THE PEN PAL SERIES (EPISODE 3)

She glanced briefly at her phone screen and saw two missed calls from Arnold. She sighed and thought, He’ll call back. Ten years. Had it been that long? She could still recall how they met – not physically, obviously. She had been sixteen at the time and had just purchased her first canon camera after an endless phase of saving her allowance from school and also money gifts from relatives.

She was finally done with secondary school and wanted to give a test drive to her many years of suppressed passion. She was tired of using smart phones from her parents, begging her brothers for theirs, using her Motorola flip phone and she was also tired of begging her neighborhood photographer to allow her use his to practice. She wanted to capture memories, messages, and images, everything she could.

She could tell her mom was proud of her and how this showed responsibility on her part but her dad just gave her a look. He had probably thought she was joking when she said she wanted to be a photographer just before she graduated to the senior secondary school. After all, she was his little doctor. The one he expected to be just like him. He had succeeded in indoctrinating one of her brothers with the advantages it had in the society and as a child of God.

Her twin brothers, Obinna and Emeka, who were 7 years older than her were graduates of Engineering and Law, respectively, from a prestigious school in Nigeria; while her other brother, Kelechi, who was just 4 years older than her was presently studying Medicine at the same school the older ones had graduated from.

She was the only girl and since she was casualmanda, a nickname she was given by her bully brothers, she wasn’t really treated in any special way, just the usual way a last child would be treated. She hadn’t earned it. She wasn’t exceptionally pretty. As a matter of fact, she was pretty ordinary. She was one of the pack, her father’s pet, her brother’s prey and her mom’s pet project.