Post by Ange Keating on Jan 6, 2013 12:40:42 GMT -8
So I made this thread so we can show each other the amazing presents we received from our Secret Santas. I'm sure we're all curious to see what everyone got and their reactions!
I'm still crying of laughter from my present. It is literally perfect. I love it sooo much. (PS you're a wonderful singer, SS ♥ AND DRAMATIC STORY TELLER. Seriously, if Blacklight needed a voiceover, you'd so have the job lmaooo)
Just PM me if you don't want everyone seeing the video though!
And I received a beautiful story:
ANDDDD, a bunch of icons which I'm planning to use as we speak ;D
I'm still crying of laughter from my present. It is literally perfect. I love it sooo much. (PS you're a wonderful singer, SS ♥ AND DRAMATIC STORY TELLER. Seriously, if Blacklight needed a voiceover, you'd so have the job lmaooo)
Just PM me if you don't want everyone seeing the video though!
And I received a beautiful story:
She is running, her little arms and legs moving as fast as they can. But it isn’t fast enough. Obviously there is a glaring difference in the developmental progress of four year old legs as opposed to five year old legs that makes the little girl’s destination look impossible to reach. But she keeps trying.
Everything is in her way, from unseen crevices in the dirt to the bushes that seem to pop up out of nowhere. They all seem to want to keep her away from the one thing she is seeking, her brothers.
She has fallen more times already than she can count using the tools that her two tiny hands provide in the form of fingers. There are scrapes on her knees and elbows, and those joints are covered with more bruises than had been there the night before. Her dress, the one that was only getting in her way, is torn. Her pigtails, the ones she hates, gone astray, the little bows that had been pinned to their ends lost many steps behind her.
She is close to crying, the little tears are bubbling underneath despairing eyes as she continues to flail after her unseen brothers. She can hear them, she can hear their chattering, their laughter, their squeals of delight at some unknown find. She hears their familiar voices, they reverberate endlessly in her one track mind, and she yells and screams their names, but no matter how many times she cries he names of her three beloved siblings, there is no answer.
Her Mommy won’t be happy when she sees the state the little girl is in, she’ll yell at the little girl the same way she always does. But the little girl doesn’t care, she just wants to find them.
But the girl doesn’t know where she is anymore, she doesn’t recognize any landmarks among the endless line of identical looking trees and greenery. She is lost, and when she realizes this, she permits herself to really cry. The tears dribble down and she does not stop them. She has stopped running now, her once quick trot slowing to a stumbling walk. Then, unexpectedly, she falls face first into the moist grass.
She doesn’t get up. She lets her salty tears mingle with the sprinkler water that covers the blades every morning. She is lost and pooped and she doesn’t want to exert the energy needed to get back up and stumble back towards her Mommy. Solemnly she picks at unseen grass while she dribbles.
The little girl can still hear her brothers’ voices, but they are louder than before. She perks up her head, and through the blades of slightly overgrown grass she spots three familiar scraped legs making their way towards her. She watches and waits silently as one of them, the youngest of the three, approaches her and then lays down in front of her. He coos her name gently and then says, “What took you so long?”
She lets out a little sob and like a good big brother he reaches his hand out to grab hers, to let her know that she isn’t there by herself anymore, that she isn’t lost anymore.
With that firm hand he helps her up, and once her grass stained dress has been straightened so that her princess underwear isn’t being shown off to an invisible crowd the four of them run off. As she follows along behind them, no longer searching for them between the bushes, she decides that she would never let herself be left behind again.
* * *
The little girl is still four. She is sitting in a room with all but one of her brothers. The seven of them fill up the remaining space in the room littered with toys they never use, for they learned long ago that their best tool for entertainment and fun was not the elaborate toys that coat the room, but the unrivalled power of their seven still developing imaginations. Their game of pretend, in which the eldest of them decides they are ninja fighter pilots, they run around haplessly shouting sounds of destruction. The little girl in her flowery dress joins in the fun, jumping over colorful toy after colorful toy and in her still slightly high-pitched voice letting out an animated, “Bam! Bam!” as her eldest brother falls dramatically to the floor.
Then suddenly the pretend atmosphere is switched from ninja fighter pilots to knights and dragons, and predictably her numerous brothers try to force the young girl into being the princess the knights must be saved. But the little girl knows what this role means, and she refuses, she will not sit and watch her brothers play fight with sticks. This is a battle she faces every time this is the game of choice and she positions herself firmly as a knight. She easily vanquishes all four of the dragons, cementing herself for the umpteenth time as a valiant knight in their play world.
Unfortunately their happily chaotic frolicking cannot last long, for soon their mother soon interrupts their game by announcing a startling fact. Daddy is home. They all stop and look at the doorway to the room they inhabit and they see a man in a suit, a man they all recognize, a man they all love. They all run at him, but it is the little girl who gets to him first, wrapping her small arms around his legs with the practiced ease of someone who is very used to homecomings, and goodbyes.
But as Daddy looks down at the seven of his eight children who had trampled over various mazes made by cumbersome toys and their own destructive and juvenile games of pretend to leap at him first the little girl sees something that makes him not look quite like Daddy. Instead of kneeling down and somehow magically wrapping them all in his long arms he seems to shrug them off with a simple statement, “Go clean that mess up.”
The little girl doesn’t quite know what he means by cleaning up the mess, because she doesn’t see one, but just like the rest of their brothers she lets go somberly and walks off to do what Daddy wants. They end their game of pretend because Daddy told them to, because they love Daddy, and who knows how long Daddy is going to be home this time.
* * *
Mommy is holding a new dress. It is blue, and the collar has a ruffle and, more importantly, there is lace. “You can wear it on the first day of school,” she tells the little girl, but the little girl just turns her nose up at it. She has had ruffled lacey dresses before, and looking at the collar she knows it is going to itch. She makes a face and shakes her head, telling her Mommy no with one little movement.
