It was odd. Mostly, people shunned me because I was Ewu. But sometimes women crowded around me. “But her skin,” they would say to each other, never directly to me. “It’s so smooth and delicate. It looks almost like camel’s milk.”

“And her hair is oddly bushy, like a cloud of dried grass.”

“Her eyes are like a desert cat’s.”

“Ani makes strange beauty from ugliness.”

“She might be beautiful by the time she goes through her Eleventh Rite.”

“What’s the point of her going through it? No one will marry her.” Then laughter.

In the market, men had tried to grab me but I was always quicker and I knew how to scratch. I’d learned from the desert cats. All this confused my six-year-old mind. Now, as I stood before the blacksmith, I feared that he might find my ugly features strangely delightful, too.

I held the cup up to him. He took it and drank long and deep, pulling in every drop. I was tall for my age but he was tall for his. I had to tilt my head back to see the smile on his face. He let out a great sigh of relief and handed the cup back to me.

“Good water,” he said. He went back to his anvil. “You’re too tall and far too bold to be a water sprite.”

I smiled and said, “My name is Onyesonwu Ubaid. What’s yours, Oga?”

“Fadil Ogundimu,” he said. He looked at his gloved hands. “I would shake your hand, Onyesonwu, but my gloves are hot.”

“That’s okay, Oga,” I said. “You’re a blacksmith!”

He nodded. “As was my father and his father and his father and so on.”

“My mother and I just got here some months ago,” I blurted. I remembered that it was growing late. “Oh. I have to go, Oga Ogundimu!”

“Thanks for the water,” he said. “You were right. I was thirsty.”

After that, I visited him often. He became my best and only friend. If my mother had known I was hanging around a strange man, she’d have beaten me and taken away my free time for weeks. The blacksmith’s apprentice, a man named Ji, hated me and he let me know this by sneering with disgust whenever he saw me, as if I were a diseased wild animal.