Free Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction by Teju Cole

traveling in the opposite direction. In about five minutes we find a place that has diesel. I am impressed by the way Rotimi talks to the woman at the pump. He falls into a casual vernacular that erases the social distance between them. The message, unmistakably, is that we need her, that it is in her power to help us out. Diesel is advertised at seventy-seven naira per liter. I tell her we want two thousand five hundred worth, and she carefully fills up the jerry can until the numbers on the pump tick exactly to two five. I thank her and pay with a pair of thousand-naira notes and a five hundred. As wepull out of the station and onto the highway Rotimi laughs and says:
    —You noticed what just happened, right?
    —Um, no. What?
    —How much did you pay?
    —Two five. That’s how much I wanted, and that was the reading on the machine. So don’t worry, I had my eye on things.
    —Okay, yes, but did you see the advertised rate?
    —Sure, it was seventy-seven.
    —And how big was your jerry can? Twenty-five liters, abi be ko ?
    —Ol’ boy, I don’t see what you’re driving at.
    —You had your eye on things! Omo , do the maths.
    So I do. Twenty-five at seventy-seven only comes to nineteen twenty-five. Christ. She’s just had us for almost six hundred naira, easy as that. Rotimi chuckles again and says:
    —Don’t sweat it, that’s just the way it is, man.
    —This damn country.
    Somehow, seeing the advertised rate set into the pump, and seeing the pump tick up the numbers, made me think that everything was clean and official.
    —We couldn’t have done anything about it. That’s just the way it is, she has to have her own cut. It saves us the trouble of having to tip her.
    He laughs again. I am a little annoyed, but I have to marvel at how brazen it all is. So I smile too, and swear again. We cruise on the highway, red lights twinkling directlyahead of us, the white headlamps of oncoming cars flashing to our left. And as we approach Isheri, I say what has been weighing on my mind all evening:
    —Rotimi, how did you deal with the, I mean, how did you cope with Sola’s death?
    The unspoken thing. I haven’t seen him since it happened, in 1993. From the late seventies and for most of the eighties we were a close-knit crew. Their mother and my father had gone to school together, and when they’d had us three boys within the space of three years, it was natural that close friendships would ensue. And so, the Bamgbose boys are there in those early photos, my fifth birthday, his brother, Sola’s third, someone else’s tenth. Sola was the youngest of us three, he was the runt, the one we teased constantly, a rambunctious, happy kid. They were always there with me, as the photos went from black-and-white prints to the washed-out colors of the Polaroids, wearing the same bow ties and ruffled shirts that our mothers made us wear to those parties. The lights of the Lagos night interrupt the darkness of the car at intervals, as though we were passing under scanners. Rotimi’s face takes on that guarded, distant look that I know so well. But when he starts to talk, it is clear that he wants to open up.
    —It was very difficult. You know, he and I were in the same class, in spite of our age difference.
    —I never did know what happened exactly. An accident at that boarding school in Abeokuta, right?
    —Yes. We were in SS One. I had just turned fifteen, andSola was fourteen. He was always one of the youngest kids in class. Anyway, one of his friends, a day student, had brought a car to school to impress the boarders with. Which, of course, wasn’t allowed. And somehow or the other, the car stopped working, developed some fault. So the boy who brought it gets into the car, and the other boys, there are three of them, start to push the car. They finally get it to start, and the three boys stop pushing. They climb up on the trunk for a laugh. But the boy inside the car doesn’t see them do this, and he just accelerates and