She Was 14

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She was 14, that awkward age where innocence still has its learner’s permit and curiosity insists on driving. Love, at that age, is not romance; it is fascination, admiration, and the reckless affection reserved for ideas, mentors, and forbidden questions.
Her name was Epiphany, which already sounded like a plot twist. She came from a noble family, the Kenyan kind where titles sit at the dinner table like extra cutlery. Political, pious, polished. Though, as she confessed one evening between the Constitution of Kenya and the French Revolution, “I don’t like church, but I love God.” She said it casually, as though she were discussing the weather. I almost wrote it down as a footnote.
She was in Grade 10. Talented. Intelligent. Disturbingly so. She understood history better than I did, which was embarrassing because I had a degree in it and a GPA of 69 that haunted me like a ghost that missed heaven by 0.02 marks. From Kenya’s resistance movements to Mao’s China, she followed timelines like gossip threads.
I once asked her, wounded in pride, why she excelled in all subjects except history.
She smiled, the kind of smile that ends debates. “If I do well in history, I won’t need a tutor. And then you won’t come around.”
So it was not my intellect but my presence. Academia humbled me that day.
Our first lesson never happened. Instead, she gave me a two-hour oral dissertation on her family’s political and social history. There was laughter, shocking revelations, and moments that demanded tears. She offered none. Slim, brown, medium-tall, and emotionally unmoved, she narrated scandals and tragedies like a seasoned journalist filing a report.
Her father had been the Governor of Kenya’s capital city and was now CEO of a commercial bank. Her mother was a High Court Judge. Her uncle, a senator. Her elder sister, an ambassador to either Norway or Turkey, the family rotated excellence casually. Her brother was an advocate of the High Court. Three children. All intimidating.
The irony of my presence still amazes me. Five candidates had interviewed for the tutoring role. A Master’s graduate in History. A Master’s candidate. A Brookhouse International School teacher. A historian-law student hybrid. And then me, armed with enthusiasm, student loans, and a GPA that screamed “almost.”
I ranked third. Statistically dead. Spiritually unemployed.
Yet fate, that mischievous deity, intervened. Her parents asked her to choose her tutor. She pointed at me and declared, “I choose him. The young man who missed a first class.”
Her parents were shocked, but they had raised her to decide and to stand by her decisions. A rare luxury. One unavailable in homes like mine, where choices were inherited like furniture.
That evening, after contracts were signed and professionalism pretended, she walked me out of their mansion.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because your story is unfinished,” she said. “The others are successful. You almost made it. You missed by an inch. Your graduation was delayed by a year because of money.”
I froze. That detail was not on my CV.
“Say hi to my mum, Ann, for me,” I muttered weakly, realizing I had been background-checked by a teenager. That was the moment I understood her intelligence was not academic; it was forensic.
We had two hours every evening. That was all. In that time, she read books, listened to music and political podcasts, watched documentaries, and adored cats. Her favorite cat was named Ness, presumably short for “Nonsense,” which felt appropriate.
One evening, during the French Revolution, she paused and asked, “Does our country need a revolution?”
I answered like a cautious civil servant. “Not necessarily. We just need to fix a few things.”
Then she leaned in. “Is my dad a good leader? You live in this country. Be honest.”
I stammered. “He’s noble. Loved by all.”
“That’s what the media says,” she interrupted. “What do you think?”
She pulled up an article on her tablet. County health workers unpaid for three months. An impending strike. An Auditor General’s report showing Nairobi had achieved only 30 percent of its development targets.
“My dad is loved and hated in equal measure,” she concluded calmly. “He has good intentions. But his advisors fail him. Communication fails the people.”
She was 14.
And she understood power better than most adults I knew.

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