Light Enough - Chapter One

The sound came first. The soft, rhythmic clack of seeds hitting carved wood, over and over, like a heartbeat with rhythm. It drifted through the modest Lagos bedroom on a current of girlish laughter, four small voices tangled together in the golden haze of a Saturday morning.

Sunlight poured through a weathered window in thick, dusty shafts, catching every mote suspended in the warm air, painting long gold stripes across a floor of worn, cracked tiles.

The room smelled of coconut hair oil and starch and something faintly sweet…the leftover scent of the previous night’s dinner clinging to the walls. On a threadbare mat in the centre of the floor, four sisters sat in a loose circle around a wooden Ayo board, its rows of smooth carved holes cradling polished seeds that clicked and scattered with each turn.

Kemi, nine years old, radiant in caramel-brown skin and neatly plaited hair, leaned over the board with the fierce concentration of a girl who hated losing. Beside her, Tinu, seven, soft-featured, honey-toned, bounced impatiently on her knees.

“Moji, play!” Tinu groaned. “You’re too slow.”

“Wait now,” Moji shot back, only five, her small brow furrowed in concentration as she hovered a chubby finger over the board. “Stop rushing me so you can win.”

“You will still lose,” Kemi said with the easy cruelty only a big sister can deliver, “even if we gave you ten hours.”

Kemi and Tinu dissolved into laughter, the sound bright and unthinking. Moji’s face crumpled, her bottom lip jutting out, her small arms folding tight across her chest in a sulk that was answered instantly. Both older girls dropping the game to pull her into their arms, smothering her in the kind of chaotic, giggling embrace that only sisters know how to give. “Oya, sorry!” Kemi said, squeezing her. “I was just playing!”

The three of them collapsed into a pile of tickling and shrieking laughter, limbs tangled, navy-blue church dresses rustling against the floor tiles.

Slightly apart from the pile, not excluded, but never quite pulled in either, sat Shadé.

Seven years old, Tinu’s fraternal twin, dressed in the identical navy dress and matching pigtails right down to the bows, her rich mahogany skin catching the same golden light as her sisters’. She watched the pile of laughing limbs with a small, quiet smile, close enough to belong to it, far enough to remain untouched by it.

“Are you girls ready?” Their mother’s voice cut through the room from somewhere down the hall, sharp and expectant.

The stillness shattered instantly. Feet scrambled. Shoes were snatched up off the floor.

Chatter dissolved into the electric excitement of getting-dressed-for-church, three sisters darting toward the door in a blur of navy fabric and flying pigtails.

Shadé crouched by the bed instead, carefully, quietly, tying her shoelace with slow, deliberate fingers while her sisters lined up at the door, buzzing with a kind of practiced excitement she’d never quite learned to perform.

Their mother appeared in the doorway.

MUM—thirty-four, polished in the way of a woman who had once turned heads and hadn’t yet accepted she no longer did, filled the frame with a presence that was equal parts elegance and edge. Her skin told its own story: visibly altered by years of bleaching, the tone uneven, patchier and more pronounced across her knuckles and hands, a synthetic wig set with mathematical precision atop her head, gold jewellery clinking softly with every step she took. There was a forced perfection to her, an aura that announced keeping up appearances before she said a single word.

The girls fell into a line without needing to be told, a ritual worn smooth by repetition. Tinu and Shadé stood side by side, mirror images down to the bows in their hair. And yet only one of them seemed to catch the light.

“Fine girls,” Mum said, smiling, sweeping her gaze across them.

The girls beamed under her approval and scattered with squeals toward the car, already bickering over the window seat, their laughter fading down the corridor like water running out of a room.

Shadé turned to follow.

“Shadé.”

The single word landed like a hand on her shoulder. She stopped. Turned. The whole room seemed to still around her. She stepped forward, small and uncertain, standing in front of her mother, waiting. Mum’s eyes moved over her, not with affection, but with scrutiny, the way you’d inspect a stain you were trying to decide how to remove.

“You’re not like your sisters,” Mum said. “You know you have to wear colours that make your skin look… less dull.”

She turned briskly toward the wardrobe, fingers flicking through hangers with practiced efficiency, until she found what she was looking for, a bright yellow dress, which she pulled free and laid flat across the bed like a diagnosis.

“Wear this,” she said. “And don’t waste time, we’re already late.”

A car horn blared impatiently from the street below.“Let’s go o!” Dad’s voice called from outside.

Mum turned and left without another word, the front door slamming shut behind her, her daughters’ laughter and chatter filtering back through the walls, muffled, animated, already moving on without her.

Shadé stood alone in the sudden silence.

She turned slowly toward the mirror propped against the wall. It reflected back a girl dressed to impress, the yellow dress crisp and neat, her mahogany skin glowing warm in the streaming sunlight, her pigtails tied with careful precision.

But her face gave nothing away.

Still. Expressionless. A mask so practiced it looked almost natural.

Only her eyes betrayed the truth underneath…a quiet, bottomless sorrow that, even at seven years old, she had already learned exactly how to hide.

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