The Prey 6

Kissing Abraham was something I should have thought about before I did.

In hindsight, coming to school the day Tochi pulled me into this mess was something I should have also thought about—but how would I have known?

⚠️ Trigger Warning: This post contains sensitive content that may be distressing to some readers. Proceed with caution.

How would I have known the spiral kissing Abraham would push me down, that it would open up a Pandora’s box I could never close?

Part <5

I didn’t know. I just wanted to numb the sounds that echoed in my ears. I wanted to quiet Senior Akachukwu’s voices. I just wanted it to stop—and there Abraham was, staring straight into my eyes. After the most vulnerable of confessions from him, so of course I did it. I leaned in and pressed my lips onto his.

The feel of fire against my skin. It tickled a bit before it scorched, lighting me up from head to toe as our lips moved together.

The feel of fire did not immediately burn, but immediately spread.

Time moved in slow motion, yet it felt like minutes passed in seconds. His lips felt like satisfying a meal craving I didn’t even know I had, like something my body had been waiting for, eager and patient. I had no experience kissing. I’d buried Senior Akachukwu’s assault deep in my mind. Kissing Abraham felt empowering, like stripping away Senior Akachukwu’s control over me. He had no power here. His assault wouldn’t stick in my memory; he’d be forgotten. And forgotten he was. So this was my first kiss, but in that moment, it felt… good. The way his long lashes drew my attention made me wonder why my eyes were even open at all. I closed them as I felt his teeth graze my bottom lip, his right hand moving to my neck, softly pressing against my skin.

This felt right.

"You’re okay." He’d said it like a declaration, and I had no choice but to believe in the prophetic vision. "Yeah. I am." Because I was okay. I was going to be okay. Or so I thought.

His lips met mine again, barely a second after the last word left my lips, almost impatient, hungry, like our first kiss was a mere tease and he wanted the full course meal.

And with how quickly things almost descended, it was a ravishing experience. Was kissing me also a craving he’d been seeking to satisfy? Had we both been waiting for this? Was that why he groaned before biting my bottom lip? Was that why he pressed my body toward his?

Still, a part of me lingered, curious to know if this was just how kissing the Senior Prefect Abraham felt like. What if he was just a really good kisser from all his years of experience? What if this wasn’t as special as I thought it was? What if it wasn’t this good because it was with me? What if this wasn’t a craving he’d been seeking to satisfy? What if he hadn’t been waiting for th—

"You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this," he suddenly murmured into my lips. I didn’t even know people could talk while they kissed, but now I knew. Wait.

He wanted to do this? It was… mutual?

Was there also was something pulling him in the way a child was naturally drawn to fire.

When we finally pulled away from each other, he told me we were heading to his hostel. There was still a crowd downstairs when we arrived, and they all paused to watch us. Abraham was used to it, but I wasn’t. Being a lackey didn’t pull you this kind of attention. People stared, people tried to suck up to you, but they never really crowded you and watched you like a performer on stage. I wasn’t used to this—but he was. As the senior prefect and a longtime academic star, Senior Abraham was used to this.

At Lux et Gloria, students were encouraged to skip periods whenever the academic stars returned from competitions to congratulate them, to cheer them on, chant their names, and clap for the individuals who’d won another huge sum in grant money. He was used to over two hundred people being in your face on average. He was used to it.

But I wasn’t. These fifty-plus people staring felt overwhelming, chaotic, invasive.

The way they stared you down, the wide-eyed faces, the scrunched-up noses, the rolling eyes, the puppy dog expressions—everyone was equally overwhelming.

And unfortunately, he noticed my discomfort—because he stood in front of me and held my arm behind him. It was a pose, a protective stance that said a lot. Said too much about things I wasn’t even sure of. And the crowd cleared up immediately. He was the Senior Prefect, and they dared not hoard his way.

I walked behind him, feeling my heart pound against my chest when suddenly a skin-crawling sensation went through my body. I could feel someone watching me, and immediately, my eyes met Senior Akachukwu upstairs, watching us both. Abraham sensed his gaze too—a gaze that intense was impossible not to feel—and his eyes trailed up. He stopped walking. For a minute, they both stared at each other—not saying anything, but silently, I knew.

Whatever was going on between them both… I’d just been pushed in deeper. Their peace facade had crumbled; there was no going back. Tonight felt too defining in a way that frightened me. It felt like the beginning of my end had begun. The time clock had started running for me. One day, my blood would spill against this very floor—and when it does, this moment tonight would be the very last thing I remember. And somehow, I just knew it.

