The Three of Us
By Ore-Agbaje Williams
Temi wouldn’t call herself rich but she is. Her father works for an oil company and her mother is a GP. Then of course her mother’s father is one of the largest shareholders at the company where her father works. Her father earned the job he has, though – she made a point of telling me that when she explained that she was not rich, even though she is. The first time I went to her house, the maid, who was white English and wearing one of those black and white uniforms that I haven’t seen on anyone else since I watched Princess Diaries 2, said ‘Hello, Miss’ and took my coat at the door and then asked what I wanted to eat and drink. She stood and waited for my answer, but the uniform looked so comical, and the house girls I’d seen in Nigeria wore their own clothes, so I thought it was some kind of weird joke, and eventually Temi answered for both of us. Then there’s the actual house – it’s big, like big-big. At the time I didn’t even know houses like that existed – I do now, because I live in one – but back then I had to subtly pop my eyes back inside my head and pretend it was perfectly normal.
It wasn’t like a show home either, where everything looks like no one lives there and the furniture is being rented by the hour. They had ‘family’ photos, a disproportionate number of which only featured Temi’s two older brothers; there were board games in the living room and a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on one of the long, grand dining tables. They had a fridge with various wedding invitations on it, messages written with those magnet letters no one really has any more. They even had a chalkboard wall where someone had written ‘House Shopping List’ in a beautiful cursive. Temi showed me her room, with its posters and bookshelves, and clothes all over the floor. She showed me her parents’ separate studies, the reading room, and then she took me into the kitchen where the maid had prepared two hot chocolates and grilled cheese sandwiches, each with a small side salad.
I wasn’t poor, but I wasn’t rich either, and everything about Temi fascinated me. She didn’t flaunt her wealth but she never pretended it didn’t exist. She didn’t care when the other Nigerian girls in our school claimed she wasn’t Nigerian enough because she had only been to Nigeria once. We were two of maybe thirty Black girls at a grammar school whose architecture was desperate to communicate that it was teetering on the edge of being private. We were sister to a boys’ school which was a stone’s throw away across the field we shared. Our school specialised in mathematics and science and regularly achieved the best GCSE and A-level results in the county. Parents sent their children there because they expected them to excel. The evenings after school were packed with extracurricular activities designed to prep us for personal statements that would make us look interesting and academically desirable.
People who attended our school were generally financially comfortable but few were as rich as Temi and her family. But one of the first things I realised about her was that she didn’t fit the profile of rich, smart girl from rich, smart family that I would have expected. She had an impeccable academic record, yes – our school made all grades public, and only once did Temi, who rarely studied, mostly just flicked through textbooks like they were magazines, not top the class, an instance in which she was joint first with a girl who’d studied for eight hours straight all week – but she wasn’t quietly formidable. She did everything out loud. She disagreed with teachers in front of the class, she wore her uniform however she wanted to, she switched subjects at GCSE without her parents’ knowledge because she knew that she didn’t want to study medicine like her brothers, and she was sick of them trying to manage her life. She didn’t care when people said she should stop showing off because she knew the answers to everything, or when a girl in our class started dating one of her brothers. That was Year 9, and she accurately predicted that her brother would end it within six weeks. I’d never met someone my age who already knew who she was and didn’t shape herself around other people’s opinions.
She was the complete opposite of me – being moulded in every possible way by my parents, who had written out their expectations on biblical stone tablets the day I was conceived. Parents who expected me back from school punctually every day, as though they were being charged for every minute I was late. Parents who studied my report cards for errors and inconsistencies to later deduct from my monthly allowance. Our backgrounds were similar, but where Temi got her confidence from, I have never been able to understand. While Temi had worked out what else was possible beyond her parents’ plans for her, I looked to mine to tell me what to do. It wasn’t what I wanted, but to obey was better than to defy without knowledge of the alternative. My parents wanted perfection without complaint. They believed they were raising three perfect wives, mothers, professionals. They wanted to play a game of my horse is bigger than yours with every parent in the country and win every time. Temi always wanted (and still wants) to show me things – things I’d never seen or experienced before, places I’d never been, people I’d never encountered, ways of being that had never occurred to me – to show me that I was capable of so much more. Your parents don’t want you to be great, she would say, they want you to be like everyone else.
Until Temi, I didn’t know it was even possible to decide things for myself. Becoming friends with Temi was like having someone lift the lid on my sheltered life and offer a hand to pull me out.
Excerpt from “The Three of Us” copyright © 2023 by Ore Agbaje-Williams. Published by Vintage.
About the book: A nice house, a carefree life, a doting husband, a best friend who never leaves your side. What more could you ask for? There's just one problem: your husband and best friend love you, but they hate each other.
Set over a single day, husband, wife and best friend Temi toe the lines of compromise and betrayal. Told in three parts, three people's lives, and their visions of themselves and one another begin to slowly unravel, until a startling discovery throws everyone's integrity into question. Full of intrigue, idiosyncratic wit and a healthy dose of wealth and snobbery The Three of Us is part-suburban millennial comedy of manners and part-domestic noir that will leave you wondering: whose side are you on?
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Ore Agbaje-Williams is a British-Nigerian writer from London who has written for gal-dem, Glamour and Wasafiri. She is an editor and wrote the novel in NaNoWriMo during lockdown. It was originally submitted to editors under a pseudonym.
You can read our interview with Ore Agbaje-Williams here