Her Mommy keeps trying to persuade her, she keeps telling her how pretty she’ll look, with her hair in braids and the dress on. But the little girl doesn’t want braids or a pretty dress, she wants to be able to run and to get dirty, to spill milk on her shirt and not get yelled at. It is kindergarten, and her brothers had told she’d get dirty. Mommy wouldn’t like that, so the little girl wouldn’t wear the dress. Not that she would consent to wear the dress otherwise.
But she keeps shoving it in the little girls face, and soon the ruffles are a little too close to her nose. She glares at her Mommy and continually shakes her head, “No,” she tells her firmly, with the decisive grace of a recent five year old with a newfound confidence that came with successfully pinning of her eldest brother to the ground when he had made fun of her braids.
But obviously no just isn’t enough for Mommy. So the little girl grabs the dress out of her mother’s hand and throws it on the floor. Her little feet stomp on it as the miniscule particles of dirt that are embedded in the carpet implant themselves in the blue fabric. Her mother looks on horrified as her little girl shouts, “No! No! No!”
The little girl is soon sent to her room.
Stupid dress.
* * *
Daddy is home again.
The little girl doesn’t get to rush to greet him though. Usually getting in trouble at school means she has to stay in her room for a little while, getting suspended for starting a fight on the playground gets her stuck in there indefinitely. So the little girl is forced to listen to the excited squeals of her numerous brothers rushing to the door to greet him, like always. She is left sitting alone in her dirty pizza sauce stained clothes, her head bowed forlornly towards the floor.
Mommy had had to pick her up early, she hadn’t looked very happy. The little girl had tried to tell Mommy what scrawny Jimmy Benson had done to deserve to have his face rubbed in mud. He had tried to kiss her, she told her mother repeatedly, his little germy five year old lips had almost come in contact with her own. What did her Mommy want her to do, get cooties?
Obviously she prefers that to the alternative, which was to physically assault the much smaller child for getting too close to her.
Mommy had yelled the way Mommy does, and now the little girl was stuck sitting alone in her obnoxiously pink room. Her legs are crossed, her pale pink comforter pulled over her chilly bare legs. She can hear the rain outside, and then she hears footsteps, and then the creak of a door opening. Then there is just Daddy standing in the doorway, looking at her.
Daddy doesn’t look happy either, and the little girl cringes under his gaze, concealing herself under the pink comforter she despises in a futile attempt to hide from the disapproval. She can hear his shallow breathing, hear him approaching her. She can almost imagine him poised above her, ready to remove the blanket and tell her what a bad girl she had been.
She peers over the ruffled ends of her comforter, staring at her Daddy with a fright she can’t explain. Daddy doesn’t look like Daddy again, and the little girl isn’t quite sure anymore who has entered her bedroom. She has the sudden urge to pull the comforter once again over her head, to muss up her braids and burrow herself into the blankets that had gone astray in the night so she won’t have to look upon the man she doesn’t recognize.
But when he lifts the comforter off from over her head she has little choice. She stares up at him, apprehension filling her as she wonders how long he will yell at her. He doesn‘t, he just growls, “You little-” but the little girl doesn’t understand the next word that he says, all she knows is that her cheek is suddenly stinging. She knows that she has been punished, and as Daddy walks silently out of the room she buries her head under the covers again, ashamed of the shiny bruise she can’t see blooming on her face.
* * *
The little girl isn’t suspended anymore, but she is staying away from Jimmy Benson, just in case. She is sitting with the older brother who had reached out his hand to help her up so many months ago at the park. It is recess, and their legs are emerged slightly in the bark of the playground. He is only one year older than her but he is her guardian at the playground, and if she wasn’t so determined to steer clear of her new nemesis, he would have made her.
There is a lot of dirt underneath her fingernails. After spending the first ten minutes of their break running off the energy two hours of sitting still had created they had collapsed in the not so comfortable bark. Her fingers had easily dug into the little scraps of wood that covered the bottom of the playground she so rarely ventured on.
They are building something, but right now it just looks like lumps of bark squished together. Unlike sand this substance cannot be easily molded into an elaborate castle and moat combination. Angrily the little girl stamps her fist into the bark mound, disliking the fact that it can be nothing else. But her brother keeps piling and when he is finished he scoots back to admire his handiwork. She looks at him, puzzled, but he just says as he brushes the wood shavings off his hands, “Bark pancakes,” is what he labels them, and when she looks even more confused he says, “Come on, eat them,” and suddenly the amazing imaginations of a five year old and a six year old take hold and they begin pretending to shovel large amounts of bark pancakes into their half open mouths.
After a few seconds her older brother turns to look at the girl as she pretends to eat, his face contorts gently into a questioning glance. She continues to pretend to eat his marvelous creations, but he stops abruptly. “What happened to your face?” he asks, pointing at the bruise that had bloomed in full force the morning after she had attacked Jimmy Benson, “Did Jim do that?” he asks, calling the little boy by his proper name the way only her older brother could get away with.
She stares at him for a second, an imaginary handful of bark pancake in her hand poised at chin level. She shakes her head momentarily and says, “Daddy.”
He looks startled, his eyes go wide, and he stares endlessly at her bruise. “That’s not…,” he says, but he doesn’t finish, almost like he isn’t sure what it isn’t. But instead of finishing he just goes back to eating his bark pancakes like nothing has happened.
But his eyes just keep drifting to that bruise.
* * *
Daddy comes to her room again that night. She is doing her homework begrudgingly, only agreeing to attempt to complete it once her mother had realized that she hadn’t even opened her backpack since she had gotten home from school five hours ago. Daddy will be leaving the next day, and the little girl expects a good bye hug before he goes off to bed.
