AUNTIE JANE

CHAPTER 1-NOT A CHILD ANYMORE

The December after Form Four felt different for me.

For the first time, I wasn't a schoolboy anymore. My uniform was folded somewhere at the bottom of my suitcase, my results were out, and every conversation at home somehow ended with the same sentence:

"So, uko excited kujoin Campus?" Of course I was

I was nineteen, waiting to join UoN, and I had convinced myself that those few months at home would be boring.

I was wrong.

Jane, My mother's best friend had visited us in the countryside. Tulikuwa tunamwita na maboys wangu BNJ (Big Nyash Jane)

I'd known her practically all my life.

She was forty, confident, warm, and the kind of woman who could walk into a room and somehow make everyone notice without trying. Growing up, she'd always been simply Auntie Jane to all my siblings and I.

But that December, something changed.

Maybe it was me.

Maybe it was her.

Or maybe it was simply the strange way adulthood begins ,you wake up one morning and realize you're seeing familiar people through completely different eyes.

Jane arrived on a Saturday afternoon.

I was in the backyard splitting firewood when I heard my mother's voice.

"Kuja usaidie auntie yako kubeba bags kwa nyumba"

I didn't know which auntie she was talking about because she had not told us Jane was coming.

I wiped my hands on my T-shirt and walked toward the house.

Jane was standing beside the car.

She smiled.

"Look at you."

I laughed. "What?"

"Naona siku hizi umekula kwelikweli. You look nothing like the young boy I knew."

"I finished Form Four, auntie Jane. I'm allowed to grow."

She laughed softly.

"Just Jane" she corrected me, she told me to call her that.

"Jane"

She raised an eyebrow.

"Better."

That evening, everyone sat outside beneath the old mango tree. When I say everyone, I mean everyone - I have 10 siblings man , I don't know if dad was trying to create his own clan or what. ,and that holiday almost everybody was home.

Ocha was unusually quiet that evening. Crickets sang in the grass slowly, cows moved somewhere beyond the fence, and the smell of wood smoke drifted from the kitchen.

Jane sat opposite me.

Every now and then, our eyes met.

Each time, one of us looked away. It was mostly me.

I couldn't understand why I suddenly became so conscious of her presence.

Maybe she noticed too.

Later that night after supper,I found her on the phone on the veranda.

"You can't sleep?" she asked.

"Not really, it's still early"

She moved slightly, making room beside her.

"Come sit."

I did.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

Then she asked, "Are you excited about campus?"

"Very."

"Nervous?"

"A little."

She smiled.

"You'll be fine."

"You think so?"

"I know so."

There was something...