Growing up, Jade learned the math of beauty the hard way: if a boy asked you out, you were pretty. If he didn't, something was wrong with your face. It didn't matter what people said about her body mostly boys who thought a compliment about her chest was the same as a compliment about her. Her elder sister could walk into a room and stop conversations. Her younger sister could too. Jade had the body every boy in her class claimed to want, and a face she was convinced made them want it from a distance.

So when she finished secondary school and enrolled at Opemipe Gallery to learn tie and dye, she didn't expect much to change. She expected dye buckets and burnt fingers. She didn't expect five boys.

Samuel, Promise, James, Femi, Ire , they noticed her almost immediately, the way boys notice anywhere a new girl shows up. *Fresh meat*, one of them laughed, not bothering to lower his voice. She should have hated it. Instead she turned the word over in her chest like something warm.

James and Femi she brushed off easily. Ire she barely registered. But Samuel and Promise actually tried.

Samuel was nineteen, a gateman saving toward school fees. He started slow pure water when the sun was hard, roasted corn on her way home, small jewelry once he had the money. Fake gold that turned your neck green, but it made her feel chosen. He never asked for anything back. He just kept showing up with something in his hand.

Promise was nineteen too, but he came empty-handed and somehow louder for it. He brought attention instead constant, thick, the kind that filled a room the moment he walked in. He noticed her new hairstyle, noticed when she was tired, noticed everything except that he never once brought her anything but himself.

Jade had spent years being told, one rejection at a time, that she wasn't the kind of girl boys chose. So she didn't ask why a boy who wanted her so badly never gave her anything. She cooked for him instead, out of her own foodstuffs. She told herself that was what you did when a boy paid you attention you fed it so it wouldn't leave.

It didn't take long before Promise wanted more than food.

He was patient the way boys are patient when they know patience is its own kind of pressure. *We're both virgins, so who are we even protecting it for?* Jade always said no — not a shy no, a real one, repeated so often it started to feel like a chore. He'd sulk for a day or two, then come back sweeter than before, and the cycle would start again.

She told herself she was strong for holding the line. She didn't yet understand that a girl can hold a line for months and still be losing something the whole time — her peace, the small tired part of her that started rehearsing excuses before he even asked.

Samuel watched from the edge of things. He saw how close she and Promise had grown, and instead of saying anything, he just brought another gift, hoping patience would eventually turn her his way. It didn't. Samuel was safe, and safe never felt like desire it felt like settling.

By the time Jade finished her training her hands finally steady with the wax Promise had worn her refusal down to something thinner. Not agreement. Just exhaustion dressed up as almost-agreement.

She never found out if he'd have kept his word, because two weeks before her final fabrics were due, she learned Promise had spent the whole stretch seeing someone else a girl on the next street, told the same lines, in the same voice, at the same gate where he used to wait for Jade.

James told her, not unkindly. She didn't cry in front of anyone. She went home, folded her last piece of fabric into a neat square, and sat with it in her lap for a long time.

What hurt wasn't losing Promise she'd never really had him. What hurt was realizing the attention she'd fed with her own foodstuffs, defended with her own body, had never been about her at all. She'd been fresh meat exactly the way that boy said, laughing, her first week new, and therefore wanted, and therefore replaceable the moment she stopped being new.

Samuel found out too, the way everyone at the gallery eventually did. He didn't say *I told you so*. He just showed up the next day with roasted corn, set it beside her without a word, and let her decide, for once, whether she wanted to reach for it.

She didn't. Not that day. She sat with the fabric in her lap and the corn going cold beside her, and for the first time since secondary school, she didn't ask herself whether she was pretty enough to deserve either.