Girls, girls look, Mummy Geo is walking to class with her Bible again. Wait, wait.

Is she actually going to carry that thing into the lecture hall? Someone tell her God doesn’t attend GST 201.

She carries that Bible everywhere like it is going to buy her a future. Someone should tell her faith doesn’t pay school fees.

Why carry that old book? Not everything valuable can be funded, Zara. Some things just have to be carried.

The four of them moved through Greenfield University like weather. You felt them before you saw them.

Designer sneakers on fresh concrete, wigs laid to architectural precision, perfume that cost more than a semester’s textbook allowance.

People stepped aside in the corridor not because they were asked to, but because some hierarchies don’t need to be announced.

Temi was the soft one. Pretty laugh, expensive taste, always the first to pull out her phone to document everything.

Chisom was sharper, quieter, the one who studied the room before she entered it. Blessing was loud and magnetic, the kind of girl who made everything feel like a party even when nothing was happening.

And then there was Zara. Zara didn’t walk into rooms, she reclaimed them. She was the kind of beauty that made people second-guess themselves.

Tall, composed, with a mouth that could deliver a compliment and a wound in the same breath.

Girls envied her, boys feared her, lecturers noticed her without meaning to. She had built herself into something untouchable and she wore white like ammo so well-fitted you could almost forget it was ammo at all.

Sandra was their fifth. Or, depending on how you counted, she wasn’t really one of them at all.

They had been assigned to suite 14B by the housing office since year one. Sandra had arrived with a mid-range suitcase, a worn Bible, and a string of fairy lights she used to warm the corner above her bed.

Zara had looked at the fairy lights like they were a personal insult. By the second week, the dynamic had calcified.

Four girls, one lifestyle. And Sandra, who declined the group chat invites to hotel brunches, who went to early morning church on Saturdays, who posted calm little videos about gratitude and her morning routine, was tolerated the way a draft under the door is tolerated.

Noticed, mildly irritating, never quite addressed, until it became a sport. It started the evening Blessing found Sandra’s latest video on her phone.

Two minutes of Sandra sitting cross-legged on her bed, no filter, no ring light, talking quietly about finding peace in a noisy world.

>> Guys, guys, come and see this. She posted this voluntarily? 47 views, Sandra, 47.

Mommy Go has entered the building. The Sandra was even people who are meant to fund your future.

>> Not everything is about funding a future, Zara. On this campus, in this economy, everything is.

She said it lightly, the way you say things you believe so completely they no longer feel like opinions.

Then she set Sandra’s phone down, smoothed her wig, and moved on. The others drifted back to their corners, Temi retouching her nails, Blessing scrolling for the next thing to react to, Chisom already composing a caption for a photo she hadn’t taken.

Sandra kept writing her notes, but her pen had stopped moving. The name Holy Mosquito was Zara’s invention.

It arrived 3 weeks after Sandra turned down an invitation to a dinner in Abuja, a private gathering organized by a man named Senator Danladi, who had, according to Blessing, a taste for natural girls with sense.

>> He specifically said he likes girls who aren’t too flashy. Sandra, that is literally your whole personality.

You know what you are going to Abuja >> I’m not going to Abuja to have dinner with a senator I don’t know.

>> He’s not asking you to marry him. It’s one dinner, one night. You come back with something that changes your entire semester.

>> I don’t want what comes after that draft that is called opportunity. Some of us don’t have parents sending alerts every month.

Some of us had to figure it out. >> The room went quiet at that.

Even Blessing looked away. I understand that, but this isn’t the way I want to figure it out.

>> Zara stared at her. Not with anger exactly. Something closer to the frustration of someone watching another person refuse a door they themselves had needed badly.

>> what you are? You’re a holy mosquito. Always buzzing around with your Bible and your peace and your little videos irritating people without doing anything useful.

>> Temi snorted. Blessing covered her mouth. Chisom smiled into her phone. Sandra nodded once, turned back to her book, and said nothing.

