Aike Anikwe
Aike checked his phone for the fifth time, hoping that he had missed the distinct notification
chirp of a newly recieved text or voice message. Unfortunately, aside from an unread message sent by his younger sister from more than a week ago, there had been no word from Malcolm.With an exasperated sigh, he made a few taps on his device and brought it to his ear. As it had three times before, the call went directly to voice mail.
“Hey Mal! Still haven’t heard from you, man! Did you get lost or something?” Aike ran fingers through his beard in a self-soothing fashion. It was extremely unlikely his old roommate had gotten lost, as Deltaville had been his home town and apparently this eating establishment had been one of his favorites prior to going to college. “Well, if you haven’t left home yet, please, please, please, don’t forget to bring your laptop. I’d hate for you to be the kind of ass whoforgets something like that before making the trip over here…”
Aike ended the voice message with a weak chuckle before disconnecting. Despite his joke he had in fact been the kind of ass who had left his laptop in his apartment all the way back in Georgia before making the trip to Deltaville. In his defense, he had forgotten that he had moved the laptop to his newly purchased laptop bag, and resorted to holding his tools in the old messenger bag. It wasn’t until he was almost halfway to Deltaville and had stopped to fill up therental car he drove in that he realized his mistake. Most of the files he might need would beavailable on the cloud, but he still felt a pang of annoyance at his own carelessness.
The harsh smell of recently burned tobacco brought him out of his mental self-flagellation as a young woman walked past him and into the pizza shop he stood in front of. No matter how many years he had spent stateside, it always caught him off guard how prevalent smoking was here compared to Nigeria, and the smell always struck him as too unpleasant to ever be worth taking up the practice.
Taking one last glance around his surrounding for Malcolm’s coupe, he decided to enter the pizza shop and get something to eat while he waited.
“Damn…” Aike uttered the curse as he noticed the line as soon as he entered the building.
When he first arrived he could have sworn that the queue had not been too long, but it seem his time spent reaching out to Malcolm had allowed more people to take a spot before him.
Figuring he’d have to wait awhile, he removed his olive colored, bomber-styled windbreaker and draped it across the messenger bag slung across his shoulders, and slightly adjusted the collar of the button-up shirt he had been wearing underneath. He caught a whiff of the same tobacco smell he had noticed before, and noticed the woman looking at what looked like the take-out menu.
Worried that he might lose his spot to newcomers if he went up to the counter to get one for himself, he tried to look over her shoulder to see what was available.
“Do they have jalapenos?” Aike asked the woman. He figured it would be pretty obvious to her that someone was peering over her shoulder, and wanted to avoid giving her the wrong idea about his intentions before the issue ever came up.