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Everyone was similarsafe and sedate academic peopleour lives circumscribed by the tended campus hedges.
WRITERS ROOMAdichie at her home outside Baltimore, wearing a Dior suit and Dior High Jewelry necklace. Behind her hangs a photo she took of her family compound in Abba, Nigeria. Tiffany & Co. ring. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Sittings Editor: Eric McNeal.Vogue, March 2025.
Echezonas sandals were orangey brown with wedge heels, and he walked in a comical strut.
How strange that a feeling can grow unprompted, from nothing, surprising even your own heart.
I was 14 and he was 16.
IN THE STACKSChimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Maryland’s Howard County library, where parts ofDream Countwere written. Dries Van Noten coat.
I was an academic star and he had abysmal grades.
Then he should come himself, I replied, falsely cool.
I thought he was being superior until I realized with surprise that he was shy.
HOLDING PATTERNChimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Tiffany & Co. ring.
He took to walking me home.
One day I said yes.
And so began a cracking open of my sheltered world.
A rush of new bewildering air.
My unlikely first boyfriend.
His was an exquisite attentiveness, open and faltering, reaching but not quite holding my hand.
Often, his skin brushed against mine.
You are the finest and most intelligent girl Ive ever seen, he told me.
I was held bound by his animation, his exaggerations.
He believed in ghosts and blood betrothals.
He wanted us to swear that no matter what happened we would wait for each other and get married.
He said he would throw himself in the path of a car if I ever stopped talking to him.
He made me laugh and laugh; he was serious but difficult to take seriously.
He told obvious lies.
He would miss school and, while walking normally, say he had broken his leg the day before.
I was unimpressed with his indifference to school, but fascinated, nonetheless.
He never read anything.
In his sparse notebooks, his childish, unformed handwriting was endearing to me.
Echezona said you look cold.
What do you even talk about?
IN THE STACKSChimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Marylands Howard County library, where parts ofDream Countwere written.
Dries Van Noten coat.
I dont remember, and what I remember I dont always trust.
Memory fades but it also self-selects.
On my birthday he gave me a scented satin rose.
The perfumy scent became overpowering if you shook the tall case in which it came.
Echezona died in my first year of university.
The extreme, random violence felt so far away as to be surreal.
The journalist asked what was wrong, and I pointed at a photograph.
It was a terrible robbery at the bank nearby.
Echezonas head was slumped against the car seat; his blood a deep gray in the black-and-white photo.
And something I wished untrue was now forever true.
That photo forced an acceptance on me: He really was gone.
Yet I mourned the future that would now never be.
With the pain and sadness came a strange sensation of having been cheated.
HOLDING PATTERNChimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.
Tiffany & Co. ring.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichiesDream Countwill be published on March 4.
Produced by AL Studio.
Set Design: Mary Howard.
Production Coordination by Boom Productions inc.
