One year ago, 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram. The handful who escaped that night have never told the full story of their ordeal — until now.

Near the classrooms in the dusty schoolyard of the Chibok Government Secondary School, the Whuntaku girls hold court beneath the green lele mazza tree. There is no sign on the tree, no discernible markings; everyone just knows it’s their spot — where they gathered in the mornings, between classes, and after school to hang out, talk about boys, whatever.

A girl can’t just join the Whuntaku clique; she has to be from Whuntaku, a neighborhood in Chibok, a town in northeastern Nigeria that most people had never heard of before the “incident.” There’s an unspoken code among them: You could be friends with other girls, but you always watch out for your own. Earlier in the year, for example, a senior decided to haze a Whuntaku junior. She had told the junior to fetch her a bucket of water from the pumps outside, where the boarding school students collect water once a day for bathing. But when the Whuntaku girl said she was already on an errand for another senior and would have do it later, the senior yelled at the junior, said she was being “disrespectful.” She made her kneel on the floor of the bathroom for five minutes. The toilet that day was filthy; it’s where roughly one thousand girls in the school bathe, and no one had cleaned it. As the junior balanced her weight on her knees, she started to cry.

When the junior returned to the room the Whuntaku girls shared, the others told her to forget it. “Forgive,” they said. But the senior kept at it, always catching the junior on errands for other Whuntaku girls. She would make her kneel. The third time, the junior had just had an operation on her ribs. This is nonsense, the Whuntaku girls agreed. They stormed out of the dorm, found the senior, and, without discussion, started to beat her. They struck her with their hands, their legs. They chased her around the dorm: “We will kill you!” they said. They had no idea the senior had epilepsy, “second death” in the local tribal language. “She did like she died,” the girls later recalled. But when the shaking passed, they started again.

Chibok has a strict no-violence policy, and everyone knew suspensions were coming. That night, the Whuntaku girls ripped out a piece of notebook paper and passed it around, each one writing her name on a line. At the school assembly the next day, they simply handed the principal the paper, lined up in the order of their names, and then turned and walked out as they were called, heads held high:

“Promise!”

“Doris!”

“Blessed!”

Everyone at Chibok Secondary School got the message: When you touch the Whuntaku girls, you play with fire.

Hauwa draws pictures of the solar system, writes the dates of the solstice and equinox, and copies the word “eclipse” again and again.

                              NOON

The girls ran without thinking. They ran without speaking. When they got tired, they rested briefly under the sparse trees, flattening themselves to the parched earth and making themselves very small. Then they ran some more. They thought they were deep in Boko Haram territory; militants could have been anywhere.

By the evening, Blessed and Salama and another girl (the fourth had run in a different direction from the broken down truck) took a break under a tree. They heard a cow mooing in the distance and saw a Fulani herdsman’s hut. The girls gathered. “These people are in the Boko Haram area. What if we go and they return us?” Salama asked. But Blessed was firm: They needed food.

When they entered the one-room straw hut, they found a couple there in the evening light. “Are you the girls Boko Haram kidnapped?” the Fulani man asked immediately.

The girls nodded.

“We heard you passing in the night. You’re safe here,” he told them. The girls weren’t sure they believed him, but they had no choice. The herdsman’s wife gave them new clothes, to disguise them, and plastic bags for their uniforms. They brought them water to bathe and fed them maize for dinner. That night, the girls cried and prayed and slept on the floor together.

The next day, the herdsman told them to follow the road and to ask people for directions home. In the afternoon, after walking all day, they rested beneath a tree. A man walked by. “You look really tired,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

Hajara Isa is among the girls who were kidnapped.

“We are the girls who were kidnapped from Chibok,” they told him.

“Don’t say that!” he snapped, “Boko Haram comes to this village a lot.” He showed them the path they should take.

Later, a man on a motorcycle drove by and stopped. “What are you doing walking on the streets like this?” he asked.

“We want to go to Chibok,” they told him.

The man looked at their plastic bags. “What’s in there?” he asked.

“Uniforms.”

“Are you the girls who were kidnapped from the Chibok School?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, get on.” Less than an hour later, they were home.

Endurance couldn’t run. She had hurt her leg jumping off the truck, so she crawled. She saw the lone beam of the motorcycle headlight, but the machine didn’t see her. Christina found her in the darkness, but couldn’t lift her up. So Endurance pulled herself, with her arms, on her stomach, on her back, dragging herself through the brush. The ground was jagged and hard like stone, she could feel the rocks tearing at her clothes, at her skin. She thought she heard gunshots. Her elbow was bleeding.

A man with a bicycle, then a man on a motorbike, and finally a man with a car carried Endurance and Christina home. When Endurance got to the front door of her family’s small mud-brick house, near her father’s farmland, she saw her neighbors and her family gathered in the living room. Everyone was in tears, as if someone had died. When she saw her parents, she started crying, too. Her family told her how blessed she had been. “You should be serious, hold God closer to you, take care of yourself and live a good life,” one of her brothers said.

The next day, her brother Emmanuel took her to the market to buy new clothes and shoes — black, brown, and red . Everything she owned had been burned in the hostel, including her books. The family took her to the doctor to treat her legs. Endurance had never been to a doctor before. They had to make sure Boko Haram hadn’t done anything else to her. Afterward, she cut off all her hair. Just like that.

The dreams returned. But these dreams were different. There were no angels singing. She dreamed only of the girls. She dreamed about Boko Haram coming back and locking her into a room. Every blessed day, if she managed to sleep, she dreamed. Where is Mary now? Was it right to jump and leave her behind?

When Blessed arrived home, Hadiza came to her house right away. It was as if nothing had changed, they clung to each other and promised to do everything the way they always had. They would not go to the village market or get water without the other.

