine. Okay. Fine.” He took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. It might be for a small class project, but that didn’t mean it would automatically rid him of his self-consciousness. “I just don’t know why you can’t do it,” he said to his twin, not for the first time.
Ajiri looked up at him, her expression soft. Unlike her girlfriend, she wore no makeup, her afro was buzzed short to her scalp instead of braided to her hips and dyed at the tips in a matching colour to her lipstick, and her skin was as cool and dark as her twin’s. She flicked the button to switch off the camera and focused fully on him.
“Look, you just need to be yourself, okay? Don’t be so nervous. And it can’t be me because Blessing has used me as a subject far too many times now.”
“Exactly. And it’s not like it’s going to go up on a billboard or something. It’s just one assignment for one tiny class,” Blessing added, before slurping really loudly on her straw.
Ajiri snorted. Blessing looked at her, then she snorted, too. Then they did that thing—the thing where they shared a look that meant they were having an entire conversation with their eyes alone—which made Ejiro feel like an interloper.
Ajiri raised her eyebrows. She was biting her lower lip and trying not to laugh.
Blessing looked guilty, though Ejiro couldn’t discern why, her full lips also twitching. “What? It’s for a class project.” Something about those words felt fake, but Ejiro couldn’t quite put his finger on what. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“You stop,” Ajiri said. They both burst out laughing, leaving Ejiro wondering, as usual, what the joke was.
He tried to ignore that twisty thing inside his stomach, the thing he was pretty sure was an ugly mixture of envy and longing, but he wasn’t sure he was successful.
“Ha, ha, okay, all right, let’s get this over with, please and thanks.”
The ladies stopped laughing. Ajiri cleared her throat.
“Look, think of it as an audition.”
The women exchanged a quick glance he couldn’t interpret.
“Yeah,” Blessing said, a little slowly. “An audition for … like, a dating show.”
Ejiro raised both his eyebrows.
The two women were giving each other that amused look again, before Ajiri quickly looked away.