The name stuck. By the next week, half the suite block had heard it. Girls in the corridor said it with a smirk when Sandra walked past.

Someone left a plastic mosquito on her desk as a joke. She threw it in the bin without a word and went to class.

What Sandra never explained, because no one had ever asked, was that it didn’t hurt the way they expected it to.

It was lonelier than painful. She had grown up as the girl who sat with her grandmother on Sunday afternoons learning how to be still.

Stillness, her grandmother said, was not emptiness. It was the part of you that remained when everything performative fell away.

Sandra had carried that into university quietly. Not as a statement, not as a campaign, just as herself.

Watching her roommate, she felt no superiority, only a quiet aching recognition. They were always moving, always performing, always preparing for the next photo, the next trip, the next man with the next envelope.

There was a hunger underneath the glamour that never seemed to get fed, only decorated.

She wasn’t better than them, she was just less afraid of silence. The Friday before mid-semester exams, Zara returned from Lagos weekend with a new bag, burnt orange, structured, a brand Sandra couldn’t name, but which Temi received like a religious event.

>> Zara, this literally just dropped. How? A man who knows what good things cost.

I need his contact and his prayers. Virgin Mary staring. You can touch it, Sandra.

It won’t corrupt. It’s a beautiful bag, Zara. >> No sarcasm, no edge, just the plain truth of it delivered without wanting anything back.

Something shifted in Zara’s expression, too fast to name, before she looked away. She was the one who looked away first.

That night, after the others left for a dinner she hadn’t been invited to, or had been invited to and declined, the line had long since blurred.

Sandra sat alone under her fairy lights with her journal open. She wrote, “They laugh at what they don’t understand, but I’m starting to think some of them are laughing because they wish they did.”

She closed the journal, picked up her phone, opened the camera, looked at herself. No wig, no filter.

Fairy lights soft and warm behind her. Tired eyes that had seen enough for one week.

She didn’t post anything that night, but something in her was beginning to find its voice.

The first thing Sandra noticed were the pills. Not immediately, she wasn’t looking, but 3 weeks into second semester, she reached for her own paracetamol on the shared bathroom shelf and knocked over Temi’s toiletry bag.

The contents scattered across the floor. Sandra gathered them up without thinking. Lipliner, a travel perfume, two bobby pins, and then stopped at the small unlabeled bottle of white tablets at the back.

Half empty, tucked inside a folded receipt like something that needed to be hidden. She put everything back exactly as she found it.

She didn’t say anything, but she started paying attention. Temi had always been the lightest one.

The laugh, the energy, the girl who made being here look effortless. But Sandra began to notice that the lightness arrived in waves.

Some mornings Temi was incandescent, talking fast, making everyone feel electric just by proximity. Other mornings she didn’t get out of bed until noon, curtains drawn, face turned to the wall.

And when the others asked if she was okay, she said she was tired. And they accepted it because nobody in that suite had developed the habit of looking too closely.

Sandra brought her tea on those mornings. Temi always accepted it without asking why. The second crack was Blessing.

Blessing’s sponsor, she called him Uncle Emeka in public, never anything more identifying, had been calling three and four times a day for two weeks.

Sandra heard the calls through the thin wall between their beds. Not the words, just the tone.

Blessing’s voice going from warm to careful to very, very small. One evening, Blessing returned from a quick visit wearing a long-sleeved blouse Sandra had never seen before in the middle of Lagos heat.

She went straight to the bathroom, stayed 20 minutes, came out with fresh makeup, and announced she was hungry.

And did anyone want suya? >> Blessing, are you okay? >> I’m always okay. Where are we eating?

She smiled wide enough to close the conversation. Everyone let her. Sandra didn’t let her exactly, but she also didn’t have the words yet for what she was seeing.

She only knew that Blessing had stopped posting pictures of herself and Uncle Emeka three weeks ago, and the absence of something is its own kind of answer.

Chisom’s crack was the quietest and therefore the sharpest. Chisom was the planner of the group.

