Oh, the burn
Jessica...Jessica was her name.
I was about ten or eleven years old when I lived in a run-down trailer park of a neighborhood that was essentially split into two divisions. The smaller division was the side I lived in, which was across the street from the bigger division. That was the side Jessica lived in.
I don’t recall many things about Jessica except the fact that she was the nicest girl I had ever met at that young point in my life. The girl could sneeze into a napkin, and humming birds would fight over it to the death. She had a honeycomb for a heart, she was so sweet. We used to escape her younger sister who had a crush on me since the third grade and make out behind one of the many abandoned trailers. I remember getting to know her body well, from her hourglass figure, to her supple breasts; All the while she kept her clothes on. Things like that were rarities between her and me. She was a few years older than I was, and she was blooming.
To a young boy, that was the world.
The summer was high and hot in the sky, burning anything the air and sunrays would come in contact with. It made the perfect marriage with the thick, choking humidity that you could probably see if you strained your eyes hard enough. The kind of heat that would make your eyes feel like they were melting right out of your face and you would lick the sides of your lips, mistaking your pupils for sweat. I was climbing a tree that was located on the bigger side of the neighborhood in which all of us young kids frequented, but it was just me that scorching day when I saw bright, strawberry blonde Jessica riding her bicycle down the hill made of pavement. You could see the heat wave right above the fresh black lanes that the city recently laid down in our pisswater habitat.
I climbed down the tree and landed my feet beside the trunk. As soon as I landed and got my footing, I looked up to see Jessica stopped in her tracks by three of an adolescent, skinny boy’s worst nightmare....boys that were older, stronger and much bigger than himself. I kept my distance, hiding behind the tree as I watched these early high school boys slowly surround Jessica. They obviously wanted something that was still only vaguely familiar to her. I could see the fear spill across her face as the freshman boys slowly began to impose their will upon her. One of them, who was the curly blonde hair football player type pushed Jessica off of her ten speed, and she hit the pavement the only way you would hit the pavement after being blatantly shoved off your bike. Her exposed knees and palms hit the blistering street, followed by her bare elbows due to the cute little summertime outfit she was wearing that was careful not to display the apparent characteristics of a maturing girl.
I too, was paralyzed by fear.
The other two Caucasians with their preppy outfits on, with their cute khaki shorts and Tommy Hilfiger tee shirts and with their perfect hair cuts picked Jessica up off the ground. Her newborn wounds on her elbows and knees seemed to gleam and glitter like red Christmas garland in the sun’s horrid gaze. I could hear her sobs cut through the humidity, and I’m sure her tears sizzled as they hit the unforgiving thoroughfare. I kept my body and face as far out of their fields of vision as possible to keep myself from getting made. My throat was clenched with uncut, absolute terror. My palms sweated like sons of bitches against the tree. I could hardly breathe due to my helplessness, due to the fact that if I were to try to save her from this horrible peril, that there would be nothing left of me when those boys got through with beating me into that hot black hell.
The curly blonde prick got in close to Jessica’s face to say something that was probably going to stay with her for the rest of her life. He made sure she heard every syllable in between her whimpering. When he was done, he backed away a bit. The other two boys pushed Jessica onto her stomach. She struggled like no other, but she was fucking powerless. They turned her head to the side, so it would face the street, so she had her eyes in the direction of the curly blonde. The curly, fucking preppy, spoon-fed blonde. They shoved her face against the searing street as hard as they could, and held it there.
I was already crying.
Her screams echoed off of every trailer, tree and car in sight. I was clutching my mouth with the inside of my arm to keep my cowardly boohooing quiet. My teeth driven into my skin to render me as silent as the outside air conditioning fixtures as they suddenly shut off, making her cries all the more apparent, and excruciating to hear.
The curly blonde walks over to her. Jessica’s face still pressed against the black hell. Her sobbing becoming a steady wet rhythm as the other two accomplices slightly grinded the side of her face into the feint gravels and small rocks that lightly cascaded the streets. He kneeled beside her, taunting her more and more. I could hear her clearer than any day. “Why are you doing this to me?!”
It was at this point that some of the neighborhood parents had decided to step out from their shit holes to find out what all the commotion was about in the street no more than ten feet away from their trailers. The three boys quickly jumped away from Jessica, as if it would absolve them of their mutiny. Three or four parents walked out to quickly scold the boys, and to help broken Jessica back to her feet. I took this time to carefully emerge from my hiding place. My hands were littered with lines made from the grooves and grains in the tree where my hands were gripping from the horror I witnessed, and the horror that I could do nothing about. Trembling with every step, I eventually made it to Jessica in a slew of tears just like her.
The side of her face was almost crimson red, with abrasions and pieces of gravel that were embedded into the side of her already lightly sunburned cheek. Slight burn marks polished the wound with a few small blotches of blood already at the surface. A light cinnamon dash of dirt glazed below her plump bottom lip and along her facial frame. The fresh scratches on her elbows and knees got remodeled with a shade of grey from the black hell. Her pink tee shirt and white shorts were suffering from the same trauma.
The parents were keeping the boys at bay while the police was called, as well as the boys’ parents themselves, along with Jessica’s. She had to give a middle-aged woman her phone number three times because she was still petrified, and in more pain than I could ever imagine. I finally made my presence known without saying a word as she turned to my direction. Amidst the yelling and reprimanding that was going on around us, despite the smooth layer of hell that was right beneath our burning soles and thick within the air, she stared at me with her bright blue eyes, beaten by tears and bloodshot from the heat, and asked…
“Why are you crying…?”