Blessed worried what Cool Boy would think. Was she ruined now? Would he still want her? Soon, he came, too. He greeted Blessed’s mother — she still didn’t know he was Muslim — and then found her. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he told her. “I’m glad you are okay.” He told her he loved her and promised to follow her anywhere.
Dorcas Yakubu is 16 years old. Her parents describe her as shy girl who loved eating tuwo (a local dish).

Dorcas Yakubu is 16 years old. Her parents describe her as shy girl who loved eating tuwo (a local dish).

When the girls’ parents got to the school the morning after the attack, they found nothing but the burnt shells of classrooms, matchstick dormitories full of metal bed frames and unanswered questions: Where had the teachers been during the attack? What happened to the security guards? How could a school be re-opened during an emergency closure without a security plan? Where are our daughters?

In Nigeria, questions like that hardly ever get answered. After waiting for the government to do something, a group of 100 fathers rode their motorbikes to the edge of Sambisa forest, the swampy national park where Boko Haram had supposedly set up their new headquarters in the countryside. They didn’t have guns, only machetes and knives. The nearby villagers told them to go back: “They have armored tanks; they have everything. They will destroy you,” the villagers said. The fathers relented.

It took president Goodluck Jonathan, who is running for reelection in 2015, three weeks to publicly acknowledge the kidnapping even happened — and when he finally did, he admitted that he didn’t know where the girls were. He then blamed the parents for not providing a list of names and promised to find them. His wife, Patience Jonathan, bemoaned the kidnapping, vowing to join the #BringBackOurGirls protests that had mushroomed across the country. Then she reversed course and declared the protests were merely an opposition-led plot to embarrass her husband in an election year. The first lady said the protesters were most likely Boko Haram members themselves.

That very day, the leader of Boko Haram, Abubukar Shekau, released a video saying he was going to sell the girls. A few weeks later, he sent out another that showed 136 girls sitting in hijabs reciting the Koran.

International media outlets picked up the story, and #BringBackOurGirls trended briefly. Michelle Obama posted a Twitter selfie holding up a sign in solidarity with the protest movement. Western governments promised to support a rescue operation. Then, just as quickly, the world turned away.

I meet the girls in a city in central Nigeria a little over two months after the incident. Blessed and Salama had been to the governor’s house in Maiduguri to help identify their friends in the latest video released by Shekau. Endurance had been to Abuja to talk to some foreigners about that night. She stayed in a hotel for the first time.

At first, the girls are all limbs and awkward giggles. They play on their phones and trade Christian and Hausa pop songs over Bluetooth. They’ve been told interviews like this are the only way to help the girls who are lost, but they’ve never told their story in detail. It’s impossible to know what parts of their tales are true, and what parts they’ve heard from others and repeated as absolute fact, the way only children can. There are moments where they get frustrated. No one has asked them about their lives before: How is this relevant to Boko Haram? How is this relevant to finding our friends?

How they managed to make it home and their friends didn’t is a question they don’t know how to answer. Sometimes they say it was God’s will. Other times, it’s something else. “The other girls were so scared, they did not have the courage,” Endurance tells me. “I have always had courage.”

This is undeniably true. The courage these girls showed in the face of men with guns is almost beyond comprehension. And yet the friends they describe, the ones still in the forest, are just as dynamic and headstrong as they are. In high school, friendships are blood bonds, so intense that the guilt of being free while their friends are in captivity is everpresent.

The timing of their abduction stays with me: They are 17, soon to be 18 — the years that mark the metamorphosis between girl and woman. It’s evident in the way they move their newly acquired figures, jutting out their hips when they pose for photographs, self-conscious and self-aware all at once. What had been their biggest year was now something else entirely. They didn’t know when they would retake their exams. They aren’t sure if this was just a thing that happened to them, or something that will define them forever.

At dusk after one of our interviews, Endurance and I are sitting in the den. The power has cut — outages are frequent across Nigeria— and the light is fading from the horizon. Endurance is showing me pictures on her phone: her friends, her house. She’s taken a photo of us together and photo-shopped a large pink heart around us as a frame. She smiles when she shows it to me. “Beautiful!” she exclaims.

Suddenly, she isn’t beaming anymore; she shifts her weight on the pleather couch.

“How do you think we can bring back the girls?” she asks, looking up from her phone. It’s as if she just remembered that they are gone.

“Praying,” Salama interrupts.

“No,” Endurance decrees, shaking her head.

“There’s nothing stronger than prayer,” Salama lectures.

“I’m still praying, but… what kind of help do you think the government can do?”

“The government screwed them,” Salama snaps, her prim composure wavering. “What is the government doing?” She frowns.

“What do you think, Endurance?” I ask her. I watch her ponder silently. This is the girl who spent most of the time I was with her laughing and breaking out into tiny jigs. She thought seriously before answering my questions thoughtfully and at length. It’s the first time since our initial day together, when she broke down crying about Mary’s fate, that she looks small and fragile.

The international spotlight that had illuminated Chibok for a few weeks had faded, taking all those promises with it. Since the kidnapping, Boko Haram has only gotten stronger; they have taken over villages and towns, raised the black flag and declared their own caliphate. They have kidnapped more women. They have killed nearly three thousand people this year alone. The government has recently claimed a string of victories against the militants, and rumors of a possible prisoner exchange swirl, but negotiations have yet to yield results. Two hundred girls are still missing.

Finally, Endurance responds.

“Their lives have already been spoiled,” she tells me solemnly. “When they come back… Nothing, nothing can help them. They’ll never be the same.”

All of the girls’ names in this story have been changed. They chose their new names themselves.

This story was written by Sarah A. Topol. It was edited by Michael Benoist, fact-checked by Taylor Beck.