Spreadsheets for trips, reminders for events, the one who knew which restaurant had the best lighting for content.

She was precise and self-possessed. And Sandra had always privately thought that if any of them had a strategy, it was Chisom.

So, Sandra noticed when Chisom started leaving her phone face down, always, everywhere. She noticed when Chisom excused herself from a group call in the corridor, walked to the stairwell, and stood there for 10 minutes before returning with the kind of expression that had been carefully reset.

One afternoon, Sandra came back early from the library and found Chisom sitting on her bed holding her phone with both hands, reading something on the screen.

She looked up when Sandra entered. Her eyes were dry, but her hands were gripping the phone so tightly her knuckles had lost color.

>> Chisom. >> It’s nothing. Assignment stress. >> She turned the phone face down. Sandra nodded and went to her corner.

She didn’t know what Chisom had been reading, but she understood the posture. The body braced as though something had already hit it and might hit it again.

Zara’s was different. Zara’s crack didn’t show in behavior, it showed in the gaps between behavior.

She was still the most composed one, still the best dressed, still the most intimidating, still the one whose approval the others quietly arranged themselves around.

But Sandra had been watching long enough now to notice the moment when Zara went still in a way that had nothing to do with confidence.

A phone call she took outside and returned from without acknowledging. A weekend she claimed was in Lagos that produced no photos, no stories, no evidence, which for Zara, whose life was curated in real time, was almost impossible.

And then one Tuesday night, Sandra awoke at 2:00 a.m. For water and found Zara sitting at the far end of the room near the window, not on her phone, not doing anything, just sitting in the dark, still dressed, her burnt orange bag on the floor beside her like she had arrived home and not been able to take the next step.

Sandra stood in the doorway. >> Zara. >> Go back to sleep, Sandra. >> Do you need anything?

>> I said go back to sleep. >> Sandra got her water. She went back to bed.

But she lay awake for a long time listening to the quiet on the other side of the room, thinking about the fact that Zara, who laughed at her 47 views, who invented the name Holy Mosquito, who had never once asked her for anything, had not said no.

The discovery came the following Saturday, entirely by accident. Sandra was returning a cardigan she had borrowed from Zara’s side of the wardrobe.

She had grabbed it weeks ago during a cold library morning and kept forgetting to return it.

She folded it neatly and opened Zara’s section to place it on the shelf. A folded paper fell from between two hung blouses.

Sandra picked it up without thinking, the way you pick things up when they fall.

She unfolded it halfway before she realized what it was, a hospital invoice. St. Catherine’s Medical Center, Abuja.

A name at the top, Mrs. Ngozi Eze, Zara’s mother. The balance outstanding was printed in bold at the bottom.

Sandra stared at the number long enough for it to settle fully into her. Below it, in Zara’s own handwriting, a list.

Names, figures beside each name, some crossed out, one circled twice with a question mark.

Sandra folded the paper carefully, placed it back exactly where it had fallen from, closed the wardrobe.

She sat on her own bed and looked at the ceiling. Zara was not living this life.

Zara was paying for it, buying it meeting by meeting, dinner by dinner, Abuja trip by Abuja trip.

And somewhere in a hospital in the capital, the reason she kept going was lying in a bed waiting to find out if her daughter had found enough.

Sandra pressed her hands flat against her knees. She didn’t cry, she just sat very still in the way her grandmother had taught her.

Not empty, not performing, just present with the weight of something true. The room was quiet.

Outside, Blessing was laughing loudly on her phone. Temi was getting ready for a dinner she had posted three countdown stories about.

Chisom was somewhere with her face down phone and her reset expression. Sandra opened her journal.

She wrote one line. The loudest lives are not always the fullest ones. Then she opened her camera, looked at herself, fairy light behind her, eyes that had seen too much this week to pretend otherwise.

She still didn’t post anything. But the words were getting closer to the surface now, and they were beginning to feel urgent.

