Lesley Nneka Arimah

Ogechi wished them death by drowning, though not out loud.

“Well, my dad says what you people do is wrong, that you shouldn’t be stopping a person from feeling natural hardships. That’s what it means to be human.”

“Your father and those people protesting outside have no concept of what real pain is. As far as I’m
concerned, their feelings on this matter are invalid. I would never ask a person who hasn’t tasted a dish whether it needs more salt.”

When Glory’s parents christened her Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili, they did not foresee Facebook’s “real name” policy,

Glorybetogod’s father hemmed and hawed till his wife said maybe he should go and eat at his mother’s house. But back to Glorybetogod, whom everyone called Glory except for her grandfather, who called her “that girl” the first time he saw her.

“That girl has something rotten in her, her chi is not well.”

She did a lot of things out of spite, the source of which she couldn’t identify—as if she’d been born resenting the world.

April 16, 2013, after receiving yet another e-mail denying her request to restore her Facebook page (the rep refused to believe any parent would actually name their child Glorybetogod),

“This is my internship. I actually work in corporate but thought I should get a better understanding of what happens in the trenches.”

“Wait, you’re here voluntarily? Are you crazy?”

He laughed again. “No, it’s just . . . you wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m not stupid,” Glory said. “So fuck you.” Then she switched on her headset, ignoring his “Whoa, where did that come from?,” and turned her dial to the busiest queue. The calls came in one after the
other, leaving Thomas little chance to apologize

He prayed over his meals, and before he went to bed, and when he woke up. He prayed for her.

Glory despised him. She hated the sheen of accomplishment he wore, so dulled on her. She hated
his frugal management of money. She hated that when she’d pressed him for sex he’d demurred, saying that they should wait till they were more serious.

Glory couldn’t get enough of him. She loved that he watched Cartoon Network with the glee of a teenager, loved that he could move through a crowd of strangers and emerge on the other side with friends. He didn’t seem to mind her coarseness, or how her bad luck had deepened her bitterness

He didn’t know that what little money she could scrape together was spent on a plane ticket to Nigeria every thirteen months, or that over the past few years, she had arrived the day after her grandmother’s death, then the day after her great-aunt’s death, and then her uncle’s, so that her grandfather asked her to let him know when she booked her ticket so that he could prepare to die. Thomas still didn’t know she was unlucky.