This had happened before. This reaction to something so small. So what if she called my mom a whore. I called her that for the whole of my pre-teen years. When my parents split suddenly for no apparent reason that was made known to there children, I immediately thought that someone had cheated and being that I was always close to my father, I immediately thought it was my mother. I never really liked her so it wasn't really that hard to think about her disgracing herself shamelessly in one of those shady ugly motels they always showed in movies and series.
So one day after the divorce, everything had gone wrong. I watched my mother yell at the pizza guy for being two minutes late with her delivery. Knowing her tendency to take out her anger on any available soul, I only watched silently as the pizza guy got his dignity shitted on by nothing but an immigrant from Uganda. He obviously didn't know that because he saw what the whole world saw. A black woman with an accent living with her daughter in a heavily guarded mansion in Washington D.C.
Anyway, the point is that that was also the week I had my period at school and got a lot of shit for it because I ruined a perfectly good skirt according to my mom. Like I was supposed to know that my uterus wall could peel off. I got my periods at ten when few knew what the heck that was? And I kept getting asked if I stuffed a dead body up my skirt. So you could understand that when she started yelling at me for getting a b minus on some history test, for the first time in my life, I shouted back.
"Where the fuck are you going in this world with a b minus?" Its very fast how she's quick to judge, but I'm fast with something too.
"You're an undocumented immigrant that only became legal because you married a man almost twice your age for a green card. You also seem to be doing quite fine. A b minus wont kill me." I retorted. And it was at that moment that I knew that I had fucked up.
My mouth sometimes gets ahead of my mind and by the time this statement had hit my mom's eardrums, I knew that shit was about to go down. The slap that sent me a couple seconds behind the timeline and impaired my vision for a good amount of time affirmed my thought. I wasn't done yet however.
"The fuck are you touching me for, you wiggly narrow assed whore?" Something was entirely wrong with me. Seeing to the fact that African parents are big on respect, the next day, I couldn't sit down properly. I also had ugly bruises from the battering that i had received but that was none of anyone's business and when they asked why I was all covered up, they got told as much.
Where was the rest of my family then? Well, after the divorce, my parents fought for custody and came to a compromise. A twin for each parent. Tyrone, my twin brother got dad and was somewhere in the same state just having a blast while I had to deal with this.
But that story was entirely off topic. The story meant for today is the first time this voice in my head got my life fucked. We were eleven. I used to spend too much time with Reile and coincidentally, we both hated going home. I refused to tell her my reasons so she saw no reason to tell me hers. We had grown quite distant due to the fact that I couldn't explain to her that there was a strange voice in my head that I had to constantly fight with to have control over my conscience. She had also become a bit boy crazy since she discovered the existence of K-pop and anime and it didn't help that I had no interest in those things.
Reile was always the type of girl to openly speak what was on her mind at any given time. It didn't matter if we were at someone's funeral or at the hospital, the girl just had no filter and while I admired that most of the time, her step dad wasn't really a fan. I had an idea that their relationship wasn't the strongest but I had no idea how bad it was. Her mom, being a model, wasn't around that much which meant that all the time Reile went home, she had to deal with the deranged mostly drunk idiot herself. We lived a few blocks from each other and I blame myself for not realizing anything sooner. It took me walking in on her step dad dragging a white hot knife across her bare back for me to finally realise that she was in trouble at home.
I can still remember that moment so clearly. I had had enough of my mom's bullshit and just decided to run to Reile's house. No, it didn't register to me that it was weird no one was answering the door yet I knew for a fact that Reile wasn't let out of the house after seven. No, it wasn't weird that I could hear muffled noise as a looked around the scarily sterile house and no, it wasn't weird that they were coming from the basement of the house. A place we were always told to stay out of the few times we spent in the house but I still followed the sound and as soon as I walked through the door, the image was burned in my mind for sure.
A huge white man standing over my best friend, a white hot knife in one hand and the other holding her petite figure still as he burnt patterns into her back. The place reeked of burnt flesh and a mixture of urine and vomit. From the looks of it, he had done it more than once. The site of my friend screaming wasn't what frightened me the most. What frightened me the most was that she was covered in scars that I had never noticed before.
And that was the first time I let the voice take over. The first time I actually came in direct contact with the violence that was living inside me all along. It was also the first time I killed a man with my bare hands and used these very same bloodied hands to stroke Reile's hair as she sobbed into my shoulder. We were both soaked in blood but we couldn't careless because at that moment, the only thing on my mind was to protect and kill anyone who tried to harm what I was protecting. And the only thing on her mind was the fact that she was still alive because a couple of minutes ago, she was sure she was going to die.
I called my dad in the next three hours and Reile's bare body was in a thin blanket as they drove her to hospital and I watched her sleep in the hospital bed that night not daring to take my eyes of her for fear that she might be dead by the time I looked back. I don't know what happened to the body or why I wasn't charged but I knew my father took care of everything. Like he always did. When Reile woke up the next day, she told me everything and I told what I could because the truth is that I have no idea why I was the way I was but she didn't care because all she knew was that I was the first person to protect her in a very long time.