But she does not get such a loving gesture.
He’s yelling at her again, something like, “It is all your fault!” but this time the little girl can’t seem to figure out what he is yelling at her for. She doesn’t remember beating up Jimmy that day, unless kicking him in her dreams when she fell asleep during math counted. She doesn’t understand.
Then the punishment begins, it is very much like the one two nights before, the one that had caused her older brother to make a disgusted face just that afternoon. His hands grasp her shoulders, but instead of striking her face like the night before he shakes her, moving her little body back and forth as he bellows in her face.
The words blend together, and so does his face within the beginnings of tears as he shakes her, but she doesn’t cry yet. She must have done something, she does not doubt that, Daddy wouldn’t be punishing her if she had been a good girl. “You-” was his next word, following it were a string of adjectives that the little girl hadn’t been introduced to yet, even on the playground.
The shaking stops abruptly, but then a punishment more like the brief one she had received earlier emerges. The strikes sting, but the little girl will not cry, no matter how much it hurts. Her brothers, she knows, wouldn’t cry, they’d stay strong and take whatever punishment Daddy gave them, so that was what she was going to do.
She will have new bruises by morning, but they will probably be hidden beneath her clothes. After what feels like an eternity, Daddy walks away, and the little girl watches him through the tears she is only now allowing to fall. All the while asking herself: What had she done?
* * *
The little girl is seven, and she is in second grade. Jimmy Benson still roams the same school as her, the only difference between kindergarten and second grade is that the math is harder and her eight year old brother has now joined her class. He doesn’t tell her why he had had to do first grade twice, but she thinks it might have had something to do with the homework he ignored when he came into her room and hugged her after one of Daddy’s many visits.
When it wasn’t her brother it was her Mommy. She would examine the residuals and plan out an outfit to hide them. The bruises, she had told the kindergarten age little girl, were secrets, she couldn’t tell other little boys and girls about them. They were special, she said. So the little girl never did, even though by age seven she had realized by the fact that she received them so often that the bruises were not special in the slightest.
Last night Daddy had come home again, and last night he had visited her bedroom while she was doing her homework, just like she had known he would. The bruises were not so easy for Mommy to hide, such as the one on her face, so Jason has taken it upon himself to explain when their teacher asks about it.
“We were playing tag the other day and she slipped on a patch of mud,” he tells her enthusiastically, “She slipped all across the yard and BAM!” he exclaims, reminding the little girl of the chaotic pretend games that used to consume their afternoons, “And she hit her face on the swing set,” he sighs, “Painful, but hilarious!” and he grins broadly.
The teacher falls for it. The secret is safe, once again.
* * *
The little girl, who is not so little anymore, is eight. She is on a court, her legs, which have grown much longer since her experience of the park, propel her quickly across the gym and to the basket. She is on a team now. She was used to playing with her brothers, to being able to get shots passed them despite her slightly shorter stature. But her team was different.
The girl loves basketball, when she has that orange and black ball in her hands, its color scheme forever reminding her of Halloween, she is free.
She leads because this is the only place she can. The other little girls, whose premature passion for the game is muted compared to her own, follow her lead dutifully. They learn from her just like she learned from her brothers, she is like another coach to them.
The ball is in her hands again, she dribbles it down the court, easily maneuvering out of the way of the opposing team. An easy lay up is soon achieved. The girl feels invigorated, reminded once again why she loves the game. The girl who is not so little loves basketball because Daddy can’t punish her when she is on the court.
On the court, she is safe.
* * *
The little girl is nine. Daddy is home. Though he isn’t quite Daddy anymore. No, that title and all the privileges, such as undying devotion and anything resembling admiration, was lost long before. Now that word just sounds foul on the not so little girl’s tongue.
Father, that was who the Daddy she had once loved had morphed into. An omniscient feared figure whose returns sent shivers up the little girl’s spine.
When her father is home now, he comes to her more. She has more bruises and more unexplained punishments. It is no longer a precious secret she keeps away because she thinks they were special. They aren’t, they are her burden. A burden that she refuses to share with anyone else because no one else needed to know.
Her older brother knows, but now that they were older and bruises weren’t expected as much he couldn’t do much to help her. He couldn’t stop their father from getting more and more angrier with each encounter, from shaking her more and more, from throwing her uncharacteristically limp body against a dresser in an attempt to inflict the amount of pain he seems to think she deserves, that she needs.
She no longer misunderstands the words he threw at her, the angry slurs of insults and furious accusations are quite clear to her now. He labels her as many of the inappropriate words spoken by playground hooligans who were mostly unaware of their true meaning. But her father means them, he hates her, and she knows it.
No matter how many times he fakes affection in front of her siblings and other family members, the little girl is always sickened by his touch, because she knows what he will say to her behind closed doors. She doesn’t want her special secret, she wants it all to go away.
But it can’t, because the only way she could make it disappear is if she tells. But she won’t tell, because the warning of her mother still rings loudly in her ears. It is one secret she can’t tell anyone.
* * *
The girl is twelve.
Somebody saw the bruises who wasn’t supposed to. Somebody saw.
The same somebody saw the cause of the bruises. Somebody saw.
Somebody knew her secret, their secret. Somebody knew.
What is she supposed to do now?
* * *
Nothing it seems.
Her father doesn’t come home for a while, and the somebody keeps quiet. It makes the girl happy, but now that she no longer has to constantly hide her embarrassing secret from everyone, she still hides too much.
Her older brother tries to persuade her to not be so closed up, but the girl refuses. Her barriers are too thick, too well made to be broken through by one pleading sibling or any of the scum of the earth that walk the halls of her middle school. She was too angry, too judgmental, too … whatever. That was what everyone told her. People tell her she got her anger from her grandmother, but the girl knows better. Her father is the real source. Why else would she repeatedly beat up Jimmy Benson since elementary school?
