Temper: A Novel Read online

  Dedication

  To Noel,

  the most outstanding boss

  in the Field of Excellence

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Vainglory

  Envy

  Duplicity

  Doubt

  Lechery

  Charity

  Temper

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Nicky Drayden’s THE PREY OF GODS

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  Vainglory

  The queasiness of a proximity break drains from my gut as I spy Kasim through the glass door of his classroom. Relief overwhelms me as my stomach settles. In the classroom, Mrs. Okoye paces in salt-stained boots, her facial features as precisely angled as the writing across her chalkboard: Heed the Narrow Season, and a Fruitful Year Renewed. Her holiday greetings may be merry, but the lines drawn on the foreheads of her students are not. Eyes gaze down at paper, and pencils scribble furiously. Despite the crisp chill of the season, sweat drips from worried brows. Finally, Kasim feels the tug of my proximity and sighs in frustration. He places his test pencil on his desk, then glares at me.

  What? he mouths.

  I’m going out for a smoke with Nkosazana. Meet us when you’re done, I mouth back.

  What? he says again.

  We may be twins, but he can’t read lips for shit.

  I’m—I point to my chest—going out. I make exaggerated swings with my arms and walk past the door. When I peek back in, a few other students have taken note of my presence. I draw a handful of smirks. For a smoke—I take a puff on an imaginary sanjo cig—with Nkosazana—I pop open the top three buttons of the drab gray-and-white ciki jacket we all wear, cup my hands beneath my muscled chest, and sashay like I’ve got the rack of a vice mag centerfold. This gets stifled giggles from some of the students, and the mellow brown of Kasim’s cheeks flushes red beneath.

  Mrs. Okoye stops her pacing, and as her eyes dart to the door, I dive out of sight.

  “Concentrate, class,” I hear her say. “This exam will count for fifty percent of your final grade, and partial answers will not be accepted.”

  I heave a sigh, thankful that I’d drawn a biology teacher fresh out of university, and a religious one at that. You could tell how uncomfortable he was with science, like every single word of it left oily residue over his tongue. He’d skimmed through so many chapters that we’d had our final exam weeks ago—all multiple choice. I’d aced it, of course, but then again, it had been so easy nearly everyone did.

  “Mr. Mtuze,” booms a deep voice from behind me. I look up from the floor and panic when I catch a glimpse of Principal Boro’s reflection in the glass, bulky arms folded firmly across a delicate lace lapel revealing eir even bulkier chest. With all that muscle packed onto eir tall and curvy physique, it’s hard not to get intimidated this up close and personal. I’ll admit, I’m a little envious, too, but somehow I resist the urge to ask for eir workout regimen.

  “Principal Boro,” I stammer, then jump to my feet. “I was just—”

  Boro plucks the cigs peeking out of my jacket pocket. “Getting back to class,” ey finishes for me. “And button up your uniform. You’re in violation of dress code.”

  “Yes, Principal Boro. Right away, Principal Boro.” You’ve never seen buttons get fastened so quickly. I’m out of there and running down the narrow hall so fast that Boro’s voice has gone quiet when I hear that baritone “Walk, Mr. Mtuze!” chasing after me.

  I don’t walk . . . and I don’t return to class either. The narrow season has already started as far as I’m concerned. As soon as the soles of my worn loafers hit pavement outside the school, my proximity with Kasim breaks and the queasiness is back. The emotions that Kasim’s closeness had tempered come raging forth so quickly, I pitch over from their impact in my gut. I feel my anger welling up, and all those things I’d wanted to cuss at Boro fill my saliva with bitterness. Muscle-headed know-it-all stole my cigs, and is probably smoking them now. I grab the collar of my ciki jacket with both hands, and tug until the buttons pop loose, all the way down to my thighs. I shrug it off, ball it up, and toss it up onto the tin awning.

  “Yes, Principal Boro! Right away, Principal Boro!”

  Sometimes I hate the person Kasim makes me, but left to my own devices, I’d be sitting in detention right now, or probably worse.

