They watched her face hit the concrete. It was her first kiss. It grazed her forearms, palms, lips, and burst like carpet burn on her teeth. They’d spilt her on the ground with a right hook and fixed her there with childish gorgon eyes, all that pathetic and ugly pooling under them, spotting the soles of their shoes.
The scabs sprouted, stiff and brown, pulling tight at the hair on her arms. You could twist and cross those limbs a hundred times over but couldn’t hide the crusty outcrop. They did their very best to stare.
Then summer came creeping, and swim lessons stripped her down to unshaven knees and a babyish bloat. She was all peeled back into a swimming cap, and the giggles blew through the cork. The banshees shrieked, refusing to enter the water with her, but hunted her in change rooms, chafing and ogling, kicking her underwear into shower puddles and groping what there was of her chest.
She remembers the handprints, the pinches and the shoving and slaps, and she lets their echoes percuss on her skin to mull shuddering nights – all the while gangling on a short twin bed, wrestling the draughts that tell her she’s untouched and untouchable.
They touched her. They sharpened their shoulders to knock her back and forth in the corridors; filled their backpacks with bricks and mines and needles just to mace them into her with effete carelessness. Her first bloody nose shoveled blood down her chin, laminating her throat. It dyed her school collar, birthed this great swerve in her nose. She stood in the bathroom once it was done, breath blurring the mirror, eyes tracing the fresh bend. She raised her hand to it just to jerk it away, the skin too hurt to touch.
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