The Man Who Owes Me Twenty Dollars

His name is Tunde Adeyemi and we met in 1988 in the third row of Mrs. Abimbola's primary four classroom in Lagos, which is to say we have known each other for thirty-six years and he still owes me twenty dollars from a bet we made in 2003. The bet is not the point. I mention it because Tunde would want me to mention it. Here is what I remember about the first day. I had been assigned the seat next to his because the boy who had previously occupied it had moved to Ibadan. Tunde turned to look at me with the specific expression of a person conducting an assessment. He was small then, which surprises people who meet him now. He looked at my pencil case, which was green and had a small plastic ruler attached to it by a cord, and he said, in a tone that contained no particular feeling, "That ruler is too small to be useful." Then he turned back to face the front of the room. This was his way of saying hello. I know this now. I did not know it then. What I thought then was that I had been seated next to a very strange person. We were inseparable by the following Tuesday. I cannot fully account for this. What Tunde was, to be specific, was relentless. He had opinions about everything and delivered them without apology. He was also, underneath all of that, loyal in the way that certain people are loyal, which is to say completely and without making a production of it. When my family left for Ohio in 1990, he stood outside our compound on the morning we loaded the car and said nothing useful. He had brought me a packet of chin-chin, wrapped in newspaper. He handed it over, looked at the ground, and said, "Write me." Then he went home. I wrote him. He wrote back. This was before email meant anything to either of us, so we wrote actual letters, which took two weeks to arrive and sometimes arrived out of order, so that you would receive a letter asking a question after you had already received the letter in which he had answered it himself. We adapted. We were twelve. You do not question the logistics when the alternative is losing the only person who knew you before you became whoever you were becoming. He lives in London now. Has for twenty years. He works in finance, which is the right job for someone who has always kept precise track of what is owed and what is not. He has a wife named Folake and two sons who are both taller than he is, which he mentions more than is necessary. We talk on the phone every few weeks. When we do, the conversation picks up from wherever it left off, which is a thing I used to take for granted and now understand is not ordinary. I have seen him in person seven times in the last fifteen years. I know this because I counted once, and the number seemed wrong, so I counted again. It was still seven. When you see someone seven times in fifteen years and they are still the first person you would call if something went wrong, you have to ask yourself what friendship actually is. Here is what I think it is, after thirty-six years of evidence. It is not proximity. It is not frequency. It is the fact that Tunde Adeyemi, in 1990, stood outside a compound at six in the morning to hand a packet of chin-chin to a boy who was leaving, and that boy never forgot it, and that neither of them has ever once needed to say so. He will read this, probably. I have told him about Memoracy because he makes fun of everything I assign my students and I wanted him to see what honest answering looks like. Tunde, the twenty dollars. You know what you did.