Abraham began to walk again, taking up space like he effortlessly did. We walked through the senior exit that split into five tunnels leading straight to the male hostels. It had overhead coverage and tiled floors, with actual outdoor air-conditioning.

This was the first time I ever entered here, and once again, Lux et Gloria amused me. Putting an outdoor AC so they weren’t supposed to feel heat walking from one block to another, building overhead tunnels for the academic stars—the sun wasn’t even allowed to touch their recognition and money-making machines. Really, what wouldn’t this school do?

I almost shook my head in humor, but my heart began to beat intensely against my chest, and it hurt.

It felt like a countdown had clicked the second I stepped in. Tension rose through my body. I had to hold onto the frosted tunnel wall and pant. The frosted wall bit into my palm, grounding me as my chest tightened. If I wasn’t in so much discomfort, I would have found the privacy screens funny. You couldn't enter here, and you couldn't see into here. Why was this school obsessed with exclusion? And why did the system feed it?

Abraham stopped walking and let go of my hand. But for some reason, Senior Akachukwu’s face suddenly flashed in my head—and it hurt even more. My chest hurt, and I reached out to grab Abraham’s hand.

"Don’t go," I whispered.

Was it a confession? A revelation? A plea?

But he immediately obeyed and held my hand. He even squeezed it a bit, countless times—like he was a CPR machine trying to restart my dying heart.

"You’ll be fine."

…Would I? Would I be fine?

Senior Akachukwu’s lips had touched mine. Would I ever be fine?

Senior Akachukwu’s hands had groped me. Would I ever be fine?

Why was his will to wreck me stronger than my capacity to repress him? Even though I didn’t want to remember, it was like my body and all the strength in my mind weren’t enough to dull the memory.

But Abraham sounded so sure and certain. I wanted to believe him. So I nodded and said, "Yeah, I’ll be fine." I moved to reach for his face so I could press my lips on his and once again distract myself from the memories poking their heads through my mind.

He allowed me, but I could sense it wasn’t a reciprocated saliva exchange. Even before he pulled away, I could feel he had something to say to me. I knew he was onto me.

He was the senior prefect; he was intelligent. He immediately spotted a pattern even before I’d been aware I’d developed one.

"Adaukwu," and there it was. An eerily calm voice as I prepared myself for the reprimand. The ‘are you using me to forget Senior Akachukwu,’ but his would come without the prefix.

I nodded my head at him as he fixed his blue eyes on me, watched me for twenty seconds in silence before saying, "Talking about it is a long-term fix than distracting yourself from it."

The reprimand I’d expected, prepared for, would’ve stung far less than this. To be so seen in a way that crumbled defenses I didn’t even know I’d put up.

There were suddenly tears in my eyes, my throat felt heavy, my vision got blurry.

His gaze on me was so tender, so gentle, and I realized I’d never actually had friends—not now after transferring here, not then before I did. Because this must be what friendship felt like; this was what companionship looked like—to be seen even through the act you put on.

Abraham stood in front of me and whispered, "You’re strong, Adaukwu, you know that, right? But you don’t have to carry your trauma alone. Take it from me… it will fuck you up, and I don’t want you ever getting fucked up. It’s why I’ve kept my feelings to myself, because I’ve been scared of fucking you up, scared if I act on them, it’d only push you deeper into this. You’d be entangled with me, but Akachukwu struck first. He touched you with the rotten hands of the system, and now you feel like you’re rotting right where he touched you, like his decay is spreading around your body, trying to rot you like we are."

Decay... that was a good way to describe it.

Feelings for me? Abraham liked me?

"Please don’t cry," he murmured, and I realized my cheeks were wet, soaked with tears. When did I start crying?

Everything that had happened up until this point had been traumatizing enough—Akachukwu slapping me, being groped in their classroom, packaging drugs, trafficking them—everything had been traumatizing enough, so why did this one little thing cut deep?

"It was just a kiss," I said. I never cried; I guess that’s why it took this long for me to. Crying was something unusual in my household.

My mother, a professor at an England school, was never around to watch me cry. My father, the general manager of a top bank, was never around to watch me cry, so I never found it important to cry about my loneliness, to put a name to my feelings, because who was there to watch it all? Who would see me? I also never had anything tangible to cry about—no social life, no interpersonal relations. All I had were my books, books, books, and books could never make you cry.