It happened on a Wednesday night when Sandra was at her lowest. Not dramatically low, no tears, no crisis.

Just the quiet accumulated weight of a girl who had been watching people she cared about slowly come apart, who had no one to tell, and who had carried it all in her chest for so long it had started to feel like a second heartbeat.

Temi had spent the afternoon in bed again, curtains drawn. Blessing had taken a call from Uncle Emeka in the bathroom with the tap running to cover her voice.

Chisom had snapped at Sandra for leaving a cup on the wrong shelf, a thin, brittle anger that had nothing to do with the cup.

And Zara had come home late, set her bag down without a word, and gone straight to sleep still wearing her jewelry.

Sandra sat at her desk after midnight with her Bible open and unread, her journal open and blank, and the particular exhaustion of someone who had been strong for no audience and received no credit for it.

She picked up her phone, not to post, just to do something with her hands.

She opened the camera, switched it to front facing, looked at herself. She almost closed it.

But then she just started talking. >> I don’t even know why I’m recording this.

I’m not going to post something out loud. I’m a 20-year-old girl in NYC. I’m Sneha so don’t assume wrong with me because I don’t like being put in situations that people live in.

They call me holy mosquito, Virgin Mary, Mommy Go. And honestly, some days I laugh because it’s funny.

But some days I sit here at midnight and I wonder if they’re right, if I’m just too small for this world, too quiet, too unwilling.

But then I look around me and I see what the alternative looks like up close, not from the outside, from inside the same room.

And I don’t see freedom. I see exhaustion dressed in designer clothes. Who’s I see girls on campus without real dispernum.

I’m not better than anyone. I want to be very clear about that. I’m just I chose something different.

And choosing something different on this campus feels like a radical act. Like you’re fighting a war nobody declared, but everybody is losing.

If you’re watching this, which you’re probably not, it’s midnight and I look terrible, but if you are, it’s okay to be got a little bit of a group chat.

It’s okay if you want peace, doesn’t look like proof of anything. Some of us are just living quietly and that’s enough.

>> She stopped recording, sat with the video for a moment, 2 minutes 43 seconds, bad lighting, no filter, her grandmother’s old blanket visible in the corner of the frame.

She almost deleted it. Instead, she posted it. No caption, no hashtags. Closed the app and went to sleep.

By 6:00 a.m., she had 400 views. She assumed it was a glitch. By the time she got back from her 8:00 a.m.

Lecture, her phone was producing sounds she had never heard from it before. A continuous overlapping chorus of notification tones that made Temi, still in bed, lift her head from the pillow.

Why is your phone doing that? Sandra looked at her screen. 14,000 views. Comments loading faster than she could read them.

Her following had tripled overnight and was still climbing in real time. She sat down slowly on her bed.

By evening, it was at 200,000 views and still moving. The comments were not what she expected.

Not mockery she had braced for. They were long, earnest, personal. I literally cried watching this because I thought I was the only one.

This girl described my entire university experience in 3 minutes. The part about exhaustion dressed in designer clothes, I felt that in my bones.

She said some of us are just living quietly and that’s enough. And I had to pause the video.

Girls from Lagos, girls from Accra, girls from Nairobi and London and Atlanta and Port Harcourt, all saying versions of the same thing.

I thought it was just me. Sandra read the comments until her eyes burned. Then she put her phone down and pressed her palms flat on her knees the way she did when she needed to stay inside herself.

The suite found out by night. Chison saw it first, shared in four different group chats she was in, none of which contained Sandra.

Sandra, this is your video. Yes. It has 200,000 views. I know. You look terrible in it.

I know that too. So you’ve been watching us this whole time. You didn’t need to.

She said it without malice, which was somehow worse. Then she sat on her bed and went quiet.

The real kind of quiet, not the performed kind, and stayed that way for most of the evening.

Temi didn’t say anything at all. She just watched the video twice on her own phone with her earphones in, and when she thought no one was looking, she wiped her face quickly with the back of her hand.