  Nkosazana’s waiting for me on the school’s front steps, standing in a thin sliver of sunlight in the midst of the long cool shadows of the late afternoon. She looks annoyed. Nkosazana shakes her head when she sees me, shirtless and shivering despite myself. She whips her long silken braid over her shoulder, blinks thick come-hither lashes, and stares me down with kohl-rimmed blue eyes the shade of the ocean just before sunset. It’s all a facade, of course. Aisle three of whatever posh cosmetic store she frequents. But what can I say, I’m a sucker for vainglory in all its forms. Especially the female form.

  “Want to borrow my jacket?” Nkosazana asks with a grin.

  “It’s not that cold.”

  “That’s not what your nipples are telling me.” She flicks me, and the pain shoots through my body and settles into my nether regions. “And your mom is going to flip when she has to buy you another uniform.”

  I shrug. I’ll swipe one of Kasim’s and let out the hems. I’ve got a month before I’ll have to worry about that anyway. No more school until after the year renews, which normally I would be excited about, but Nkosazana and her twin sister are escaping the cold, rainy season by going north to Nri for the holidays. Her parents are the type who can afford a better school, but send Nkosazana and Ruda to the Bezile School of Fundamentals on principle. They are even okay with her dating a poor boy from the comfy—as long as you stay chaste, her father had stipulated to me privately after the most decadent dinner I’d had in my life. Endless plates of lamb with foreign spices, pure white rices, and several odd and meaty vegetables that I’d never seen or even heard of. With my best manners, I’d smiled, and said my “Yes, sirs,” and put on a good show, and then stipulated Nkosazana very thoroughly later that night.

  “You’re sure you can’t tell your parents you don’t want to go?” I ask her. Not for the first time. Or the tenth. This narrow season promises to be particularly bitter. I’ll miss the anticipation as my pebbles plink against her bedroom window in the cold of night, and the warmth she brings between the sheets.

  “I would if I didn’t want to go. But I do. You would, too, if you’d seen the swim costume I’ve picked out. Completely sheer, besides a few carefully placed rhinestones.”

  I growl under my breath. We’d been dragged along on family trips with the cousins, of course, and though Kasim and I had never stepped a foot outside the country, we knew all about the carnal pleasures associated with the beaches of Nri—tropical drinks, exotic dishes, and the dark, bulging muscles of men who can break coconuts open with their bare hands. “Well, I hope you don’t get sand stuck where the clouds don’t roll.” Lie. I totally hope she does, and spends her entire posh holiday walking funny.

  Nkosazana screws her lips at me. “You know you and Kasim are more than welcome to come. You don’t have to act like a jerk.”

  “I don’t want to be your dad’s comfy puppet, paraded around all of Nri to show just how progressive he is to his welshing buddies.”

  “Dad wouldn’t do that.”

  “Please. You do it sometimes.”

  Nkosazana’s posture whips to attention, and in less than a second, she’s in my face, hands on her hips, somehow managing to make our androgynous school uniform seem both feminine and fashionable.
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  “What?”

  Anger rims her voice. She’s the only one I know whose temper is anywhere even remotely close to being as quick as mine. “Auben Mtuze, you take that lie back right now.”

  I shake my head. “It’s not a lie. Last weekend, when we were out shopping, and your friends Nyiko and Tiwa came by—”

  “Nkule and Sindi,” Nkosazana corrects. She must see where I’m going with this, because her brow has loosened.

  “When you introduced me, you said we went to the same school.”

  “We do go to the same school!”

  “But why did you have to tell them? Why couldn’t you have introduced me as your boyfriend and left it at that? They know you go to a comfy school. And they could probably smell it on me anyway.” The queasiness in my stomach shifts, pulsates. There’s more I want to say to her, scream at her, but I can’t allow my temper to drive me. I shove my hand into my pocket, carefully fondling the shards of broken glass I’ve started carrying with me, letting them pierce my fingertips in succession until the pain eases my anger back into submission.

  Later, a voice whispers, then crawls across my neck, down my back—soft and delicate like a silk scarf. My mind falters. These past few weeks, I’ve been hearing things—whispers in the wind, laughter in the distance, cusses beneath the baying of street dogs at night—but the voices have never been this close, this clear. I shiver, and not from the cold.

