Complicated

Seventh grade was a time of extreme ups and downs.

I’m not going to bore with you with my yo-yo-in attitudes as I felt terrified as my voice cracked one day and went like a freaking octave lower. This quasi-baritone like voice (in my opinion) didn’t match up with the rest of me and I hated it.

It was also during this time that my older sister started hanging out with a new set of neighbors down the road. I can’t say I remember her name but unfortunately I can remember her brother, John, too well.

John was more of my brother’s age and there were times I wondered why he hung out with me; or I hung out with him.

All we really did was play video games and maybe with with Lego sets. I had no real feelings for him. I mean there was time that if you asked me if I knew him, I’d say yeah, he’s pretty good at playing “Super Mario Brothers”

However, ask me now, and I would scream out how I wished he was dead and how he lead me to want to die myself.

Well since you asked...

On a late Saturday night John and I rode our bikes through the neighborhood. Yes, I still had my goddess-inspired two-wheeler but over time it had been modified and slowly started to fall apart. It was on that early evening that it became a unicycle as we rounded the corner into our neighborhood, which was on a hill.

It was just like a taking a test that you utterly fail at: everything seemed so okay and then snap!
The front wheel came off-with my hands still holding onto the handle bars. I slammed my knees, legs and arms onto the gravel road. It didn’t happen in slow motion and as much as it sounds epic, it was just a freaky-looking kid slamming themselves onto the street with the rear of the bike skidding past me.

John laughed for a few seconds and I did too until I looked at the condition of my jeans, shirt and the bike itself. I couldn’t go home looking like I had gotten into a fight and lost because the house was actually locked.

Forgot to mention that my sister and I were staying over there for the night as my parents and brother had gone somewhere overnight.

So, we went to his house instead, which was about five hundred feet from the scene of the accident.

I had some clothes in a duffel bag in a room I was supposed to share with my sister. It was just a pair of shorts and a t-shirt; it was summer in the south, after all. I came back downstairs to see my sister playing a video game with a bunch of older girls and boys. They were laughing hysterically at the screen as they moved the character around and kept jumping off of a cliff. I knew the game and I wondered why they kept jumping off into the pit over and over again.

It did not make any sense to my seventh grade brain. Maybe April could explain it to me because John didn’t as he called me to come upstairs. It was spring and I was still trying to figure out myself. There were times when I had an infatuation with April, where talking to her would take me to a dangerous place where I wanted to reach out and kiss her cheek. However, there were also times that I would be lost in a stare of some eighth grade boy who didn’t know me from Eve, until someone should whisper in his ear. His eyes would widen and everyone around him would laugh.

April had told me that one day I would just have to freaking take the plunge once again and wear what I wanted.
Damn my parents and the school board if they cared.

But no, I had retracted into kind of a shell since earlier that year; to just try and get by without anyone asking me stupid questions; like why I had long hair but my voice sounded like I was a “young dude”. I obeyed my parents at home. I listened to the teachers at school. I stopped trying to knock Tony’s teeth out and developed a mellow wrapped in confusion and served with a generous portion of pico de mortal fear of my sexuality.

We sat up in his room talking about our classes with John telling me how things were in high school; that even though he was a freshmen he had power over others in the school. How he could walk down the hallway and no one would touch him, flick his ears or destroy his personal property. He told me that when I got into High School he would be there to show me the ropes, defend me and be there for whatever I needed.

Again, I didn’t really see anything in John.
Not a thing.
He was an older acquaintance who I, and my brother, did a few things with around the neighborhood. That, and he was the only person I knew who owned a Super Nintendo.

However, at that moment, I had delusions of grandeur that I could walk into the high school with my sandals, skirt with tattered a shirt; my repaired rainbow necklace and hold my head up high as I walked either close behind or to the side of him. It was a spectacular thought and I fell asleep in that room with those thoughts.

I woke up, however, to the sound of whispering in my ear.
Quiet, with a hoarse tone.
John was saying something in my ear as one of his hands ran down my back.

I’m pretty sure my eyes were so wide-open they would show up in the dark.

He continued to breathe in my ear which sent a subtle chill up my spine that was cancelled out by the hand moving up and around my chest.

His inaudible mutterings in my ear stopped as he kissed my neck for a moment before he shifted his body and slowly took a hold of one of my hands.

I had my eyes closed and kept my breathing shallow and under control. Even though it was dark, there was a little light coming in through the window from a street lamp. I kept my body limp like a sleeping rag doll and unfortunately for me, that’s what he was counting on.

My hand was soon wrapped around something that I never thought I had would ever would. John continued to whisper something and held my hand in position. If I was braver, I could have crushed it.

If I had been more courageous, I would have bent it in two.

If my sister hadn’t been drunk, I wouldn’t have been assaulted.