Zara said nothing that night. She came in, saw the open phones, understood what was happening, and went to the bathroom.

She stayed in there for a long time. When she came out, her face was composed and dry and perfect.

She didn’t look at Sandra. Within the week, the notifications had become unmanageable. A lifestyle brand slid into her DMs asking about a partnership.

A podcast called Real Girls, Real Lives sent a formal collaboration request. A journalist from an online magazine wanted a 15-minute interview.

Sandra answered each one carefully in the same plain language she used for everything else.

She posted a second video, shorter, simpler, just her saying thank you, and that she hadn’t expected any of this, and that she was still figuring it out.

That video got 400,000 views by the next morning. She was still sleeping on the same mattress, still waking up for the same 8:00 a.m.

Lectures, still brewing tea for Temi on the bad mornings. The fairy lights above her bed were the same ones from year one.

Everything around her had changed, and she had not. And somehow, that was the whole point.

What she didn’t know yet was that the girls who had mocked her were watching each number climb, refreshing her page, reading comments that said things about Sandra that no one had ever said about them, despite all the money, all the trips, all the curated perfection.

The mockery had gone quiet. In its place was something harder to name, and much harder to live with.

The unraveling didn’t happen at once. It really does. It came the way harmattan comes, gradually, then completely.

First, the air changes, then the skin. Then, one morning you wake up and everything that was green has gone pale and brittle, and you wonder how you missed the transition.

Temi was first. The pills were no longer enough, or they were too many. Sandra never found out which.

What she found was Temi on the bathroom floor at 6:00 a.m. On a Thursday, sitting with her back against the tub, knees pulled up, eyes open, but not quite present, not unconscious, just somewhere else.

Sandra sat down on the cold tile beside her without a word. She didn’t call anyone, didn’t reach for her phone, just sat close enough that their shoulders touched.

They stayed like that for 20 minutes. I don’t even know when it got this bad.

You don’t have to know that right now. I’ve been pretending for so long I forgot what I was pretending about.

I know. How did you know? The mornings you couldn’t get up, I just I knew.

Timmy turned to look at her. Her eyes were swollen and her lashes were bare, and she looked younger than Sandra had ever seen her.

Why didn’t you say anything? You weren’t ready to hear it yet. Timmy pressed her face into her own knees and stayed there.

Sandra didn’t move. Outside the bathroom window, the campus was beginning its morning noise. Generators cutting off, early students crossing the compound, a vendor calling out.

Sandra made sure Timmy ate before her first lecture. She walked her to the campus counselor’s office the following afternoon and waited outside until she came out.

She told no one. Blessing’s ending with Uncle Emeka came loudly. It came through the suite door on a Friday evening.

Blessing, suitcase wheels scraping the floor, jaw set, eyes red but dry in the way that means a girl has already finished crying and has moved into something colder.

She didn’t Chisom, don’t. He sent a video to three people, people I know. I should I knew the kind of person he was.

I knew. I just kept thinking the bag of the trip or the next thing would make it worth it.

Her voice didn’t waver. It was the flatness of someone delivering news about another person.

Blessing, look at me. This is not what you deserve. None of it. You never even said I told you so.

That was never going to come from me. I need a lawyer. I don’t know any tears.

I want you to lawyers. I don’t know any lawyers. One of the brands that contacted me has a legal team.

I’ll make a call. Blessing stared at her. Why would you do that for me?

Because you’re my roommate and you’re in trouble. That’s enough reason. Chisom came to Sandra 2 weeks later with her phone finally face up.

She showed her the messages without preamble. A man, screenshots, a threat, content he claimed to have, a figure he wanted transferred or he would distribute it.

The figure was substantial. The screenshots were real. >> I’ve been managing it for 2 months, sending small amounts to buy time.

It’s not stopping. >> Have you told anyone else? >> No, I couldn’t. You know how they talk.

>> You know how they talk on this campus. The journalist who interviewed me, she covers digital safety issues.