But still, they all persist, and none more fervently than her older brother, the one who has always looked after her, and has deemed it necessary to do so once again. He can be incredibly persuasive, and if anyone can convince her to open up, it would be him. But every time she thinks about giving it up, about slightly chipping away at her barriers, her father comes home again, and she is reminded why she is the way she is. Maybe it is wrong for her to blame her issues on her father, even though ultimately he was a contributing factor to her creation. It is much easier, she has learned, to blame him rather than herself.
* * *
Her father comes home for Christmas.
Her brother has been on a downward spiral for a few months now. Now that he isn’t solely responsible for making up excuses for her, he has found more time to hang out with his friends. Just like in first grade, his grades have started slipping.
Her father has always asked to see their grades at the end of Christmas break, and for once the girl is not worried that her grades will be the cause of her next punishment. When it comes down to her brother, he doesn’t even pretend to not know why his father has suddenly has started yelling at him. Insults like the ones the girl had been hearing for years are now being thrown at her brother like a tidal wave.
It continues through the evening, slowly building up and then equally as slowly easing out until all that was left of his shouting fest is a smoldering look directed solely at her older brother.
The next day is not much better. Her brother asks her father a simple question, and immediately the shouting resumes, as if there has been no quiet in between the two storms. It was then that her brother almost sets the house on fire. He snaps in the middle of the living room and holds a flickering candle to the curtains, a threat against his father if he didn’t stop talking. It is only after the pleading of his anxious wife that he apologizes, however grudgingly, and her brother sets the candle down.
The next day her brother has a nasty bruise, but her father never touches him again.
* * *
The girl is sixteen. She is sitting in a restaurant with her brothers and two mere acquaintances.
The girl hates the relatively unknown boy she is sitting across from, though she hates most people now that she has realized that people can’t be trusted. This cotton candy colored mess of a boy has managed to piss her off since she first met him, which, arguably, wasn’t very hard. But still, it was a feat to be recognized.
He has gotten in more verbal fights with her than Jimmy Benson had gotten punched by her in all of eleventh grade, and she hates him for it. She doesn’t like him, even though she can’t think of more than a couple of good reasons why she doesn’t.
It doesn’t matter how many stupid games her brothers come up with them to play while they wait for their food, or how many of these games set her up on the same team as the boy with the cotton candy colored tresses, she isn’t enjoying herself. Even if she is, it is all dashed when she realizes that her favorite older brother has a penchant for the obnoxious boy’s sister.
She is doomed.
* * *
“You’re not ugly.”
A month or so has passed, and she is now seventeen. Just like the girl predicted, she was doomed to spend more time than she wanted, which was none, with the cotton candy boy. She is alone with him at the moment, a place she would desperately like not to be. She’d prefer even more not to be talking to him, but considering the pathetic image insecurities he had just professed she feels and intervention in the form of words is necessary in these circumstances.
“You’re not ugly,” she repeats to her cotton candy colored enemy when he doesn’t respond. It is one of the first compliments she has bestowed on anyone in years, if it can even be categorized as that when it comes out more like a scolding.
He stares at her like she is a purple three-headed alien with sixteen eyes who has just beamed into his living room. The girl is half expecting him to ask what leader she wants him to take her to, but instead he just stays silent.
The girl doesn’t understand why it is so hard for him to hear. It isn’t as if it is some groundbreaking new discovery, or like she had said something completely unbelievable like that inanimate objects had just learned how to talk. It is a simple fact that he needs to get into his head.
“Okay,” he says, and that is the end of that.
* * *
The girl is still seventeen, but there is one startling change of events. No, it is not the return of the father she had loved when she was younger, that unflawed perfect figure that she had created in her unfaltering imagination. It is the fact that she and the cotton candy boy have somehow become something other than enemies.
She doesn’t want to explain it, because she can’t. To explain it is to admit that she has been wrong about him from the beginning, and she is not ready for that.
For some unexplainable reason, the boy has become part of her everyday life, and for once she doesn’t see it as an inevitable doom to spend her afternoons having math explained to her by someone far more intelligent than she. She puts up with him because he puts up with her, and somehow they have fallen into an easy relationship. Something called friendship.
* * *
“Daddy” came home again because his little girl has been bad. It isn’t another suspension for beating up Jimmy Benson or whatever other high school fellow had become her victim. No, he stopped coming home because of that after the first six times it had happened.
The girl who is not so little knows what she has done is much worse than punching someone who deserves it. She has expected him to come home, and now he is there in front of her, and though she trembles, she is prepared. The only thought floating through her mind: What excuse would she use this time?
* * *
Somebody else knows, again. But this time it isn’t someone willing to keep their mouth shut, it is her cotton candy friend. He keeps asking about her bruises, and in that overly intelligent mind he has managed to put two and two together. Her older brother had warned her, and now she was facing consequences.
He has gone to her father, but the girl catches him in the act. Her father knows her friend knows, and she knows more than ever why the secret must be kept. He can’t know, because if he knows, everything is ruined, if he knows then all of the time she has spent keeping it to herself is worth nothing.
She saves him from completely ruining everything, she manages stops him before he can reveal his conclusion. She protects her family and her secret and her friend from his own curiosity in the only way she knows how. Through lying and spiteful words. The only slightly true phrase she used was, “You ruined everything,” which he almost had. But the, “I hate you,” and the, “I won’t forgive you,” couldn’t be farther for the truth.
She waits impatiently for him to leave, crossing her fingers that he will not question her response to his nosiness, and when he is gone she turns to face her father.
She is not sure she is ready this time.
* * *
It is her father at his worst, and the girl at her weakest. She isn’t sure how much of it she can take. But she takes it because she has to, because if she doesn’t protect him then her cotton candy friend will be faced with her father’s beast, which was rivaled by no other. She will keep him safe, even if it kills her.
