It was supposed to be a snicker, but Kanayo could not tame it—the laughter boiling in the pit of his stomach, travelling up his chest, and flaring through his veins. Before he realized what was happening, a loud, vicious sound erupted from his lips.

From the left corner of the spacious room, Fr. Moses Ojomo, who doubled as the school’s principal, held sway in a swinging chair behind a desk, book in hand. Looking up from the book, his gaze floated towards them. “Who was that?” he growled. “Who did that?” His eyebrows were deeply furrowed behind thick-rimmed glasses that made him look like Kanayo’s father.

“He’s coming, he’s coming,” whispered Audu, the cause of Kanayo’s outburst, straightening, his knees pressed against the cold linoleum floor.

Fr. Moses sprang to his feet, an enormous presence in a white billowing cassock. Strutting forward, he held a long, three-pronged whip and cracked it against the leg of the desk.

Kanayo swallowed a ball of saliva, feeling a sharp sting at the back of his throat. He examined the whip. Its puffy body bore a close resemblance to the koboko his father kept hidden in a corner in his study.

Fr. Moses snapped, glaring at them, and Kanayo could barely recognize him, this man who sometimes visited his parents in the evenings at Itakpe to pray with them. His mother would plead with him to stay a little longer while she prepared dinner. Even his father would join his voice with hers, pleading with him to stay and eat, until sometimes Fr. Moses reneged on his decision, saying, “Prof, it’s because of you and madam o. If it were any other parishioner, I wouldn’t agree to stay.” Kanayo would crouch between two armchairs and watch them—his father and Fr. Moses—staring intently at the TV, laughing and cheering as Undertaker flipped Tripple H over in a bid to smack his head on the ring. He would get lost in that brief moment of shared euphoria.

Kanayo stole a quick glance at Audu, who was busy picking at his nails and moving his head sideways, swaying to a melody he alone could hear, unperturbed. He felt a thin pang of jealousy towards Audu, this boy who could slide in and out of character. Audu pranced about with a smugness that held the rhythm of command, a boy bold enough to defy rules and regulations. He had eyes and ears everywhere; he wasn’t scared to walk shoulder to shoulder with his seniors, fist-bumping them at will. Audu was always in the company of bad boys, the sort of boys who smoked joints in hidden corners of the dormitory and classrooms until their eyes were flushed red. Recently he had begun to puff a stick or two like them and pick on other junior students.

Kanayo could not bring himself to say that Audu was the reason for the outburst. How could he tell Fr. Moses that Audu had been twerking moments ago and licking his index finger as though he were giving someone a blow job? He couldn’t betray his friend. Yes, his friend. That was how Kanayo regarded him. Audu had grown to occupy a soft spot in Kanayo’s heart, but sometimes he doubted his place in Audu’s life. He could not help but worry that the thread of friendship between them—if it was actually there—was slowly coming undone. It seemed to him that he was the only person holding unto it, clinging to its frayed edge like a birthright while Audu’s own end remained lax, as though he were barely making an effort. Kanayo noticed the slackness between them in class each time Audu rose in the middle of a discussion and strolled to the rear of the class to be with his guys.

Sometimes Kanayo wondered if what Audu felt for him was love or hate or just admiration. Once, when a student said something nasty and the entire class broke into raucous laughter, the teacher on duty had roared, “Who was that?” And within a second Audu had shouted, “It was Kanayo, sir.” It had taken Cecelia, Kanayo’s seatmate, and a couple of other students to rush to his rescue, insisting that it was not him, that Kanayo wasn’t the sort of person to disrupt a class.

Again Fr. Moses cracked his whip. “You think I am joking here?” He glanced back and forth between Kanayo and Audu and then back to Kanayo, as though, if his eyes lingered on Audu too long, they would fall out. Kanayo felt a gnawing pain around his knees, but he couldn’t afford to lean on anything, couldn’t bring his hands down to his side, or else Fr. Moses would pounce on him like a lion.

If not for Jerry, that stupid class captain who had included Kanayo on the noise-makers list, he wouldn’t be here right now, in this cold room while class was ongoing. It wasn’t astonishing to find Audu on the list, since he was a regular customer of nuisance, but the annoying part was that they were the only culprits on the list. How was it possible? What game was Jerry playing? Even with both eyes closed, Kanayo could reel off the names of other students guilty of disturbing the class.

