Drama in Royal Priesthood

No day passes at Royal Priesthood High School without drama, and Amylade "Amy" Falade should know — she survived every single one of them. At RPHS, a private boarding school where gossip is oxygen, the drama curriculum includes pant thieves in the hostel, abandoned babies in the dorms, holiday-coaching crushes, and prefect politics sharper than any exam. Amy is happy to watch the show from the middle of the crowd, until Oreoluwa, the fine boy every girl in the set notices, starts walking her home, and Queen Ogar, the loudest, shiniest, most dangerous girl in school, decides Amy is interesting enough to adopt into her circle.

It is the opportunity of Amy's life, and the beginning of her trouble. Inside Queen's group she is finally somebody — but the seat has a price. When Eniola, the quiet, Bible-carrying girl the whole set loves to hate, is framed for a porn scandal, Amy keeps her head down and her mouth shut, and hates herself a little more each day. Then Peace, a member of the group, confides an unwanted pregnancy she cannot afford to fix, a secret Saturday dinner is planned behind closed doors, and by Monday morning the school is whispering that Peace is dead. Amy walks out of the group with her name intact, and a nylon bag she will never forget.

Grief keeps stacking. Her mother dies. Her father brings home a new wife with a past the whole house argues about. Her wild elder sister Motofumi chooses cigarettes, loud speakers and stranger friends over family, and Amy, still a girl herself, becomes the adult under that roof. Clawing her way from average student to senior girl, she snatches the one badge everybody swore belonged to Queen — and discovers exactly how cold a best friend's smile can turn.

University in Lagos is supposed to be the clean slate: Medicine and Surgery, a white coat within reach, a campus where nobody knows her story. But Lagos has its own weather. Boys catcall outside the examination hall. A friendly smoker called DD dreams of music while his father chains him to medicine. And then a peach-colored Benz slows down beside her, and Queen climbs out — richer, smoother, building a fresh empire of "potentials", and waiting with a request that is not a request: carry a chip into the GST 101 examination hall, or the whole school will finally hear who held the nylon bag the night Peace died.

This time Amy does not pay and does not run. With Eniola — now a law student with every right to judge her — she drags the secret into the light and files the truth, signed and in writing, before Queen can sell her own version. And somewhere between guilt and grace, Amy finally understands the verse stitched inside her school's name: she was never a spectator in somebody else's drama. She is part of a chosen generation, a royal priesthood — and the drama can keep talking, because it no longer decides who she is.

Witty, warm and unflinchingly Nigerian, Drama in Royal Priesthood is a complete school-to-university saga of friendship, grief, ambition and forgiveness. Mature themes — loss, guilt, assault and its aftermath — are handled with strong tension and closed doors; nothing explicit is ever on the page.