She doesn’t even bother waiting for him to leave to start crying, and as he walks out of the room like so many other nights before, the girl can almost make out a smirk.
* * *
Mommy finds her there later. She falls to her knees in front of her bruised, broken, and sobbing daughter. The girl, who has suddenly morphed into that little girl who has seemed to have disappeared so long ago, can feel the gentle arms wrap around her shoulders. Her Mommy coos her name and promises a solution.
The next day, her father is gone.
Everything is in her way, from unseen crevices in the dirt to the bushes that seem to pop up out of nowhere. They all seem to want to keep her away from the one thing she is seeking, her brothers.
She has fallen more times already than she can count using the tools that her two tiny hands provide in the form of fingers. There are scrapes on her knees and elbows, and those joints are covered with more bruises than had been there the night before. Her dress, the one that was only getting in her way, is torn. Her pigtails, the ones she hates, gone astray, the little bows that had been pinned to their ends lost many steps behind her.
She is close to crying, the little tears are bubbling underneath despairing eyes as she continues to flail after her unseen brothers. She can hear them, she can hear their chattering, their laughter, their squeals of delight at some unknown find. She hears their familiar voices, they reverberate endlessly in her one track mind, and she yells and screams their names, but no matter how many times she cries he names of her three beloved siblings, there is no answer.
Her Mommy won’t be happy when she sees the state the little girl is in, she’ll yell at the little girl the same way she always does. But the little girl doesn’t care, she just wants to find them.
But the girl doesn’t know where she is anymore, she doesn’t recognize any landmarks among the endless line of identical looking trees and greenery. She is lost, and when she realizes this, she permits herself to really cry. The tears dribble down and she does not stop them. She has stopped running now, her once quick trot slowing to a stumbling walk. Then, unexpectedly, she falls face first into the moist grass.
She doesn’t get up. She lets her salty tears mingle with the sprinkler water that covers the blades every morning. She is lost and pooped and she doesn’t want to exert the energy needed to get back up and stumble back towards her Mommy. Solemnly she picks at unseen grass while she dribbles.
The little girl can still hear her brothers’ voices, but they are louder than before. She perks up her head, and through the blades of slightly overgrown grass she spots three familiar scraped legs making their way towards her. She watches and waits silently as one of them, the youngest of the three, approaches her and then lays down in front of her. He coos her name gently and then says, “What took you so long?”
She lets out a little sob and like a good big brother he reaches his hand out to grab hers, to let her know that she isn’t there by herself anymore, that she isn’t lost anymore.
With that firm hand he helps her up, and once her grass stained dress has been straightened so that her princess underwear isn’t being shown off to an invisible crowd the four of them run off. As she follows along behind them, no longer searching for them between the bushes, she decides that she would never let herself be left behind again.
* * *
The little girl is still four. She is sitting in a room with all but one of her brothers. The seven of them fill up the remaining space in the room littered with toys they never use, for they learned long ago that their best tool for entertainment and fun was not the elaborate toys that coat the room, but the unrivalled power of their seven still developing imaginations. Their game of pretend, in which the eldest of them decides they are ninja fighter pilots, they run around haplessly shouting sounds of destruction. The little girl in her flowery dress joins in the fun, jumping over colorful toy after colorful toy and in her still slightly high-pitched voice letting out an animated, “Bam! Bam!” as her eldest brother falls dramatically to the floor.
Then suddenly the pretend atmosphere is switched from ninja fighter pilots to knights and dragons, and predictably her numerous brothers try to force the young girl into being the princess the knights must be saved. But the little girl knows what this role means, and she refuses, she will not sit and watch her brothers play fight with sticks. This is a battle she faces every time this is the game of choice and she positions herself firmly as a knight. She easily vanquishes all four of the dragons, cementing herself for the umpteenth time as a valiant knight in their play world.
Unfortunately their happily chaotic frolicking cannot last long, for soon their mother soon interrupts their game by announcing a startling fact. Daddy is home. They all stop and look at the doorway to the room they inhabit and they see a man in a suit, a man they all recognize, a man they all love. They all run at him, but it is the little girl who gets to him first, wrapping her small arms around his legs with the practiced ease of someone who is very used to homecomings, and goodbyes.
But as Daddy looks down at the seven of his eight children who had trampled over various mazes made by cumbersome toys and their own destructive and juvenile games of pretend to leap at him first the little girl sees something that makes him not look quite like Daddy. Instead of kneeling down and somehow magically wrapping them all in his long arms he seems to shrug them off with a simple statement, “Go clean that mess up.”
The little girl doesn’t quite know what he means by cleaning up the mess, because she doesn’t see one, but just like the rest of their brothers she lets go somberly and walks off to do what Daddy wants. They end their game of pretend because Daddy told them to, because they love Daddy, and who knows how long Daddy is going to be home this time.
* * *
Mommy is holding a new dress. It is blue, and the collar has a ruffle and, more importantly, there is lace. “You can wear it on the first day of school,” she tells the little girl, but the little girl just turns her nose up at it. She has had ruffled lacey dresses before, and looking at the collar she knows it is going to itch. She makes a face and shakes her head, telling her Mommy no with one little movement.
Her Mommy keeps trying to persuade her, she keeps telling her how pretty she’ll look, with her hair in braids and the dress on. But the little girl doesn’t want braids or a pretty dress, she wants to be able to run and to get dirty, to spill milk on her shirt and not get yelled at. It is kindergarten, and her brothers had told she’d get dirty. Mommy wouldn’t like that, so the little girl wouldn’t wear the dress. Not that she would consent to wear the dress otherwise.
