11 Mewa

I opened my eyes to see a room I didn't recognize. There were African paintings and prints everywhere and I admired them as I got up. My head was pounding, but there was no time to focus on that. I was finally gonna escape these hoes. I realized there was no window in my room and pressed my ear to the hallway door. The lights were off and there was no trace of movement. I crept into the hallway and tried to figure out how to leave. I walked forward, felt a doorknob and quietly opened it. It definitely wasn't a direct way out, but it seemed as if there was a window inside for me to climb out of. As I crept closer to it I began to whisper prayers to myself in Yoruba as I tried to find my footing on the windowsill. As I climbed on top and felt for the opening of the window, my hand somehow sunk into the wall. I yelped as I jumped away and whispered another prayer as if it was a curse. Then, the entire wall disappeared into a slot in the ground to reveal a walk in closet. My dumb ass decided to enter, extremely unsure of what I would find, then realized it looked normal enough. There were formal designer coats and shoes and hats and pants. It could've been a walk-in closet. But I knew Ade better than that, and I assumed I was in his place. Ade could probably go a week without changing his sweatpants. He thinks he's so cute he can get away with wearing whatever he wants and he hates designer clothes. I realized this must be some type of decoy. I began searching for what he could be hiding and noticed a little drawing in the corner of the wall behind the clothes. I walked closer to it and realized what it was, an Adinkra symbol. And not just any adinkra symbol, the symbol for freedom. I touched it and the clothes sunk into the floor, as maps, pictures, codes, and more rose around the room. I felt my skin tingle, laughed incredulously and turned around to face Ade.

"So where the fuck am I to begin with?" I asked as Ade rolled his eyes.

"You made good time." he responded

"Thank you. Now, care to explain to me what this is and why you led me here?" I smirked as I took a seat on a nearby couch. He walked to the Kurig and began brewing some tea.

"Would you like some?"

"Yes. Ginger please. Now why am I here?"

"I need you."

"For what exactly?"

"To stop Ximenes."

"Whomst?"

"Ximenes Moreno, your captor?"

"Oh you mean Xylophone. Proceed."

"You love to play too goddamn much I swear. Okay get comfortable, this is a long one. When I was very young, Ximenes was my neighbor"

"Wow, back in 555 BC! What was it like?"

"Okay Nki, I get it. W have a three year age difference, shut up and move on. So anyways, we were neighbors, X was a bit older than me but I was always mature and tall for my age, so it didn't matter and we got along fine. He always wanted big things. Like BIG things. While I could relate, I knew becoming THE richest man in the world was something that would be unrealistic for me as a black boy, with a foreign name, who grew up poor. I wasn't really interested in extreme wealth like that to begin with, the power was something that seemed mentally taxing. X however, fit the perfect bill. His parents were disgraced heirs so he always felt money was something that was owed to him. It was in his blood. Skip forward to high school, I graduated early at sixteen, three years after he graduated at 18. By now we had grown apart, although we were friends, his parents' views had always been a bit problematic and he had somewhat taken after them. I was never one to deal with ignorance so I may or may not have called him a bitch and broken his nose in freshman year. To be fair, it was an accident, I have a tendency to be heavy handed, but he was pressed for three weeks because people kept teasing him for being clocked by a twelve year old, the youngest kid in school since I skipped a couple grades. Anyways, after that we grew apart and I didn't hear about him for a while after he graduated. About a year before I graduated, my baby sister was kidnapped. No one knew what happened to her but the police mostly dismissed it as a case of a runaway. They said it wasn't unlikely for "young women from our city with her background". They ignored the fact that she was a straight A student, they ignored the fact that she had goals mapped out five years ahead, all including her family, her education and her home. They ignored the fact that she left without telling me, when shortly before she wouldn't even leave the room without telling me. We were so close and they expected me to believe that she had willingly left her brother, her role model, her friend, without so much as a hug before bed the night before? A note? There was nothing indicating that she had planned it. Days went by, then weeks, then months, then a year. No one knew where she went. There were no leads. It was like she had vanished. Then one day, a year later , I bumped into Ximenes. At this point I had been accepted into MIT on full scholarship with a major in computer science and programming. X informed me of a new business that he was starting up and asked me if I wanted to head the Tech branch of his company. Of course I didn't accept immediately, I researched and researched about the company's background and where he got investors to build it from but there were no investors. The fact that he suddenly had all this money was more than suspicious to me, yet I couldn't trace any illegal activity. When he offered to pay off my parents' mortgage in exchange for my work plus a six figure salary, I accepted wearily. I thought it was harmless, my parents were struggling for so long. When I begged to take the load off their hands they refused, but they deserved so much better. Slowly with my designs the business grew, the first thing that passed other companies in profit was my tablet design, then laptop, then phone. Slowly Ximenes branched it out to other places and before I knew it, I got the call we had passed apple, then Samsung, then we were the #1 tech company in the world and I was a billionaire. One of the richest men in the world. The second richest to be exact, behind Ximenes. Somehow, in my gut I still felt unbalanced. I payed off my parents' debts, bought them a mansion in Nigeria and a nice condo in New York City, then I donated billions to various charities. I still felt a hole. I decided to use my newfound fortune to hire a P.I. to look for my sister. After months of searching, I was given an address. I asked my P.I. what he meant but he told me he could no longer do anything but give me this address. The very next day I plotted my GPS (literally mine, I made it, trademark) to the address and drove. When I got there, it seemed there was nothing but a deserted building. The wind whistled through the cracked windows of the dingy building and vines danced around the side bricks. I had no doubt 90 rats and 300 roaches were in there throwing it back at the fucking vermin party of the year. I almost turned away, but I before I could, my throat closed up and my eyes watered.

Right in front of it, was my sister. "