Perfectly Imperfect

~55~

                             
Bare your soul to me
  Here I stand for you.

                               

                                ~KUNMI~

The uninvited creature did not only stay for breakfast, infact she made brunch for herself and Junior. She just made herself at home. I did not think I've ever felt at home like she was feeling. Mom and Dad were not at home so it was just the three of us and the maids at home and Sophia was quick to use that ample opportunity to just display her highest level of weirdness and craziness that my brother had to pull me aside and tell me this.

"Are you sure this is the original Sophia Williams or someone pretending to be her?"

I just smiled and shook my head because I was really starting to believe the latter.

"Shouldn't you go back home or at least call home and let them know where you are?"

She shrugged from where she sat down on the floor, her back resting against my bed while I sat down on my bed.

"There's no one at home, my parents are away on a business trip and my brother followed Steph to her chemo so..." She shrugged again. "I'm all yours today."

I barely heard every other thing she said with my brain just wrapping itself around the word Chemo and trying to understand its meaning.

"Chemo?" I echoed, sounding incredibly dumb to even my own ears but I went on anyway because it surely couldn't be the Chem I was thinking about. "What's that?"

Her fingers stilled on her phone screen and she turned back so she'd be able to see my face.

"Normal Chemotherapy of course. Is there another one?" She said this with a casual shrug, a nonchalant shrug even, as if chemo was something as normal as getting treatments for flu or malaria.

For a minute or two or even more, I couldn't think of anything to say. I just sat there, staring at her and trying to take it all in. Her sister was that sick? That explained it then, her dark moods, the deep sadness in her eyes whenever she thought no one was looking. It was all because her sister was sick? That sick?

The thought made me shiver.

Cancer wasn't something that happens to the people I know, cancer wasn't something that happens to my friends' sisters and definitely not Sophia's sister. That kind of pain of watching a loved one go through that much physical pain wasn't something that happens to Sophia Williams, who looked like life was supposed to always fall into pleasant places for her, who looked like she did not even deserve to know what the p in pain looks like.

I remembered Aminah's words too, when she said it was basically impossible for Sophia to be going through anything bad but she was actually going through this. This wasn't only bad, it was worst. It was all too much to take in. Her sister had cancer? I remembered how her sister was that other night of her party, even then, I had sensed that something was wrong but I just never thought... I could have never thought it was something this bad.

How she was even managing... How she was holding her shit together was baffling. I don't know what I'd have done if I was in her position.

If Mayowa was the one...

I visibly shuddered and I blocked that thought immediately.

Sophia was still looking at me, her expression blank and empty and her face... Her face looked like something that had been carved out of pain and sadness itself and it shattered me completely, to see her like that, completely beaten up and sad.