Excerpt from Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Go and face your books and don't let me hear your mouth again this night." Ma would frown, but she'd still pat my Jheri curl as I trailed despondently out of the kitchen.

Gloria tried to teach me how to fight, but my attempts were pathetic in a way that infuriated her and exhausted me, so I spent my time either with my limited circle of friends or hiding out in the library with Ms. Collins, the fuck-free librarian who gave me books I was technically too young to read. Around the time I discovered books and computers were enough, puberty discovered me, bringing with it a pair of hips and a six-inch growth spurt to balance them out. Suddenly I had a pair of boobs nestling underneath my school shirt, a set that may not have been of Gloria proportions but still moved liberally enough for my sister to haul me before our mother and demand I be taken shopping for a reinforced bra.

"It's almost pornographic, Ma," she'd hissed, gesturing at my chest. "Do something."

It was unfair. It was more body than I knew what to do with. I was unused to the male gaze, comfortable in the shadows, sneaking through life unnoticed and unbothered. I had, like Gloria, discovered books on Black feminism, much to my sister's delight, who thought I ought to use my blossoming ass to torment boyfolk of all kinds.

"You should join the field hockey team," Gloria said at the behest of her coach, who had also clocked my new height and the thickening of my thighs.

"What? No." The thought of spectators watching my behind bouncing up and down on the hockey pitch was enough to push me toward cardiac arrest.

"It's fun. You get to hurt people without getting into any real trouble," Gloria said, excellently impersonating a psychopath.

"No."

"Marcus Raines has rugby training at the same time." This piqued my interest. Marcus Raines was the hazel-eyed object of adolescent female lust from ages eleven to seventeen. Gloria registered my interest with disgust. "I was kidding. Leave that boy alone," she warned as we waited outside the school gates for an aunty-but-not-really to swoop by with Nate and pick us up. But these, like so many of Gloria's sage words, fell from her lips onto my newly braided hair, rolled off and plopped into the dust by our feet as we climbed into the car.

In the end, the only thing that kept me from Marcus was my own shyness compounded with a crippling awkwardness I hid behind the autobiographies of great women Ms. Collins recommended.

* * *

The point is this: I was unprepared for Quentin when I met him at nineteen. I took a place at King's College to study English and digital media (I could do this without guilt as Gloria had dipped and twirled off to Oxford to study law) and combined my love of books with an aptitude for Adobe Creative Suite. Until Quentin, university for me could be summarized as a series of questionable outfits, evenings spent reading Dostoyevsky by lamplight (because I was an idiot who thought it romantic when what it was was the catalyst for my now diminished eyesight) and realizing I could stay out until four in the morning without any ramifications more serious than weathering the inevitable battle to stay awake during lectures. Limits were hazy and could be traversed with the right amount of gumption and liquid courage. I was still shy, still self-conscious of what I looked like from behind, but I had an expansive vocabulary and access to cheap shots at the student union. Anything seemed possible.

I had clumsy sex for the first time with a boy named Dane, who had large hands and pawed at my chest like he was trying to commit the swell of my cleavage to memory. I dated him half-heartedly because for me, wallflower extraordinaire, nothing about sex was casual. I even grew fond of the way he would arrive at my campus room every Friday and pretend to care as I cut his hair and told him about my week. On campus I did as much reinvention as I could. I wore butt-length braids, I swore a lot. I tried but failed to become the hard drinker university students are expected to be. I started bandying about the phrase patriarchal stultification and befriended a group of radical feminists who signed me up to a debate team.

Excerpted from Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli. Copyright © 2022 by Onyi Nwabineli. Excerpted by permission of Graydon House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.