Third Grade
All of the kids in our neighborhood played outside at the same time, just before dinner and right after lunch. Riding bikes, digging holes, and making war. I was alone one day and walking on the sidewalk three houses down the street from our newly built house. Our house was fresh and clean and very white. It hadn't been broken in yet. I felt safer outside in the dirt with my feet cut from running around barefoot over the sand and pebbles the snow trucks had left behind from the icy winter like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs. The outside has been used for millions of years so there is no worry of getting it worn. That is where I found myself, playing in the sand, when the boy across the street rode up on his shiny trick bike. He was the kind of child who was unintelligent, comanding, and loud. In a child's world, it was all that mattered. I had never been in a child's world for long. He ordered me to lay down on the sidewalk. He usually liked to play these games in the privacy of my basement where the walls resembled the concrete bricks of a jail cell. I surrendered myself with my head in the grass and my body stretching across the cement. He towered above me with all his authority and without a word pedaled his bike over my stomach . The compressing of my skin and my muscle sounded like a steak being rolled into itself again and again. The wet meat squishing and the blood forcefully rearranging in the muscle. I begged for mercy, but I didn't have the power of innocence. No one wants to show mercy on a broken girl. He had previously made sure of that. Once more, he turned his bike and rode over me again, my stomach meat becoming softer, tender. When I could finally open my eyes again, I saw my savior. A soft white light shone around his hazy silhouette that blocked away the sun. A hand that no god could have reached towards me, picked me up from the ground. No adult could understand how to save me from my unwillingness to get off the sidewalk where rocks bore into my back. I ran with my bare feet up the street to our clean house, never looking back. I'd heard the sounds of him avenging me before and I could hear them again in my mind. The sound of wind and the sound of meat being tenderized.
I have never lain across the sidewalk again. I've been to scared he won't come when my stomach is flattened all the way down.
Tenth Grade.
The circles under my eyes started on one Friday night full of sweet smoke and hot, dewy skin. I went home late and hid the evidence of a second life under my clothes. While I was in the shower trying to scrub the dirt and sweat from my pores, I leaned my head directly under the hot stream of water and cupped my bruised hands around my ears and listened to the water roar. The powerful noise becoming thunder rolling just under my skull over the vast sky of my brain. The water streamed down my face making it hard for me to breathe, but I couldn't let the sound disappear. Not yet. I let the thunder pound away every thought and every noise. In one second, I lost my breath and had to step forward. The water changed. It sounded like the Pop Rocks we used to eat. The snapping and the crackling of the little candy sitting on our tongues and when we parted our lips we let the sound out, making it loud enough for each others ears. This time I was alone with no one to share my crunching noises with. I slammed the shower off before I had to listen to much more.
A shower doesn't always wash away the dirt, but if things get loud enough, it can drown it.
I suppose this is my second rough draft. It's about my experiences but based on the format and style of Indian Education. There is no racism because it isn't the common theme of my paper. More comments? The last really helped. I like this a little better.