I never cried, so hearing my crying voice felt strange. I sounded so chopped up when I spoke. But yet, I didn’t hate it. I sounded just like I did the last time I’d cried when I was eight. I sounded like a kid again.

Abraham reached his arm around my waist and pulled me closer. It was a strange hug in the way it made me feel safe.

"It was not just a kiss, Adaukwu. It was a kiss you didn’t want, and when things we don’t want happen to us anyway, it sticks. It shapes us; our mind and body remember. It’s okay to be hurt by what he did. It didn’t happen to me, but I am incredibly pissed. You can’t know just how much rage I’m in." He was right—his nose was flared, his eyebrows were touching, but still his voice came out calm. Scarily calm.

"All I want to do right now, after seeing how much it really affected you, is go back and kill him, push him over that railing he watched us from. But I won’t, because he deserves something much worse." His voice tightened at the end, and I looked up at his face.

Staring at his lips as he talked, "It didn’t happen to me, but I’m fucked up about it anyway. It happened to you. Choosing to distract yourself with me instead of staring straight at it is turning your back on it, giving it the power to chase you, to run after you."

He really was intelligent. I understood much better now. It was like I could see his intelligence stat chart with the polygon stretched out, currently on emotional intelligence.

Abraham’s intelligence was spread nicely; he was not just a jack of all trades but a master of trades. He was well-rounded, so smart, and that’s why I believed him—because he knew what he was talking about, both from experience and just general high intelligence. So I listened. "You start like that, and you’ll be running all your life. The distraction of your choice will become weaker against the memory, forcing you to go stronger and stronger and stronger, until you’re smoking heroin and having premarital sex with random girls of your pick." Experience.

"You will kiss me now, and I want to kiss you now, so I will kiss you now. But with time, it won’t be enough. The memories will distort and take on new shapes; they will evolve, and then you will want something stronger than kissing. You will want sex, Adaukwu." High intelligence.

"I would also want sex with you. You would have sex, and it might be with me, might not be with me, but that’s the very foundation on which the system is built: repression. Some people run from their pain and are willing to hurt someone else; some run from their pain and are willing to get hurt by someone else. It’s the same coin. Everyone who’s rotten in there is rotten because they didn’t realize running from your pain spreads the decay around your body." His thumb wiped away a tear from my face as he spoke, and he felt so soft, so delicate.

I wish I could say that moment in the tunnel didn’t change things. But it did. It was the moment I realized I wasn’t alone. Today had shifted something between us, drew me out of an ignorance I didn’t even know I was in, forced me to confront a feeling that’d been growing, festering underneath my consciousness because it was now too strong to ignore, to even fight it.

I liked Abraham.

"But it’s so small; it was just a kiss. People get affected by way more. Tochi has marks on her body, but she comes to school every day. Mine doesn’t matter—"

"I used to think that until tonight. So many things have happened in just one night, but talking to you about Asher changed that. I used to think it didn’t matter. I lost my twin brother, and I still thought it didn’t matter. Even as the decay consumed me whole, I still told myself it didn’t matter. I repressed memories of my brother. You know when people say, 'You came to the world alone, you’ll return alone?' I didn’t come to the world alone; I came with a DNA copy of me. One zygote split into embryos but still just one zygote. My soul was split in half, but now I’ll go alone. He went alone. A part of my soul died too, and I still said it didn’t matter. So when does it matter? You don’t measure pain. If it hurts, it hurts. No pain is greater than the other. Did it hurt?"

Did it hurt?

Hurt?

That was what it was—the pain within me was bound to hurt.

"It hurt," I whispered, and felt another flood of tears rush in. "Akachukwu kissed me, he squeezed me, he ripped my house wear. It was like I didn’t matter. He wanted what he wanted, and he was going to get it. It felt dehumanizing being treated like that, to be pushed against the wall, to feel him rub against me like that, to hear him tell me to pause my screaming until he’s in me. It is actually too much. Tonight was too much." And for the first time in my life, I crumbled. I felt my knees give way as I touched the tiles. Abraham dropped down with me, and somehow we both knew I’d said as much as I could.

Thankfully, with him, it felt enough.