But she keeps shoving it in the little girls face, and soon the ruffles are a little too close to her nose. She glares at her Mommy and continually shakes her head, “No,” she tells her firmly, with the decisive grace of a recent five year old with a newfound confidence that came with successfully pinning of her eldest brother to the ground when he had made fun of her braids.
But obviously no just isn’t enough for Mommy. So the little girl grabs the dress out of her mother’s hand and throws it on the floor. Her little feet stomp on it as the miniscule particles of dirt that are embedded in the carpet implant themselves in the blue fabric. Her mother looks on horrified as her little girl shouts, “No! No! No!”
The little girl is soon sent to her room.
Stupid dress.
* * *
Daddy is home again.
The little girl doesn’t get to rush to greet him though. Usually getting in trouble at school means she has to stay in her room for a little while, getting suspended for starting a fight on the playground gets her stuck in there indefinitely. So the little girl is forced to listen to the excited squeals of her numerous brothers rushing to the door to greet him, like always. She is left sitting alone in her dirty pizza sauce stained clothes, her head bowed forlornly towards the floor.
Mommy had had to pick her up early, she hadn’t looked very happy. The little girl had tried to tell Mommy what scrawny Jimmy Benson had done to deserve to have his face rubbed in mud. He had tried to kiss her, she told her mother repeatedly, his little germy five year old lips had almost come in contact with her own. What did her Mommy want her to do, get cooties?
Obviously she prefers that to the alternative, which was to physically assault the much smaller child for getting too close to her.
Mommy had yelled the way Mommy does, and now the little girl was stuck sitting alone in her obnoxiously pink room. Her legs are crossed, her pale pink comforter pulled over her chilly bare legs. She can hear the rain outside, and then she hears footsteps, and then the creak of a door opening. Then there is just Daddy standing in the doorway, looking at her.
Daddy doesn’t look happy either, and the little girl cringes under his gaze, concealing herself under the pink comforter she despises in a futile attempt to hide from the disapproval. She can hear his shallow breathing, hear him approaching her. She can almost imagine him poised above her, ready to remove the blanket and tell her what a bad girl she had been.
She peers over the ruffled ends of her comforter, staring at her Daddy with a fright she can’t explain. Daddy doesn’t look like Daddy again, and the little girl isn’t quite sure anymore who has entered her bedroom. She has the sudden urge to pull the comforter once again over her head, to muss up her braids and burrow herself into the blankets that had gone astray in the night so she won’t have to look upon the man she doesn’t recognize.
But when he lifts the comforter off from over her head she has little choice. She stares up at him, apprehension filling her as she wonders how long he will yell at her. He doesn‘t, he just growls, “You little-” but the little girl doesn’t understand the next word that he says, all she knows is that her cheek is suddenly stinging. She knows that she has been punished, and as Daddy walks silently out of the room she buries her head under the covers again, ashamed of the shiny bruise she can’t see blooming on her face.
* * *
The little girl isn’t suspended anymore, but she is staying away from Jimmy Benson, just in case. She is sitting with the older brother who had reached out his hand to help her up so many months ago at the park. It is recess, and their legs are emerged slightly in the bark of the playground. He is only one year older than her but he is her guardian at the playground, and if she wasn’t so determined to steer clear of her new nemesis, he would have made her.
There is a lot of dirt underneath her fingernails. After spending the first ten minutes of their break running off the energy two hours of sitting still had created they had collapsed in the not so comfortable bark. Her fingers had easily dug into the little scraps of wood that covered the bottom of the playground she so rarely ventured on.
They are building something, but right now it just looks like lumps of bark squished together. Unlike sand this substance cannot be easily molded into an elaborate castle and moat combination. Angrily the little girl stamps her fist into the bark mound, disliking the fact that it can be nothing else. But her brother keeps piling and when he is finished he scoots back to admire his handiwork. She looks at him, puzzled, but he just says as he brushes the wood shavings off his hands, “Bark pancakes,” is what he labels them, and when she looks even more confused he says, “Come on, eat them,” and suddenly the amazing imaginations of a five year old and a six year old take hold and they begin pretending to shovel large amounts of bark pancakes into their half open mouths.
After a few seconds her older brother turns to look at the girl as she pretends to eat, his face contorts gently into a questioning glance. She continues to pretend to eat his marvelous creations, but he stops abruptly. “What happened to your face?” he asks, pointing at the bruise that had bloomed in full force the morning after she had attacked Jimmy Benson, “Did Jim do that?” he asks, calling the little boy by his proper name the way only her older brother could get away with.
She stares at him for a second, an imaginary handful of bark pancake in her hand poised at chin level. She shakes her head momentarily and says, “Daddy.”
He looks startled, his eyes go wide, and he stares endlessly at her bruise. “That’s not…,” he says, but he doesn’t finish, almost like he isn’t sure what it isn’t. But instead of finishing he just goes back to eating his bark pancakes like nothing has happened.
But his eyes just keep drifting to that bruise.
* * *
Daddy comes to her room again that night. She is doing her homework begrudgingly, only agreeing to attempt to complete it once her mother had realized that she hadn’t even opened her backpack since she had gotten home from school five hours ago. Daddy will be leaving the next day, and the little girl expects a good bye hug before he goes off to bed.
But she does not get such a loving gesture.
He’s yelling at her again, something like, “It is all your fault!” but this time the little girl can’t seem to figure out what he is yelling at her for. She doesn’t remember beating up Jimmy that day, unless kicking him in her dreams when she fell asleep during math counted. She doesn’t understand.
Then the punishment begins, it is very much like the one two nights before, the one that had caused her older brother to make a disgusted face just that afternoon. His hands grasp her shoulders, but instead of striking her face like the night before he shakes her, moving her little body back and forth as he bellows in her face.
