“There’s what we call the good touch, like a hug from somebody we trust, or our sister holding our hand… then there’s what we call the bad touch,” Mrs. Meyers continues as the class pays minimal attention. “This is more like, somebody putting their hands on you where they don’t belong. Somebody who makes you feel uncomfortable… and then telling you that you can’t speak a word of it.”
“Like a stranger?” Georgia asks, as she always does. I want to roll my eyes but I am actually interested in class today – this is something new for us.
“Not always a stranger,” Mrs. Meyers explains, sending fireworks up from my belly. If people we know can hurt us, I think, we should be more careful in this world. “Sometimes the person that hurts us is closest to us but makes us feel so good in other ways, that we never speak a word of it. You can always tell somebody if you are being hurt. That’s what a bad touch is. It’s abuse.”
I remember a television show that I watched a couple of days ago by accident. The girl was being hit over and over by a man and she told the police that it was “domestic abuse,” but I don’t know what that is, and it sits on the tip of my tongue as I wait to possibly ask the teacher.
“Is abuse only hitting?” I ask.
“Mostly it is only hitting,” Mrs. Meyers smiles, warm with the fact that she was prompted. “But it can be other things, too. When somebody treats you badly over and over again, it is abuse.”
“Like not feeding somebody you love,” I say.
“That’s correct,” says Mrs. Meyers. “Very smart, Emily.”
I walk in the door after school and Sophia is standing there, biting her nails and shaking. She says, “The clock must have broke. It’s been reading the same thing for hours now and I thought you weren’t coming home, I thought something happened to you.” My sister rushes over to me and puts her cold hands on my shoulders and I instantly think back to the night before and how I brought hand warmers into her closet and put them on her hands while she slept but they must not have worked. It’s because she’s so small; I know that’s why. Sophia guides me over to the scale sitting on the dirty kitchen floor and tells me to step on it, as I always do, shoes off.
“Good, good,” she smiles. “You’re up five pounds.” I don’t know what this means but it makes Sophia happy, and that’s what matters to me.
When my parents come into the kitchen and start throwing around things for supper, Sophia disappears. I’m looking everywhere for her but she’s nowhere to be found. My father pours some old, stale cereal into a bowl – I only know it’s stale because it’s the last cereal we have and I had some for breakfast, which wasn’t so good. My mother barks something at me about being in her way and pushes me aside as she picks through shelves looking for pancake mix, and sighs when she can’t find any. That’s been gone for days but I don’t say anything. I stand there and think about the last pickle in the fridge and half a bowl of yogurt that I have left, one of the only edible things in this whole house. As I’m thinking about it, my mother reaches into the refrigerator and pulls out my bowl of yogurt, sticking the spoon in her mouth and going to take a seat. I want to cry but I don’t.
I walk upstairs to find Sophia, and she’s cowered inside the closet like she usually is, her room, her dwelling. I push the coats and shoes aside and crawl back into the small space where she’s curled up; she’s so small that she only takes up about a foot of space on the floor all the way around and I tell her there isn’t a lot of food in the house. That I’m hungry, but I think I’ll just skip supper because they ate the last of what is good. Sophia looks at me with wide eyes, and I think I feel her heart skip a beat even though I’m me and I’m not inside her. She tells me I have to eat, even if it’s just plain toast or a cold bowl of soup. Just. Eat.
I come home from school the next day and Sophia weighs me, but this time she does not smile like she has been the past few days. I don’t know what she expected but she always has this quizzical look on her face as if something isn’t right. That day, my mother asks me if I want to come to the store to pick out some groceries and I’m very excited by the thought. I ask her if we can pick out some ice cream, and she says that would be fine. Sophia is in the closet and I go into my room to grab my coat. I come out into the hallway where my mother is slipping on her shoes. As I walk past the closet that she is standing in front of, I see Sophia curled up in her foot-long area, staring back at the both of us. My mother slams the closet door right in her face and we’re on our way.
That night, we have new cereal for supper and my mom makes some pancakes with our new mix. I think about Sophia still curled up in the closet, many days without food and I want to ask about it but I don’t talk about Sophia because she is what my parents would call a “sore subject.” I think back to Mrs. Meyers and wonder if my parents are what is called “abuse” but then again, abuse is a bad thing and I don’t think my parents are bad at all. They make sure that I go to school, they buy me clothes, and we eat food. What happens to Sophia, I think, may be her fault. But I don’t know, because I just worry about me.
