Bruises, Cuts, and Rumors

I kept my head down. Step after step after step. I ran to my bus stop… Like always I tried to hide in the tree until my got there. I couldn’t help but wish and hope that the bus driver would forget me—just this once.

The bus slowed and came to a stop. So much for wishes coming true. I came out of hiding and climbed onto the bus. As soon as the others see me the bus goes silent. They were probably wondering if the rumors are true. They’re not—but it doesn’t matter to them.

I walked all the way to the back of the bus. Several people try to trip me but I kept my head bowed and my eyes cast down. I never let anyone see how much they hurt me. How much I wished the rumors would just stop. Even if I had wanted to tell them they would never have believed the truth.

It only took 10 minutes to get to the school but by then I had already been called every derogatory name they knew. I just say there until everyone got off. Then, slowly, I got up and made my way to the front. As I got off the bus everyone stared at me. I could almost feel their thoughts, wondering if the rumors were true. But no one would dare to think to ask me about it.

I hurried to my locker to put up my sweater and backpack. When I closed my locker she was standing there. Just like every other day. If I was at school she came to see if there would be a “meeting” that afternoon. It was times like that that I wished I was invisible or dead—more often than not wishing for the latter of the two.

She gave me her trademark smile with a sadistic twist that was reserved just for me. I immediately turned and ran to the closest bathroom to hide in until class. In the bathroom I saw my reflection—what I see, I hate.

The girl I saw was pale with dark smudges under her eyes from the night terrors that plagued her sleep. She had hair that hung limply around her face. Her shirt and pants were extremely baggy and her shoes were ratty—obviously the cast offs of those who donated their clothes to charity. Even though it was awfully hot out she wore pants and longs sleeved shirts—hoping that they could adequately hide the bruises, cuts, and scars she bore. In the mirror I saw someone that was worthless—someone that never should have lived in the first place.

The warning bell rang so I rushed to class. I go to the very back and sit down. Slouched down in my seat, I hoped that the teacher wouldn’t call on me. The teacher walked in and looked at me. In that moment I knew that even the teachers had heard the rumors. In his eyes I see disapproval, pity, disappointment and accusation. But no one even attempted to find out the truth.

Without anyone asking me whether or not it was true I had already been condemned as guilty. The teachers, the students, the councilors, the principals… no one thought to ask me what had really happened or to see if I were all right. No instead they found me instantly guilty, all based on a rumor.

The day blurred by. I don’t even remember anything that was taught, anything that happened. All I remember is that they looked at me with accusation I their eyes. Each class I slouched down more and more. Finally school was over. It was time to meet up with my tormentors.

I walked slowly from my locker to the gym. I held my orange backpack as though it would save me from what was about to happen—as though it could bring back Cass.

I walked in excruciatingly slow. I stopped right outside of the gym doors. I waited, then slowly walked in.

I stared into their faces. Not the faces of my peers, but into the faces of the teachers that had ignored me. They just looked at me as though I held all the answers to their questions. Idly I stood there. Waiting…

The teachers came to slowly surround me. I felt as though the walls were closing in on me. I knew I should tell them but it wasn’t like they would have actually heard me—no ever did back then. They encircled me. Then my mathematics teacher steps forward. In that instant I knew that there were hosting an “intervention” but I didn’t need one. They didn’t even have a clue as to what they were getting into.

“Sweetie, we need to talk to you about what you have been doing.”

Silently I just stood there. I didn’t say anything because they wouldn’t have actually believed me. No one had even believed me—no one until Cass.

Everyone assumes that Christian country kids are nice… and some are. But they can also be the meanest people in the world.

“So, tell us. We won’t hold it against you. We won’t even tell anyone else.”

“The rumors aren’t true.” I spoke so quietly that at first I didn’t think they heard me, but then they started to laugh. Tears started to form behind my eyes. I refused to let the stinging tears show or fall. I would not give them another reason to ridicule me.

“But they have to be.”

I looked for a way out. They had surrounded me so I couldn’t flee. I closed my eyes and for the first time actually believed that being beat up was better than that. Anything was better than that. All those teachers, the very people I should have been able to trust, all believed a rumor over me. All because one of my ex-friends got jealous because she thought I was getting all the attention. If she wanted the attention I was getting I would have gladly traded her places in a heartbeat.

“No.” It had been all I could do to speak at all. The tears I refused to show were trying to strangle me.

“Then how do you get all your bruises?”

Could they really not remember how just a couple of months ago I had went to several of them to get help for the “roughhousing.”