Fr. Moses should flog them already; Kanayo was tired of kneeling on the floor. Since he had started at the school a year ago, this was the first time he would be punished by the principal. He had heard stories of how Fr. Moses dealt ruthlessly with boys who fell into his black books. In addition to flogging, he compelled the students either to wash the toilets behind the senior blocks or to clear the school farm, flooded with thickets of stubborn grass.

The principal drew nearer, until a single stroke of the cane separated him from the boys. Kanayo cracked his knuckles, preparing himself for what was coming. Which side would Fr. Moses prefer? His palms or his buttocks? He could stand to take the strokes on his palms or on any other portion of his body, but definitely not his buttocks. He wouldn’t be able to sit for days.

Pointing the whip at him, Fr. Moses said, “Kanayo Ugwu, son of Professor Charles Ugwu, my good friend.” He paused. “I pity you. You know why?” It wasn’t a question begging for an answer, Kanayo sensed. Pushing the glasses up on the bridge of his nose, Fr. Moses droned on: “Continue following this one, this riffraff…” He poked Audu’s face with the whip.

“I beg leave me jor,” Audu snarled, shoving the cane from his cheek. “If you injure me, you go take me go hospital o.”

Fr. Moses’s eyes went wide with shock, his mouth curved in a perfect O. “Did you just open that thing you call a mouth to talk to me like that? Do I look like your mate?” He shot Audu a red-hot glare that could have set a house ablaze. But that was it; he did not raise a finger to harm him. “Sometimes I wonder who you resemble in your family.” He was tapping the whip on his palm, scrunching his nose. “Your father is a nice man, and your mother so respectful and hardworking. But you…you are a complete buffoon.”

If asked to explain how he did it then, how he was able to contain the hot laughter burning in his guts for as long as it took to kill the flames, Kanayo would have said it was a miracle.

“Keep fooling yourself,” Fr. Moses added to Audu. “You know this is your second year in JSS3? Your mates are all in SS1.”

Almost immediately, Kanayo felt a pang of guilt in his chest. He shouldn’t have laughed at Audu. Laughing at someone’s failure wasn’t a kind thing to do. He hadn’t repeated a class in his entire life, and he couldn’t imagine starting all over again, from scratch. How was Audu able to tolerate the shame and mental torture of being in the same class for a whole session with his successors—boys and girls he had once jeered at and bullied for the fun of it—while his mates transitioned to a new class? Perhaps Audu was feeling bad about himself right now. Kanayo couldn’t tell. Audu’s expression could pass for sadness or nonchalance.

Suddenly Fr. Moses turned to Kanayo. Snorting, he pushed a hand into the pocket of his vestment and pulled out a bone-white handkerchief to blow his nose.

Kanayo allowed himself to be distracted by Fr. Moses’s office. Bright showers of midday sun were blocked behind thick curtains with floral prints, only glimmering through in fragments. On the wall beside a rectangular air-conditioner hung three large portraits: the Pope, Benedict XVI, a chubby-faced man dressed in a white vestment; the Bishop of Lokoja Diocese, Most Reverend Dr. Martins Olorunmolu, dark and unsmiling; and a smiling Rev. Fr. Moses. They were arranged next to each other in order of hierarchy. Beside a table piled with books and a big black Bible stood a wardrobe plastered to the wall, revealing a handful of coloured vestments.

A huge painting of Our Mother of Perpetual Succor caught his eyes. It was propped against the wall in a corner of the room, surrounded by a row of lit white candles. In the portrait, a woman wearing a veil held a small child in her arms, with a flaming-gold halo looped over each of their heads. Flanking her on both sides were angelic beings wearing the same loop-shaped halos above their heads. The painting was an exact replica of the one in his father’s study. Kanayo had first stumbled upon it while cleaning the study. His father had been standing a few meters away as he swept the floor and dusted the cushion by the window. Kanayo’s gaze met the portrait. He stared at it for a while, enthralled by its simplistic beauty and an air of calm as the child was swaddled in the arms of the mother.

“It is a Byzantine icon,” his father told him.

“Eh?” Kanayo said, scratching his head.

“You heard me right.”

His father droned on about the painting, how it was an ancient relic. Most of the words slid out of Kanayo’s mind like thawing ice; they were so complex that they made little sense to him. Still, he listened. He enjoyed moments like this, moments when they found a common ground within the quotidian, when his father regaled him with stories about the Biafran war, about America, about other historical events. Yet the only thing he was able to remember from his father’s speech was that the portrait had become an object of worship again when it was discovered by a group of archeologists many centuries after it was made, and that many miracles were wrought by it upon its veneration.

