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Sticks and Stones

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Sticks and stones may break her bones… but words will never hurt her.

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Her earliest memory is of a stick. A big, god-awful brown stick that crashes down on her arm with more force than the raging seas and she can hear herself scream out in pain, as she begs her assailant to stop. Just stop. The salty tears that run down her face don’t end, even as he leans forward and yells, for the entire playground to hear, “You’re a baby!”

And she cries harder because she thinks that it’s true, that she’ll never be as big as he is; she won’t be able to hurt him and make him feel the pain that’s threatening to swallow her whole. But even as the authoritative voices of the teachers reach her ears, all she can hear are the cruel words of the older boy echoing in her head, cutting through the pain in her arm. “You’re a baby…”

-

She’s seven years old and hiding at the top of the stairs. She can hear them below, arguing… arguing about her. The raised voices make her eyes squint tightly shut, where no one will be able to hurt her, and she clutches her teddy tighter.

“I don’t want her. She’s a whiny brat!”

His heated voice causes her to whimper. It’s been like this for months, but it feels like her whole life. She wonders, through her sleep-fogged mind, if he’s telling the truth; if she really is a brat, and if her mummy thinks so too.

“No! This whole mess is all her fault!”

She’s only seven, but her heart breaks over the words spoken aloud by her father, and even so she wishes he wouldn’t leave. She wants to hug him and say, “I’m sorry, daddy, I’ll try harder from now on, I promise.”

But she doesn’t, and his parting words stay with her for the rest of her life.

-

It’s her grade six camp and she’s been partnered with Lyle Sims for the ropes course. He walks behind her, and when she misplaces her footing and trips, he doesn’t steady her like the partners are supposed to. Instead he scoffs and informs her that all bastards are retarded.

She turns around with a heated glare she reserves only for people like him. Bullies. “What?”

“You’re a bastard,” he sneers, looking for all the world like a pig with his scrunched up face. “Didn’t your mummy tell you? That’s what people who don’t have a dad are called,” he mocks her by pretending to cry. “Bastard!”

Her face is defiant. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

“Oh yeah?” His smirk is sour and she doesn't see his movement. “My mum told me they should get rid of all the bastards… so I guess I’m doing the town a favour.” He pushes her off of the ropes and she falls the five feet to the ground, breaking her hand in the process and producing a life-long hatred for her small, gossiping town.

-

Her first boyfriend is two years her senior, when she’s fourteen years old. She’s gone behind the bike shed with him and he’s all over her, and she hates the sensation of his tongue in her mouth. It’s disgusting and she pushes him away. “Stop.”

He grins, breathlessly, and then moves back for more. His mouth covers hers and he steals her oxygen and she panics.

“No!” She pushes him, firmly this time, and looks at him uncomfortably. “I don’t want to.”

“Aw, come on. Why not?” He goads, his hand moving to find its way up under her shirt, but she pulls it away and looks over his shoulder.

“Because, I said so.” Her tone is final and he knows it, so he heaves a disgusted sigh before walking away and showing her his middle finger.

The next day there’s a rumour going around the school that she throws herself at boys and has an unlimited range of STD’s, and she finds a small mark on her neck from his teeth. It doesn’t hurt, but the hushed words following her as she makes her way around the school pierce right through her heart.

-

When she turns seventeen, her friends hold a surprise party for her. The alcohol flows freely and she thinks, ‘Why not?’ It’s her birthday, after all, and she should be celebrating. She takes the drink offered by someone she vaguely recognises at school and skulls it.

Before long she’s had three, four, five and she can’t see. Her head feels woozy and the bright lights overhead make her eyes hurt, but even when she strains all she can make out is a few fuzzy lines. Her legs have given up on her and she stumbles, barely upright, from one side of the room to the other and wonders where her friends are.

“You alright there?” The voice is nigglingly familiar, but she can’t place it. She attempts to open her mouth to reply, to ask where her friends are so they can take her home, but her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth and she can’t get the words out.

She’s dimly aware of a drone in the background. It starts off as a subtle buzz and turns into a thumping chant, but she still can’t make the words out. She’s trying to figure out what’s going on when she feels a heavy weight in her lap and then someone is breathing in her face and their lips are abusing hers. She chokes on their breath, gags and then throws up, right on the person in front of her. She doesn’t even have time to turn away.

At school the next week she finds out that she’d been serenaded by Paula Hartley’s cousin, the outlandish lesbian one. She’d been too drunk to do anything that sit there, stunned, while a girl attempted to make out with her.

The cat calls of, “Lesbian!” that follow her around all day are bad enough without her thumping headache and the bile that rises in her throat whenever she thinks about it. She thinks she can stand the verbal torture until it gets to sixth period drama and the boys all do a enactment of the party that went wrong, complete with retching. She rushes out of the room with ringing laughter and “Queer!” chasing after her.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to face them again.

-

She’s twenty-one and preparing to leave the town forever, and she’s promised herself she’ll never come back. She’s going to liberate herself and get a life, away from the town that’s been keeping her prisoner ever since she was born. But first she needs to talk to Abbot.

He walks through the door and stops when he sees her waiting at the kitchen table with a solemn look on her face, but she can tell that the thing that annoys him most is the slight glint of excitement in her eyes.

She stands up, acutely aware of the table with the missing leg, the peeling wallpaper and the sink that doesn’t stop leaking. Summoning all her courage, the courage that she never thought she’d have, she says it. The two words that are going to change everything and determine her future.

“I’m leaving.”

Abbot blinks. She knows that he never expected her to actually say it, have the tenacity to actually choke it out. She can’t count the number of times that she’s waited for him to come home, only to swallow the words back down timidly.

Then his face changes and he leers at her, but even that can’t bring her down. Her new weightless feeling doesn’t allow her so much as to flinch, even when he walks right up to her to whisper in her ear.

“You’re never going to escape it, you know. Never. You’re never going to get anywhere in life… You’re nothing.” She knows it’s his way of trying to intimidate her into staying, but this time she won’t give in.

She’s sick of this town with its relentlessly persecuting people, and she’s sick of the way they look at her. Even now, her memories of her younger years come back to haunt her. She knows they’ll never stop; she knows they’re going to be talking about her for the rest of their pitiful lives. But she also knows it doesn’t have to be this way – not for her.

So she’s leaving. And nobody, not even Abbot, with his demeaning words, is going to stop her. She can’t take it any longer.

“You’re nothing.” He repeats softly, eyes boring into hers. “And don’t ever think you are.”

She smiles now, a calm, soft smile that goes hand in hand with her tranquil feeling. After all these years she’s finally liberated, and she knows that nobody’s going to be able to take the feeling away from her. She doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t need to. Her expression says it all.

She stands tall and proud as she walks through the door, leaving behind Abbot and his words that used to be able to stab through her heart; her disgraced teenage memories and her broken family unit.

“You’re nobody!”

Her parting present is a smile nobody’s seen in years and his words float through her and out the other side, because now nothing can hurt her.

Sticks and stones may break her bones… but words will never hurt her.

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A/N: Uh... This is what I get with boredom, late nights and an overactive muse. Not that I know exactly what a muse is, it just seems like a cool word. So if anybody feels like enlightening me, please feel free.