Being albino made the sun my enemy; my skin burned so easily that I felt nearly flammable. That’s why, though I was really good at soccer, I couldn’t join the boys when they played after school. Although they wouldn’t have let me anyway, me being a girl. Very narrow-minded. I had to play at night, with my brothers, when they felt like it.

Of course, this was all before that afternoon with Chichi and Orlu, when everything changed.

I look back now and see that there were signs of what was to come.

When I was two, I almost died from a bad case of malaria. I remember it. My brothers used to tell me that I was a freak because I could remember so far back.

I was really hot, absolutely burning up with fever. My mother stood over my bed, crying. I don’t remember my father being there much. My brothers would come in once in a while and pat my forehead or kiss my cheeks.

I was like that for days. Then a light came to me, like a tiny yellow flame or sun. It was laughing and warm-but a nice kind of warm, like bathwater that has been sitting for a few minutes. Maybe this is why I like candles so much. It floated just above me for a long time. I think it was watching over me. Sometimes mosquitoes would fly into it and get vaporized.

It must have decided that I wasn’t going to die, because eventually it went away and I got better. So it’s not as if strange things haven’t happened to me before.

I knew I looked like a ghost. All pale-skinned. And I was good at being ghost-quiet. When I was younger, if my father was in the main room drinking his beer and reading his paper, I’d sneak in. I could move like a mosquito when I wanted. Not the American ones that buzz in your ear-the Nigerian ones that are silent like the dead.