The words blend together, and so does his face within the beginnings of tears as he shakes her, but she doesn’t cry yet. She must have done something, she does not doubt that, Daddy wouldn’t be punishing her if she had been a good girl. “You-” was his next word, following it were a string of adjectives that the little girl hadn’t been introduced to yet, even on the playground.
The shaking stops abruptly, but then a punishment more like the brief one she had received earlier emerges. The strikes sting, but the little girl will not cry, no matter how much it hurts. Her brothers, she knows, wouldn’t cry, they’d stay strong and take whatever punishment Daddy gave them, so that was what she was going to do.
She will have new bruises by morning, but they will probably be hidden beneath her clothes. After what feels like an eternity, Daddy walks away, and the little girl watches him through the tears she is only now allowing to fall. All the while asking herself: What had she done?
* * *
The little girl is seven, and she is in second grade. Jimmy Benson still roams the same school as her, the only difference between kindergarten and second grade is that the math is harder and her eight year old brother has now joined her class. He doesn’t tell her why he had had to do first grade twice, but she thinks it might have had something to do with the homework he ignored when he came into her room and hugged her after one of Daddy’s many visits.
When it wasn’t her brother it was her Mommy. She would examine the residuals and plan out an outfit to hide them. The bruises, she had told the kindergarten age little girl, were secrets, she couldn’t tell other little boys and girls about them. They were special, she said. So the little girl never did, even though by age seven she had realized by the fact that she received them so often that the bruises were not special in the slightest.
Last night Daddy had come home again, and last night he had visited her bedroom while she was doing her homework, just like she had known he would. The bruises were not so easy for Mommy to hide, such as the one on her face, so Jason has taken it upon himself to explain when their teacher asks about it.
“We were playing tag the other day and she slipped on a patch of mud,” he tells her enthusiastically, “She slipped all across the yard and BAM!” he exclaims, reminding the little girl of the chaotic pretend games that used to consume their afternoons, “And she hit her face on the swing set,” he sighs, “Painful, but hilarious!” and he grins broadly.
The teacher falls for it. The secret is safe, once again.
* * *
The little girl, who is not so little anymore, is eight. She is on a court, her legs, which have grown much longer since her experience of the park, propel her quickly across the gym and to the basket. She is on a team now. She was used to playing with her brothers, to being able to get shots passed them despite her slightly shorter stature. But her team was different.
The girl loves basketball, when she has that orange and black ball in her hands, its color scheme forever reminding her of Halloween, she is free.
She leads because this is the only place she can. The other little girls, whose premature passion for the game is muted compared to her own, follow her lead dutifully. They learn from her just like she learned from her brothers, she is like another coach to them.
The ball is in her hands again, she dribbles it down the court, easily maneuvering out of the way of the opposing team. An easy lay up is soon achieved. The girl feels invigorated, reminded once again why she loves the game. The girl who is not so little loves basketball because Daddy can’t punish her when she is on the court.
On the court, she is safe.
* * *
The little girl is nine. Daddy is home. Though he isn’t quite Daddy anymore. No, that title and all the privileges, such as undying devotion and anything resembling admiration, was lost long before. Now that word just sounds foul on the not so little girl’s tongue.
Father, that was who the Daddy she had once loved had morphed into. An omniscient feared figure whose returns sent shivers up the little girl’s spine.
When her father is home now, he comes to her more. She has more bruises and more unexplained punishments. It is no longer a precious secret she keeps away because she thinks they were special. They aren’t, they are her burden. A burden that she refuses to share with anyone else because no one else needed to know.
Her older brother knows, but now that they were older and bruises weren’t expected as much he couldn’t do much to help her. He couldn’t stop their father from getting more and more angrier with each encounter, from shaking her more and more, from throwing her uncharacteristically limp body against a dresser in an attempt to inflict the amount of pain he seems to think she deserves, that she needs.
She no longer misunderstands the words he threw at her, the angry slurs of insults and furious accusations are quite clear to her now. He labels her as many of the inappropriate words spoken by playground hooligans who were mostly unaware of their true meaning. But her father means them, he hates her, and she knows it.
No matter how many times he fakes affection in front of her siblings and other family members, the little girl is always sickened by his touch, because she knows what he will say to her behind closed doors. She doesn’t want her special secret, she wants it all to go away.
But it can’t, because the only way she could make it disappear is if she tells. But she won’t tell, because the warning of her mother still rings loudly in her ears. It is one secret she can’t tell anyone.
* * *
The girl is twelve.
Somebody saw the bruises who wasn’t supposed to. Somebody saw.
The same somebody saw the cause of the bruises. Somebody saw.
Somebody knew her secret, their secret. Somebody knew.
What is she supposed to do now?
* * *
Nothing it seems.
Her father doesn’t come home for a while, and the somebody keeps quiet. It makes the girl happy, but now that she no longer has to constantly hide her embarrassing secret from everyone, she still hides too much.
Her older brother tries to persuade her to not be so closed up, but the girl refuses. Her barriers are too thick, too well made to be broken through by one pleading sibling or any of the scum of the earth that walk the halls of her middle school. She was too angry, too judgmental, too … whatever. That was what everyone told her. People tell her she got her anger from her grandmother, but the girl knows better. Her father is the real source. Why else would she repeatedly beat up Jimmy Benson since elementary school?
But still, they all persist, and none more fervently than her older brother, the one who has always looked after her, and has deemed it necessary to do so once again. He can be incredibly persuasive, and if anyone can convince her to open up, it would be him. But every time she thinks about giving it up, about slightly chipping away at her barriers, her father comes home again, and she is reminded why she is the way she is. Maybe it is wrong for her to blame her issues on her father, even though ultimately he was a contributing factor to her creation. It is much easier, she has learned, to blame him rather than herself.
* * *
Her father comes home for Christmas.