“I am clumsy.” I didn’t want them to laugh. Even though I needed help I knew that I could not tell them the truth. I would not be called a liar or a drama queen because I told the truth.

“Being ‘clumsy’ does not account for it all.”

How would they know? I wondered.

“Tell us the truth.”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell the truth. I just wanted to get away. By then I could barely hold the tears back. I could tell they weren’t going to give up.

“Come on, tell us the truth. There’s nothing to be afraid of,” they said.

That’s what they thought. They weren’t the ones in my place. They weren’t the ones who were being punched, kicked, shoved, hit, and basically tortured. I had already told them the truth and I paid for that mistake. But more importantly Cass had paid the ultimate price—she had paid with her life.

They started to close in on me and I felt as though I was a plump rabbit and they were all starving wolves. I could tell they wouldn’t let me out of it; they wanted me to tell them what was really going on. But how could I do that when they wouldn’t even believe me?

“If you tell us the truth you can leave and we’ll never bother you about it ever again,” they promised.

I knew that if I told them the truth I would never have a moment of peace about it. But then that was my last day so it wasn’t like I was ever going to have to see them again.

“I already did,” I whispered.

“No, you haven’t now tell us what we want to know!”

They had gotten so close that I felt as though I didn’t even have enough space to breath. I felt the tears that I had been trying so hard to hold back start to slowly trickle down my face. I hated the tears! They were a weakness I wished I never had.

“What a baby! She can’t even tell them her stupid answer without crying for her mama!” one of the students outside of the rind of teachers yelled.

Everyone was laughing—even some of the teachers. I didn’t understand why this had to happen to me. Why did I have to go there to that school? Why did I have to be mixed? Why couldn’t they have left me alone?

“Tell us the truth now!” the teachers demanded.

I didn’t think I could put up with much more. I just wanted to go home! I just wished that everything was over—I just wanted to be left alone, to never be beat again. To never feel as though death would be better than life.

“Tell us now before we have to call your mother,” they threatened.

That was the last straw. She could never find out what had been happening.

“You want to know the truth? You really want to know the truth?” I had practically yelled. After years of holding under their pressure I had finally broken.

“Yes.”

“The truth is I stood up to the bullies to help Cass. You remember who she is, don’t you?”

They stayed silent, waiting for me to continue.

“Well, guess what I got for trying to help a friend? I bet you don’t even care, but take a wild guess anyway,” I demanded.

No one said anything—they just stared at me as though they couldn’t believe I was actually talking. So few of them had ever heard me talk more than a couple of moments at a time… None of them had ever seen me angry before and right then I was beyond angry—I was a pissed off bull ready to strike out at anyone who came near me.

“Oh, so you don’t want to know? Well, I’ll tell you any way. Every day I have been here since then I have had an afternoon ‘meeting.’ Do you want to know what that entails? Do you?”

The teachers were looking at me as though I had lost it—as though I had finally gone crazy. Who knows, maybe I finally had. I saw a couple of them shaking their heads no.

“Oh, so now you don’t want the truth? Well, tough luck cause you’re getting it whether you want to or not! These ‘meetings’ are times when I got to be surrounded by a bunch of my peers. You know what they did to me? They tormented me. I got hit, slapped, punched, kicked, shoved, spit on, called just about every mean thing you can be called, and if they were feeling really generous they even threw whatever they could at me.”

“Liar!” a student yelled out.

“Really? I’m being the liar? If I’m lying then why do I have all the cuts I have? Why do I have these bruises? Why do I have the scars to prove it? If I’m lying then tell me why did Cass kill herself? Huh? Please tell me why! Because if we were just lying about the abuse then what would she have to kill herself over?”

Everyone was silent.

“Please tell me, if you truly think I’m lying, why she committed suicide.” I could barely hold back the sob that was caught in my chest.

“I don’t know why she killed herself but it wasn’t because of the other students,” one of the teachers quietly said.

“Is that what you really believe? That she just randomly decided to overdose on her mother’s prescription meds?” I asked in disbelief.

“How do you know that? We never told the students that and that was never in the news, so how do you know about it?”

“Oh, did we forget to tell everyone? How inconsiderate of us! Though I’m pretty sure that it didn't concern anyone, so I guess it was just our oversight that we never told you,” I sneered.

They just stared at me; some of them were casting looks of disgust at me. They probably were thinking my outburst proved the rumors true.

“We made a suicide pact… not that any of you helped to stop it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, did you already forget? It only happened a few months ago. Well, I guess I can’t expect you to remember us coming to almost all of you, now can i? I mean, how on earth can two girls coming to you covered in bruises and cuts be in any way memorable?”

