Night Like That (gxg)

20. i want commitment but does it want me

Now

Chastity was a questioning-commitment kind of girl because of her very cliché parental issues. She had never thought of herself as traumatized or anything – just smart enough to understand that putting yourself in a situation that required some kind of union to be considered romantic was, at best, questionable. At worst, stupid.

Unlike Ivy's parents who genuinely seemed to like each other (as much as Kenyan parents did anyways) she couldn't remember a time when her parents had been civil for the sake of being civil.

The toothpaste had been pressed on wrong. The food had too little salt. Why was the telly on fucking KTN when the house was a Citizen kind of house? Who dared to not tumble dry the bomber jacket that clearly was specified to tumble dry?

In Chastity's life, the worst her parents ever got was when they had come to her academic day in form two. It had been a shock for her. They never actually came to any school activity together – certainly not one where they would have to actually interact for long periods of time. Academic day was exactly that. Long lines and talking to one another to alleviate boredom and pretend to actually care about Chastity's academic performance.

Mercifully, they had gone through most of the big six; English, Maths, Kiswahili and Chemistry. Chastity had done everyone a favour by booking space on both the Biology and Physics lines so that everything could go faster. They could ignore the humanities and technical subjects – they weren't important enough for her to risk an outright war between her parents.

She had been wrong.

Her mum had forgotten both her lip-balm and Vaseline in the car and her father was not having any of it. "Surely," he had said in a clipped voice that was low but still high enough for Chastity to register the fight in it, "you could do the bare minimum and look decent. What do you want the people around to think? That I don't know how to control my wife? Are you purposefully trying to embarrass me with your chapped lips? At least pretend to think about your daughter and the precedence this sets out for her."

They had been one student away from her Biology teacher. It was supposed to be fine.

"Oh," her mother had snapped back, "now you think you own me?"

Her father gave a sharp almost triumphant nod. "With your dowry expense, yes. I do actually own you."

Because her parents thrived off drama as much as they did fighting every chance they got, they had migrated from using Kamba and were straight up using Kiswahili, earning a few looks here and there. A few interested looks that had Chastity's heart pounding. If they didn't stop, they were going to completely embarrass her.

"Did I actually tell you to pay any of it? You could have said no. Be the modern man you like pretending to be, eh? Maybe if I actually ended up with the second contender, we'd be at our son's academic day!"

A sharp and piercing noise rented the air. Her mum gasped in outrage and those around followed suit. Chastity had taken a step back. She'd never actually seen either of her parents result to physical violence. It always remained in the verbal. Then again, she'd never heard her mother insinuate anything of the sort she'd just heard.

"You will respect me," her father had said through gritted teeth, her mother still clutching at her cheek, eyes wide in absolute shock.

Everyone around them had been quiet, vampirically taking it all in. Chastity was in a kind of state; the one that had her questioning why no one was stepping up front to make the whole thing better. She couldn't. She was the child and she hadn't wanted to risk being smacked in front of everyone in her form.