Efua's mother introduced her the same way at every gathering: "This is the one who made it." Not by name first. By function.
She had stopped correcting the introduction years ago. It wasn't inaccurate, exactly — she had the job, the flat in East Legon, the ability to send money home without checking her account balance first. What the introduction left out was the version of her that existed before any of it: the girl who used to fail mathematics quietly, who cried in the bathroom before her final exams, who never once decided to become the family's proof of concept. It simply happened to her, the way weather happens to a person standing outside without an umbrella.
Her younger brother, Kojo, had a different relationship with the family's expectations. Nobody introduced him by function. He was simply "the other one," which she used to think was a kindness extended to him and never noticed, until the year he stopped coming to family gatherings altogether.
She found him eventually, in the small flat he shared with two roommates, doing work he loved and earned little from. "You have room to be who you actually are," she told him, and heard, only after she said it, how much envy was folded into the sentence.
He looked at her for a long moment. "You could put the umbrella down too, you know," he said. "Nobody's actually still checking if it's raining on you."
She didn't have an answer for that. She still doesn't, most days. But she has started, occasionally, to imagine what she might build if the building were only for her.
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