“But… you were just lying! Just trying to get attention!”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that… We wanted you to finally realize what was happening right under your noses! In fact, it was happening right here in this very room. But you never even thought to investigate into what we said was happening, did you?”

No one answered. None of the teachers would even look at me.

“No, of course you didn’t! I mean we were only twelve-years-old, what could we possibly know about abuse—even when we had the evidence there for you… You just decided that we were lying because you didn’t want to admit that it was happening or you didn’t want to spend the ‘precious’ time it would have taken to address it. She’s dead because of you!” I screamed.

“It was her own choice to take her life, we didn’t force her to take those pills,” one of the teachers angrily declared.

None of them had any clue about what had really been going on.

“Yes, it was her choice. But it was the only one she felt she had! I have only endured this for one year but she has been forced to deal with it for three whole years! When she tried to get help no one believed her. Did you know that her parents thought she was exaggerating—that the other kids were just teasing her—even though she had the marks to back up her story? Did you know that her big brother said she was acting out for attention and at one point told her if she continued to cry about it that he would give her something to cry about? Did you know that when she went to her uncle, who she trusted explicitly, he pretended to believe her but after about a week he began to sexually abuse her? She had no one to talk to and no one to believe her. Then when I came along I convinced her to go to you! I convinced her that you could help. We thought that you of all people would be able to help her—would help us, but you turned a blind eye just like everyone else in her life!” I paused for breath and to clear the tears out of my throat.

I looked at the teachers and some of the students, going from face to face. In some of them I saw surprise, in a couple I saw guilt, but in most I saw horror and disgust.

“If it was you that went through that, what would you do? Would you have continued to endure that? Would you have fought back? Please, tell me. What would you have done in her place?”

I waited for an answer. It felt like an eternity passed before someone stepped forward.

“I’d call the cops,” a student called out.

“I guess you could do that… But then she did do that it in a way. Did you know that the uncle she trusted so much that molested her is a police officer? Who do you tell if the ones who are supposed to be there to protect and help you are the ones you need protection from or turn a blind eye to you because they don’t want to deal with it? What do you do then?”

No one had an answer. Everyone was squirming and no one would meet my gaze.

“Well, here’s the answer we came up with: if no one wants to help you, you take matters into your own hands. Since no one wanted to help us the only thing we could do was continue to endure it or remove ourselves from the situation. Since we are only twelve running away really wasn’t an option, so that left us with enduring the abuse or leaving this earth…”

“Why didn’t you just endure it a little while longer? It was only a couple of months until summer vacation,” one of the teachers asked reaching her hand out as though to sooth me. I flinched away and she pulled back.

“You’ve been alive for a while, right?”

The teacher nodded.

“Then let me ask you a question. What happens when all the pain and wrongs you endure turn you numb and eventually crush your heart and soul? Please, try to explain to me how you can continue to live when you’ve literally had the will to live beaten right out of you? How do you continue to deal with the abuse when you know that when you get home someone is waiting there to hurt you in a different way? How do you continue to endure the physical and mental abuse at school while you are forced to endure the sexual abuse at home every single day?”

No one had the answer. But I could tell that they were all uncomfortable. Some of them had even started to sneak out of the room.

“You brought me in here to learn the truth. The truth about not only my bruises and cuts but about the rumors. Now you know the truth, the whole truth. Is it what you wanted? Are you satisfied now?” I demanded.

No one would look at me. By then all the students had fled along with a couple of the teachers.

“I asked you if you were sure you wanted the truth, you said yes. Now that you know, are you sure you still want it?” I quietly asked barely loud enough for them to hear me.

Those that were still there just shook their heads and looked at me with looks of great sadness.

Where was that sadness when it was life-and-death for Cass? I wondered.

“Now that I’ve told you the truth can I go? Can I finally be free of these chains? Since you have heard the truth, will you let me leave to try to find peace of mind for the wrongs done to me?”

“You can go,” the teacher closest to me whispers.

“Thank you.”

I went to leave but at the door I paused and looked back. I saw the few who were strong and brave enough to stay and hear the whole truth… I saw how the burden of the truth was already starting to bow their shoulders. I turned and left. Never again would I step foot in that place, never again would I be forced to tell a truth that even adults find hard to carry. I could finally find my peace, knowing that I wouldn’t be forced to take that truth with me to my grave.

Finally in that moment I could move on from those bruises, cuts and rumors that had ruled my life for too long.