AS CHAPTER ONE ENDS, NICKY YOUNG, OUR YOUNG HEROINE, HAS JUST OBSERVED ANOTHER VIOLENT OUTRAGE BY HER FATHER, AND THIS TIME, HER SISTER TOOK THE BRUNT OF IT. NICKY IS STARTING TO FORM OPINIONS ABOUT MEN, HER PARENTS, FRIENDSHIPS, AND UNDERSTANDS IN ORDER TO SURVIVE, SHE’D BETTER SHUT DOWN AND KEEP HER HEART CLOSED.
From my hiding place I watch everything. My father whips my sister again. She is helpless and cannot escape. She’s somersaulting, stumbling, and falling as the belt strikes her.
While Jenise screams with high pitched sounds of terror I haven’t ever heard from her, I stay frozen and keep praying, “Please don’t let him find me, please don’t find me . . .”
Jenise falls and turns her head. She sees my hiding place. For the first time since his rage began, I see the fear and pain on her face. She shrinks to become as small as possible, her once tall and erect posture, beaten down.
All she has to do is point me out and complain that I didn’t eat my portion either. She could take the violence away from her body so easily, but instead she’s taking the pain for both of us.
She stumbles and rolls over, exposing her soft belly, trying to surrender to his fierceness, but he whips her again and yells, “Get up!” Down the hallway and up the stairs to her bedroom she runs, my father following her, making her sorry she challenged him.
Finally, Jenise’s bedroom door slams and the whipping stops. I hear her sobbing and crying, but at least she has been left alone.
It’s better when we’re left alone.
In many ways, we were alone.
Even though I escaped the physical consequences that night, I didn’t escape the mental ones. When my mother arrives home I come out of hiding, but only in body.
Did we talk about what happened? I can’t remember. If we did, I don’t remember being comforted. Her arms never surrounded me or my sister, nor did her words give us any reassurances of being safe, or that we were loved, or she’d hold us no matter what.
As we got older, the constant pounding of my father’s drunkenness made Jenise and I grow up fast. We became skilled at the techniques on how to survive our home, especially when we entered high school and were more independent.
But when I was eight-years-old, the only ways I knew to survive were to run and hide or detach in the hopes that the madness would stop before it came down to crush me.
And I ran, and I ran, and I ran, and I didn’t stop running for years.
MAR
About the Author: