Verified Correct Answer: Option
Grammar & Contextual Explanation
The Borrowed Bicycle
The bicycle wasn't even mine to lose.
It belonged to Mrs. Okafor next door, a heavy old thing with a wicker basket and a bell that stuck halfway through its ring. She'd lent it to me on a Tuesday afternoon because my own bike had a flat tire and I'd told her, quite convincingly, that I only needed it to run to the shop and back. What I actually wanted was to ride it down to the quarry with Dele and Femi, along the gravel path that everyone's parents had banned us from, the one that curved past the old fence and dropped steeply toward the water.
I told myself it would be fine. It was always fine, until it wasn't.
Femi went first, whooping the whole way down, and Dele followed, laughing so hard he nearly steered into the ditch. When it was my turn, the bicycle felt too big under me, the handlebars slick with a fine layer of rust that came off on my palms. Halfway down the slope, the front wheel caught a stone the size of a fist, and everything after that happened too fast to properly remember: the frame twisting sideways, the gravel tearing at my knee, the sickening crunch as the basket folded in on itself against a rock.
I lay there for a moment just breathing, more startled than hurt. Dele and Femi came running, and between the three of us we managed to drag the bicycle upright. The front wheel was bent into something closer to an oval than a circle. The basket hung by a single wire, swinging like a broken jaw. There was no fixing it, not before dinner, not before Mrs. Okafor noticed.
"What are you going to tell her?" Femi asked, wiping gravel dust from his hands.
I didn't answer right away. I was already building the story in my head, the way you build a wall, brick by brick, without looking too closely at any single one. By the time we reached her gate, I had it ready: a dog, a big one, off its lead, that had darted out from behind a parked van. I hadn't seen it coming. I'd swerved. There was nothing I could have done.
Mrs. Okafor listened with her arms folded, her eyes moving from my face to the ruined basket and back again. She didn't say much. She thanked me for bringing the bicycle back at all, which somehow felt worse than if she'd shouted. She said she hoped my knee would heal quickly. She said dogs like that ought to be kept on a lead, and it wasn't fair, was it, the things people let their animals do.
I nodded along to all of it. I even added a small detail about the dog barking, just to make it feel more real, more finished.
That night, my knee throbbing under a rough bandage, I lay awake replaying the moment at her gate. Not the crash — I'd already stopped thinking about the crash. It was her face I couldn't put down, the way she'd looked almost sorry for me, when the person she should have been angry at was standing right in front of her, lying to her, quite calmly, about a dog that had never existed.
Weeks later, the bicycle still sat propped against her back wall, wheel bent, basket unrepaired, a small monument to a story nobody had ever questioned. Mrs. Okafor waved at me sometimes from her porch, the same easy wave she'd always given, and every time she did, something in my chest tightened a little further, because I understood, more each day, that the wave wasn't really meant for me. It was meant for the boy in the story — careful, unlucky, blameless — and that boy had never existed either.
I wish I had told the truth.
Source: Myschool Past Questions Archive (Record #56194)