“Do you know whose son you are?” Fr. Moses’s razor-sharp voice cut through Kanayo’s musings. “Of course, you know the reason your father brought you to this school. Do you know how disappointed he would be if he found out that you have not changed? In fact, he would be devastated to know that you now hang out with this boy, this ne’er-do-well.” He eyed Audu. “After leaving your class few hours ago, you and this f… Lord have mercy on me.” He made the sign of the cross on his own forehead. “Both of you had the nerve to disturb the class. I thought you were a quiet person. Initially, when I heard the reports that you now hang out with this boy, I thought they were all lies. ‘Based on his past record, Kanayo isn’t that stupid,’ I thought. But now you’ve proved me wrong.”

Kanayo’s mind became a rollercoaster of thoughts. What had Fr. Moses heard about him and Audu? Did it include those cryptic nights when he had nuzzled against Audu on his bed, flicking his tongue over his throat as Audu slipped a hand into his shorts? Was Fr. Moses aware of the evening when he had skipped mass just to be with Audu under the cashew tree behind the junior hostel, to hear him rant about life? In that moment Kanayo had caught sight of a different Audu, discovered the tenderness in his words and in the way he ran his fingers down the plane of Kanayo’s face. He was enthralled by Audu as he watched him puff a blunt, his face partially veiled in perfect rings of smoke.

Fr. Moses did not divulge what he had been told, and Kanayo prayed silently that he wouldn’t tell his father whatever it was. He closed his eyes and stretched out his hand, waiting for the full weight of the whip to land on his palm; but, to his surprise, Fr. Moses did not raise the cane against him. Instead he reminded him again of the reason he had been sent to St. Harmony’s College, without delving into details. “Remember why you came here,” he declared. “A word is enough for the wise.”

He dismissed them then, but Kanayo saw something in his eyes, something dark, as he shook his head at Kanayo, and that memory would stay with him for a long time.

Now they were out of the cold breath of the room, delivered into the blazing underbelly of the sun. Kanayo seemed to have been transformed into a different person, a creature imbued with fury, whose pace Audu struggled to keep up with. When Audu called out to him, after catching sight of a handful of senior boys in cream-coloured shirts and blue trousers, loitering in the corridor of their hostel, Kanayo did not halt in his tracks.

The bell for siesta must have been jiggled, Audu thought, sidestepping the puddle in front of him. Kanayo did not turn around, even when Audu called his name for the umpteenth time. It was strange. Kanayo wasn’t the sort of person to get so angry. Perhaps it had something to do with what that stupid priest had said. But the man had also launched some vile words at him, so that couldn’t be the reason. It was obvious that the priest knew quite a lot about Kanayo and his family. Well, whatever relationship existed between them, Audu was grateful for it. It had saved him from being flogged by that old man.

Yet there was something odd about Kanayo’s outrage. Audu could sense it in the heaviness with which Kanayo’s feet came down on the concrete pathway, as he squeezed through the maze of ixora and hibiscus plants leading to the junior boys’ hostel. It was in the heartless manner with which Kanayo yanked off the purple heads of plumeria plants beside the water tank.

What could be the reason for this new rage? Audu kept wondering about it as he clambered onto the elevated slab of concrete in front of the hostel’s main door. Maybe it had something to do with the last thing Fr. Moses had said. What had the man meant by the reason Kanayo was brought to the College by his father? What could it possibly be?

Audu promised himself that he would find the answers to these questions roaring in his head.

SAY IT LIKE YOU CAN’T BREATHE is a coming-of-age novel about love and the journey to understanding one’s sexuality, as well as the challenge of keeping passion alive in a society steeped in hate and violence. The main character, Kanayo, is forced to enroll in a mixed Catholic secondary school by his strict father, after he was caught kissing a boy in a corner of the church. His father hopes that, perhaps, in the midst of girls and with a new closeness to God, his son will be redeemed and perhaps purged of the spirit of homosexuality that has crawled into his life and household.

But Kanayo’s life is transformed when he meets Audu at St Harmony’s Catholic secondary school, Lokoja. Audu is both Kanayo’s blessing and his downfall. In a society which frowns at homosexuality, declaring it as immoral and a fetish, the boys struggle to manoeuvre in these dark waters. They take bold risks, hurt a few people, even take a blood oath of allegiance to be faithful to each other. But then the wheels of adulthood roll in, bringing its own complexities, reshaping their lives, and flinging them into different places, far from each other’s reach.

Despite the distance and the many changes their lives have undergone, will their love stand the test of time? What will be the impact of their blood oath, taken years ago, on themselves, their current lives, and their future?