  “Auben?” Nkosazana says, staring up at me through those thick lashes. “Are you okay?”

  “Huh? Yeah. Never mind, it was stupid.”

  “If something’s bothering you, we should talk about it.”

  “Less talk. More making out.” I tug Nkosazana close, and she squeals. Our tongues wrestle, her mouth artificially sweetened by a blend of coconut-lime-flavored beeswax with a touch of something fishy, leaving her lips unnaturally shiny and shimmering. She is perfection incarnate. That it comes at the expense of hours upon hours of primping and priming only makes her sexier. Nothing could dampen this moment.

  Except . . .

  “Seriously, Nkosazana? Out here in front of the whole school? Classy.” Ruda, Nkosazana’s allegedly greater half, shifts the waistband of her ill-fitting uniform, then takes a hard seat on the steps next to us and picks at the dirt beneath her gnawed fingernails.

  Nkosazana shudders, then concludes our session with a prim and tight, off-center peck on my lips. She’s gone prim and tight all over in fact, and any hopes I’d had for a frolic in the tangle reeds are squelched cold. Nkosazana dabs away our slobber with a frilly kerchief, then takes a moment to reapply another layer of gloss upon her lips before settling down next to her twin.

  They look nothing alike. Act nothing alike. I know that’s not uncommon for twins, but if you lined up a hundred random girls and had to rank the likelihood that each had once shared a womb with Nkosazana, Ruda would come up dead last. Every. Single. Time.

  I’ve heard the rumors. Ticket twins. As in their mother was open to any man willing to pay the price of admission. One mom, two daddies. Not so uncommon for twins in the comfy, and apparently even high-class snobs party a little too hard sometimes.

  Nkosazana wedges her arm beneath Ruda’s and lays her head on her sister’s shoulder. “Sweetie, could you give us ten minutes?” she coos.

  “I’ve got a headache. I need proximity,” Ruda hisses. Likely a lie. Ruda may be the greater twin, but duplicity and greed run hot in her, even when Nkosazana is close by. Lie or not, Ruda pulls out a small vial of one of her medicinal oils and rubs her temples until the whole area smells like Mother Nature’s breath after a night of binge drinking. “In any case, humility is neither of your virtues, so no reason to start acting like it now. Play tonsil slalom all you want. I don’t care.”

  I raise a brow at Nkosazana, not above taking Ruda up on her offer, but Nkosazana shrugs me off like chastity is suddenly her middle name. I’ve got to get rid of Ruda. There’s no way I’ll make it through the school break if we end our eight-month romance like this. I moan and pitch forward, rubbing at my own temples.

  Nkosazana is immediately up, her hand rubbing along my back. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I seethe. “It’s just a proximity headache. Nothing to—” I wail out in agony.

  “Must be contagious,” Ruda mumbles under her breath.

  “Do you want me to get Kasim?” Nkosazana offers.

  “No, I don’t want to disturb—” For the win, I start to pant, staring glassy-eyed off into nothingness like I’m about to snap off from a permanent proximity break. It’s a ridiculous display. My acting is worse than when Kasim and I used to play snap offs in the primary school playground. Our vice scars were still new then, still scabbing over in fact, depicting the seven vices split between all twins. I’d been branded with six from shoulder to elbow, now garish raised keloids. Kasim had gotten only one—greed—now a faint scar, more like a discoloration, easy to miss unless you’re looking for it. But back then, before we really had an idea of the repercussions of being a lesser or greater twin in society, it was all fun and games. We’d spend hours feigning the symptoms of terminal twin separation, then enact the ways our vices and virtues would be our undoing. My favorite was death by vainglory, preening forever in a mirror, turning down Kasim’s offers for food and drink, until my body succumbed to malnutrition in a fit of dramatic and highly ostentatious death throes. Kasim’s favorite was conscience, in which he fell into a spiraling loop of moral balance, debating and judging the rightness and wrongness of every action, word, and thought until his brain exploded all over the blacktop.

  Fun times.