The next day, as we walked into the cafeteria hand-in-hand, the stares of hundreds of students followed us. It felt as though the entire hierarchy had shattered; here I was, no longer just a lackey, but someone claimed by the Senior Prefect. Before the closing bell, Abraham stood outside my class door, leaning against the railing where we could both see each other. Even the Advanced Further Maths teacher looked perturbed by his presence, yet no one dared speak up. Abraham even walked in once the bell rang, picked up my school bag, and stood at my desk. It was a quiet gesture, but I realized then that he wasn’t just protecting me from the crowd. He was also protecting me from myself, from the confusion that filled my mind.

He didn’t have to do this. But he did.

In the days that followed, I noticed subtle changes. Abraham held my hand more frequently. Whispers swirled through the halls—people assumed we were dating.

Two weeks went by. Very scarily quiet.

No outbursts. No laughter. The school felt eerie.

But nothing—and that was the fearful part.

I hadn’t even been harassed by Senior Akachukwu’s girls. They ignored me, even when Abraham had been gone for eight days on an intra-country school trip competition. No one did anything. I felt like kneeling and begging. I preferred if they’d even chosen to hit me and beat me rather than ignore me. The silence scared me. And I wished I had someone to discuss this with.

I didn’t have any friends. And in the absence of Abraham, this realization hit harder. More painfully so.

The major pro of being the Senior Prefect’s lackey was that everyone left you alone—and ironically, it was also the only con.

I had no one.

Just books. Just books. Just books.

No friends. No one.

And I wondered if it made me more vulnerable. Would things have played out differently if I had friends? Anyone else, really—other than Abraham.

Abraham.

I knew he wanted me to not overthink things and be calm, but… I knew the silence was dangerous, even if he didn’t say it.

"…but I won’t because he deserves something much worse."

What was much worse than death?

There was ice. Defined and clear ice. The hierarchy stood on people knowing who their clear leader was, and now, after the fight, the peace illusion had crumbled. Two sides had appeared again instead of the one it was, and now people were unsure who their leader was.

He had to appease or reach an equal footing with Akachukwu terms ago, and I could see that it angered him that it’d all been undone.

Yet, he might have been irritated and annoyed, but he didn’t show fear.

Instead, I had to do more deliveries and get two “assistants” of my own.

A pauper who didn’t want to be part of the system, now entrenched deep—giving out commands and making requests of her own. All in SS1.

Abraham returned on the fifteenth day after he’d left. He didn’t travel with his heroin stash; he never traveled with drugs during his other half-day trips and three-day trips, which made me wonder if other prefects ever did.

This time around, I knew for a fact they did, because Abraham and I delivered thick hardcover notebooks and textbooks that I knew would somehow have drugs in them even before Abraham pulled out the end of one and heat-sealed packages fell out. The notebooks were fake; they weren’t their real notebooks, just made to look like they were. Since moving around with blank notebooks would have looked suspicious, junior students had written in them and filled them up to look like their real school books.

This time around, I actually participated in real-life drug trafficking, and since everyone came back with no scandal rocking the school, that meant the drugs successfully crossed into another country.

How deep did this system really go? It required a level of power to protect these students. I discovered no one even searched them, but then again, no one really expects secondary school students to walk around with hard drugs. In fact, I learned that before Abraham became Senior Prefect, they just stashed the drugs individually—all man to themselves—since no one searched them. But Abraham added this encryption method for double protection, even though he didn’t move with any nor have to. All he moved around with during trips was his EpiPen, ever ready for an emergency.

We spent the evening prep in the tuck shop room, and he told me he’d gone halfway through with his plan and was certain he’d restored order by ninety percent during the trip. I wanted to ask what his plan was, but I knew if I had any involvement in it, he would’ve already told me, so I didn’t. Instead, I acknowledged that when the academic stars returned from their two-week trip, things had quieted down.

I could see there was a difference. People valued Abraham because he provided value.

People feared Akachukwu because he was mad, but after the trip, I could see most people hated madness. Hated how violent it could be, how unraveling madness was. The system did not thrive on people looking in because of a scene, and all Akachukwu ever did was cause a scene.

Not only did Abraham score the highest, proving he was the right standard the school was looking for, but Abraham also provided value, gave the system more structure, more safety, even as just a figurehead. Abraham also cared about the students, at least the academic stars, and to the school, it was more than enough.

It also didn't hurt that, everyone knew if Senior Akachukwu was mad, Abraham Sawyer—our senior prefect—was insane. And with time, I would understand just how insane.