She knows people who handle these cases. I can connect you. >> You will do that?

>> It wasn’t a question. It was the sound of someone recalibrating everything they thought they knew.

>> She’s um send me the screenshots. Let me make the call. >> Zara was last.

Zara was always going to be last. It was a Sunday evening, 5 weeks after the video.

Sandra was at her desk reviewing a brand brief when she heard the door open and then unusually close softly.

Zara never closed doors softly. She stood just inside the room. She was not in her usual armor, no full beat, no structured bag, no posture assembled for an audience.

She was in a plain black top, her hair wrapped, eyes that had not slept in more than one night.

She stood there long enough that Sandra set down her pen. >> My mother had a second episode last night.

They’re saying she needs surgery before the end of the month. The man I was depending on to cover it, he’s gone.

Found someone else. Just like that. >> Everything I’ve been doing for the past 14 months, every dinner, every trip, every time I pushed you toward Daladi because I needed someone to take my place at a table I was exhausted from sitting at.

Her voice stayed level, but her hands were not. It’s gone. >> How much does she need?

Sandra. How much, Zara? I’m asking you to fix it. I I I came because I I know where else to go and that says everything, doesn’t it?

After everything I said to you, after everything >> She sat down on her own bed.

The burnt orange bag was not there tonight. The room looked different without it. You are the only one among us who was actually living freely.

I saw it from the first week. Your fairy lights and your 47 views and your grandmother’s blanket.

I saw it and it made me so angry because I couldn’t afford to live like that and it was easier to make you small than to admit that what you had was the one thing I wanted most and couldn’t buy.

The confession landed in the room and stayed there. Sandra didn’t rush to fill the silence.

She sat with it like she sat with everything. Fully, without flinching. Then she opened her laptop.

>> One of the podcasts that partnered with me, their host runs a medical fundraising initiative.

I was already thinking about my mother’s church women’s group. If we combine both reach, we can start a campaign tonight.

You’re not going to say anything about what I just told you? >> I heard everything you said, Zara.

I’ll carry it. But your mother doesn’t have time for me to make this moment about feelings.

Let’s work. >> They worked until 2:00 a.m. The campaign went live before midnight and had reached a third of its target by morning.

The fundraiser hit its goal in 11 days. Sandra never posted about it. Never made it content.

Never let it become a story about her generosity versus Zara’s need. When people in her comments asked what she was working on, she said something personal and left it there.

The brands kept coming. The podcast numbers kept climbing. A publishing house sent a preliminary email about a book.

Sandra read it three times, then called her mother, and then went to church on Saturday morning and sat in the back pew the way she always had.

Unremarkable, unperformed, present. Sweet 14B never became a perfect place. That would be a different kind of story.

Temi started therapy and stopped pretending the bad mornings weren’t happening. Blessing’s case moved slowly through legal channels, but it moved.

She some deleted three accounts and rebuilt one, smaller and more honest. Zara visited her mother after the surgery, sent Sandra a voice note that was mostly silence, and then the words, “She’s okay.”

And then the call ended. Sandra saved that voice note. She posted one final video about all of it.

Not the details, never the details, just the shape of it. About how the girls who mocked her became the girls who needed her, and how she had needed to decide in real time what kind of person she was going to be with that power.

>> I didn’t want to be right. I want nothing good about watching people fall apart.

The soft life is not a small thing. Peace is not a small thing. It is not a birthright, and it costs something.

Just not what they told you it would cost. >> What I know is this.

Peace is not a small thing. It is not a consolation prize for girls who couldn’t get the bag.

It is the most protected, most fought over, most quietly radical thing a young woman can choose, and it costs something.

Just not what they told you it would cost. The video got 3 million views.

Sandra was not surprised. She was not unsurprised. She was simply herself, sitting cross-legged on her bed, grandmother’s blanket in the corner of the frame, fairy lights warm and unchanged above her head.

Some things had stayed exactly the same. That was the whole point. If you followed this story to the very end, I truly appreciate you.

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