  “I’m getting him,” Nkosazana declares, then races off back inside the school.

  My performance ends as soon as the door shuts behind her.

  “I think you missed your calling,” Ruda says with a smirk. Duplicity recognizes duplicity. She nods, her unwieldy and unkempt afro nodding a half second later. “We’re always looking for honest males to fill roles in theatrics. We’re up to our eyeballs with finemisters and laddies.”

  Finemisters and laddies? I flinch at her use of those outdated gender slurs, her crudeness catching me off guard. Sure, maybe I’ve been known to call gender chimeras, or kigens for short, out of their name when my temper is running hot, but coming from perfect goddess-of-the-earth Ruda, with her five clunky virtue talismans hanging from homespun hemp rope . . . Color me intrigued. I forget all about my plan of bribing her for a little alone time with her sister and pry deeper.

  “Honest male,” I say, flexing my chest muscles. “I don’t think anyone’s been called that since my grandfather’s time.”

  “Just got out from a brutal history exam, and my head’s still buried under a mountain of antiquated terms. Had to write a two-thousand-word essay on the effect that the Bankole Sex Revolts had on each of the four sexes for the past century and a half. So I really do have a headache. Just not a proximity one.”

  “Friendly Lemurs Make Greasy Gravy While Flying Big Great Colorful Kites.”

  Ruda raises a bushy brow. “Did you hit that pretty head of yours today?”

  “It’s a mnemonic for remembering kigen nomenclature from the rise of Branch Institutionalism to the Bankole sesquicentennial,” I say with a shrug. “I made up a mnemonic for all of the recognized sex and gender permutations there were during the pre-Institutionalism era, too, but I gotta warn you, it’s forty-seven words long and a fair amount of them are cusses.”

  Now she looks at me like I’ve got horns growing out the sides of my head. “Mnemonic. Sesquicentennial. Permutations. Those are big words for—”

  “A lesser twin? Is that what you’re going to say? Because last time I checked, intelligence isn’t linked to vice and virtue.”

  “I was going to say ‘for someone whose library study sessions turn into make-out sessions about one hundred percent of the time.’” Ruda looks me over closely, then snorts. “Maybe I should apologize for all of those nasty things I’ve said ab
out you.”

  “You’ve never said anything nasty about me.” Rude, yes. But not nasty.

  “Not to your face.” Ruda steps right up next to me, and I catch her scent. Like boiled cabbage and wet burlap, and for some strange reason, it does not completely disagree with me. “So, Auben Mtuze, what do you want to ask me, out here, just the two of us?” Her lips part. Full, chapped lips that look like they’d cut if I tried to kiss her. Not that I’m thinking about kissing her. Not that I’m not thinking about kissing her.

  Taste her, the whisper says. The hairs on my back rise, and despite my unease, other parts of me start to rise as well.

  “I, um . . .” I swallow the hard knot in my throat. “Maybe, I was hoping that you ladies wouldn’t be in such a rush to pack for Nri. You could come over to our place. Maybe stay for a bite of something. You know. Get the ‘full comfy experience’ beyond the wall, so you can brag to your friends over umbrella drinks on the beach.”

  “Full comfy, huh?” She pretends to consider my offer, especially, I’m sure, the draw of diving farther into our section of the neighborhood—a pocket of sin situated within the posh Greater Bezile suburb. “Can you promise we’ll see wu mystics and holler whores, and eat mealie pap and fried chicken feet, and wash it all down with a heavy quart of tinibru?” Her tongue is sharp and accurate, but I don’t take offense. Sometimes stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.

  “I’m afraid we only have light tinibru in the icebox, fewer gristly bits. But yeah, something like that.”

  “Sounds repulsive. But, sure. I’m in.”

  I smile at Ruda, right as proximity kicks in. I look over my shoulder and see Kasim, a big fat frown on his face. “You and Ruda are getting along? Nkosazana was right. This is an emergency.” He glares at me with a temper that never ignites beyond mild irritation. “I had to leave my test early for this. I left two answers completely blank.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “It was touch and go for a minute, but Ruda gave me some of her nature’s teat oils, and now I feel better.”