As I’m thinking about this, I remember the ice cream in the freezer. I shove the last bit of cereal in my mouth and I ask my mother, “Can I have one of those ice cream cones for dessert?”
Before she has a chance to answer, my father’s spoon clashes down inside his bowl of milk as if he has been stunned. “You bought her ice cream?” he asks. “I thought we agreed that she was putting on… you know, too much weight.” My heart skips a beat, or so I think. I think of Sophia lying in the closet, her foot-long space. I think about her thin arms and how cold her hands are without the extra body fat keeping her warm.
I don’t cry about the fact that I didn’t get any ice cream but I do find Sophia and I tell her about what happened, and what was said. She pleads with me to the point where it scares me. I want to cry, but I try my best not to show it. She tells me that I have to tell Mrs. Meyers what is happening. I find this odd; it just sounds weird to me. I ask her why, and she tells me because Mrs. Meyers is somebody that I can trust. I tell her no, I don’t want to do that. I don’t think that Mrs. Meyers needs to hear about my family. She begs me. She tells me that she’ll go downstairs and bring me two ice creams up to my room tomorrow if I tell her. She says please, tell Mrs. Meyers about the food. Tell Mrs. Meyers what you told me. I say okay, but I don’t mean it.
“What did she say?” Sophia asks as I step on the scale. My stomach growls and Sophia hears it. She gives me this odd, sideways look and she suddenly seems extra sad.
“What did who say?”
“Mrs. Meyers, when you told her about the food. What happened last night.”
“Oh. I forgot.”
Sophia didn’t talk to me the rest of the night. I heard her sobbing inside her closet space that night. I asked her one time why she slept inside the closet. She said that she was confined to the closet. I asked her what confined meant, and she told me that mother and father just wanted her there – that was her room.
It is about a week without three meals a day – it is now one. I have supper and that is it. I try to have extra some nights, coming downstairs in the middle of the night to eat a hotdog because my belly is still growling but most of the time I can’t get past the second step before I hear my father moaning from his bedroom, “Emily, get back to sleep.”
Sophia weighs me and then steps on the scale for a glance of her own one day, and I see that the size is half the number of mine. But that sounds wrong because she is twice as much the age as me.
That night, Sophia comes into my bedroom and I am surprised to see her. She begs me to tell Mrs. Meyers, but I close my eyes and pretend I am sleeping. She cries on the end of my bed that night, and I hear her talking to me, pleading with me, but I fall asleep somehow anyway.
The next night, my parents are eating chili from a can and even though I don’t like chili, I really want some. I don’t say anything because they didn’t offer any to me and I wait for my mother to say something. But she just eats and eats, and she says nothing. I wonder if I’m going to eat at all that night. As I watch her take the last bite and pop it into her mouth, I can’t help it anymore and I start crying all over my face and my hands and suddenly I have their attention.
“I’m so hungry!” I shout, sending my father to his feet as he tries to assess the situation. “I need food or else I’m going to die!”
My mother doesn’t know what to say, but my father laughs now and just so happens to say everything. “Honey, you have to watch your weight. You don’t want to end up becoming fat.”
“That’s what Sophia said, too!” I shout back, angrier than ever now and tears still streaming down my face. “She said you called her fat and she’s not fat – she’s skinny and she’s abuse!”
“Wh-who?” my father stammers, taken aback. “Who did you just say?” For a second, he makes this look at my mother, and I think they are both going to erupt or scream or cry – maybe all three.
“Never mind,” I say, and I feel that it’s too late. But my father just sits down and he keeps eating, and I’m astonished because I thought that they were going to just kill me for what I said. I know that Sophia is a “sore subject.”
Sophia weighs me every day and tells me that I can only help myself and that she can’t do it for me. Sometimes I wonder why she can’t help me; she is my sister, after all. But then again, I wonder a lot of things. I wonder how she ended up in the closet and how she got so skinny. I wonder why she doesn’t go to school like I do, and why she never sneaks around the house looking for food. I wonder why nobody ever talks to her, like she’s some toy that got thrown in the closet to later be forgotten.
But I guess that’s just how things are supposed to be. She’s just a “sore subject.”
Submitted May 03, 2016 at 09:37AM by horriddaydream http://ift.tt/21rPtfr nosleep
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