AncilShe placed her hand over her neck and said, “I like turtleneck sweaters.” The scar wasn’t very visible and you could probably only see it from up close. It was a reddish vertical scar at the side of her neck which was a completely different color from the rest of her skin.
“It’s not that visible. You can barely see it unless you look really, really closely. You shouldn’t hide it, you know. You don’t have to.”
“I like turtleneck sweaters,” she said again. I didn’t respond. I just turned away and looked at the street lights shining down on us. I really had nothing else to say. She was clearly self-conscious.
She let out a long and heavy sigh and then said, “My father did this to me a long time ago. It’s not the only one I’ve got. Every night, for a long time, he would come home all drunk and angry and take out all his drunken rage on me and my mom.” She sighed again. “He would sometimes use a whip, a bat, or just his hands. No matter how much my mom tried to get him to stop, he would just get angrier and angrier. My mom and I wanted to run away but we couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“We just couldn’t. My father did a lot of bad things; bad things that I can’t even begin to describe to you. He was a ruthless drug dealer back in the day and my mom and I were afraid that if we ran away, he would find us and do really bad things to us.”
“Why didn’t you and your mother just report him to the police?”
“My mother did, once.”
“And what happened?” She didn’t answer my question but I saw her eyes swell a bit like she wanted to cry.
“She was supposed to testify against him but she…” Her voice broke a little and tears flowed down her cheeks. “She never made it to court.”