Her brother has been on a downward spiral for a few months now. Now that he isn’t solely responsible for making up excuses for her, he has found more time to hang out with his friends. Just like in first grade, his grades have started slipping.
Her father has always asked to see their grades at the end of Christmas break, and for once the girl is not worried that her grades will be the cause of her next punishment. When it comes down to her brother, he doesn’t even pretend to not know why his father has suddenly has started yelling at him. Insults like the ones the girl had been hearing for years are now being thrown at her brother like a tidal wave.
It continues through the evening, slowly building up and then equally as slowly easing out until all that was left of his shouting fest is a smoldering look directed solely at her older brother.
The next day is not much better. Her brother asks her father a simple question, and immediately the shouting resumes, as if there has been no quiet in between the two storms. It was then that her brother almost sets the house on fire. He snaps in the middle of the living room and holds a flickering candle to the curtains, a threat against his father if he didn’t stop talking. It is only after the pleading of his anxious wife that he apologizes, however grudgingly, and her brother sets the candle down.
The next day her brother has a nasty bruise, but her father never touches him again.
* * *
The girl is sixteen. She is sitting in a restaurant with her brothers and two mere acquaintances.
The girl hates the relatively unknown boy she is sitting across from, though she hates most people now that she has realized that people can’t be trusted. This cotton candy colored mess of a boy has managed to piss her off since she first met him, which, arguably, wasn’t very hard. But still, it was a feat to be recognized.
He has gotten in more verbal fights with her than Jimmy Benson had gotten punched by her in all of eleventh grade, and she hates him for it. She doesn’t like him, even though she can’t think of more than a couple of good reasons why she doesn’t.
It doesn’t matter how many stupid games her brothers come up with them to play while they wait for their food, or how many of these games set her up on the same team as the boy with the cotton candy colored tresses, she isn’t enjoying herself. Even if she is, it is all dashed when she realizes that her favorite older brother has a penchant for the obnoxious boy’s sister.
She is doomed.
* * *
“You’re not ugly.”
A month or so has passed, and she is now seventeen. Just like the girl predicted, she was doomed to spend more time than she wanted, which was none, with the cotton candy boy. She is alone with him at the moment, a place she would desperately like not to be. She’d prefer even more not to be talking to him, but considering the pathetic image insecurities he had just professed she feels and intervention in the form of words is necessary in these circumstances.
“You’re not ugly,” she repeats to her cotton candy colored enemy when he doesn’t respond. It is one of the first compliments she has bestowed on anyone in years, if it can even be categorized as that when it comes out more like a scolding.
He stares at her like she is a purple three-headed alien with sixteen eyes who has just beamed into his living room. The girl is half expecting him to ask what leader she wants him to take her to, but instead he just stays silent.
The girl doesn’t understand why it is so hard for him to hear. It isn’t as if it is some groundbreaking new discovery, or like she had said something completely unbelievable like that inanimate objects had just learned how to talk. It is a simple fact that he needs to get into his head.
“Okay,” he says, and that is the end of that.
* * *
The girl is still seventeen, but there is one startling change of events. No, it is not the return of the father she had loved when she was younger, that unflawed perfect figure that she had created in her unfaltering imagination. It is the fact that she and the cotton candy boy have somehow become something other than enemies.
She doesn’t want to explain it, because she can’t. To explain it is to admit that she has been wrong about him from the beginning, and she is not ready for that.
For some unexplainable reason, the boy has become part of her everyday life, and for once she doesn’t see it as an inevitable doom to spend her afternoons having math explained to her by someone far more intelligent than she. She puts up with him because he puts up with her, and somehow they have fallen into an easy relationship. Something called friendship.
* * *
“Daddy” came home again because his little girl has been bad. It isn’t another suspension for beating up Jimmy Benson or whatever other high school fellow had become her victim. No, he stopped coming home because of that after the first six times it had happened.
The girl who is not so little knows what she has done is much worse than punching someone who deserves it. She has expected him to come home, and now he is there in front of her, and though she trembles, she is prepared. The only thought floating through her mind: What excuse would she use this time?
* * *
Somebody else knows, again. But this time it isn’t someone willing to keep their mouth shut, it is her cotton candy friend. He keeps asking about her bruises, and in that overly intelligent mind he has managed to put two and two together. Her older brother had warned her, and now she was facing consequences.
He has gone to her father, but the girl catches him in the act. Her father knows her friend knows, and she knows more than ever why the secret must be kept. He can’t know, because if he knows, everything is ruined, if he knows then all of the time she has spent keeping it to herself is worth nothing.
She saves him from completely ruining everything, she manages stops him before he can reveal his conclusion. She protects her family and her secret and her friend from his own curiosity in the only way she knows how. Through lying and spiteful words. The only slightly true phrase she used was, “You ruined everything,” which he almost had. But the, “I hate you,” and the, “I won’t forgive you,” couldn’t be farther for the truth.
She waits impatiently for him to leave, crossing her fingers that he will not question her response to his nosiness, and when he is gone she turns to face her father.
She is not sure she is ready this time.
* * *
It is her father at his worst, and the girl at her weakest. She isn’t sure how much of it she can take. But she takes it because she has to, because if she doesn’t protect him then her cotton candy friend will be faced with her father’s beast, which was rivaled by no other. She will keep him safe, even if it kills her.
She doesn’t even bother waiting for him to leave to start crying, and as he walks out of the room like so many other nights before, the girl can almost make out a smirk.
* * *
Mommy finds her there later. She falls to her knees in front of her bruised, broken, and sobbing daughter. The girl, who has suddenly morphed into that little girl who has seemed to have disappeared so long ago, can feel the gentle arms wrap around her shoulders. Her Mommy coos her name and promises a solution.
The next day, her father is gone.
ANDDDD, a bunch of icons which I'm planning to use as we speak ;D
