The boy rolls in a tight fetal position next to a battered cardboard box stamped APPLES sitting at the back of the school bus. At the bottom of the box lies the detritus of the children who ride the bus: wads of chewed gum, candy wrappers, empty and crumpled cans of soda. A shimmer of black-red snakes from his nose to his lips where it smudges, crooked and bright.
His captors are bigger boys, dangerous, eight years old at least. They have caged him under their seat and are gleefully, determinedly kicking the child with moonboots that are faded and soiled, torn with stuffing spilling out: thump thump thump. They face forward, laughing bully laughs together, swinging their big feet back and forth quickly, as if splashing water while sitting atop a dock. Their prisoner doesn’t make a sound, bearing their blows quietly, as if his tenderness can absorb them.
Usually the kindergarteners huddle at the front together—safer in proximity to the only adult on board—but the small child had been swept to the back in a crush of bigger kids released early by a substitute teacher, hurrying to the best seats at the rear. In his efforts to swim upstream in the chaos of a full bus clamoring and throbbing, the little boy accidentally elbowed one of the bigger boys in the face. The elder grabbed the younger by his jacket and pitched him to the ground, where he scrambled on hands and feet to escape under the back seat.
The aisle running down the middle of the massive vehicle is a gangplank through a carnival possessed. Another small child comes now, also displaced by the irregularity, stepping gingerly but quickly, head down. Tight braids fall to her waist, every day a mercy she does her mother as she silently tries to eat her cereal while the brush pulls and tears. She has been trained not to make a fuss.
Deeply relieved to find an open spot—one seat up, kitty-corner from the boys—she begins to sit down. As she does, she takes in the scene: two big boys and the third, smaller and wincing, bleeding on the ground. Instinctively, she turns her eyes away as the realization of what they are doing crystallizes. The bus driver might as well be a mile away in his sagging seat, and she is terrified that if she stands up again, she will make herself a target. Two trapped animals are better than one.
The slight girl watches quietly in stolen glances, a flipbook crime materializing at her back, the heartbeat of a hummingbird banging in her chest beneath tiny nacre globe buttons. She sits still as stone, an emotion that she doesn’t know the name of yet charging her stomach, opening and closing her fists. This moment, split seconds, tips her world on end; senseless brutality, a power dynamic as unfair as she has ever witnessed.
She has seen brutal things happening outside of her before: a deer smacked dead on the highway, the branch with her swing snapped from the maple and piercing the garage window during a thunderstorm. But she has never before encountered violence for which there seemed to be no explanation.
Daring to take a longer look and locking eyes with the little boy—pleading eyes, sunken eyes—she wills someone to do something. To rescue him, to rescue her. To punish the big boys. Kicking them as they lay helpless seems like a just reckoning. Years later she would remember how it sounded and tasted and smelled, and she would continue to feel ashamed of her inaction.
She doesn’t know if she is the only witness or if the others around her, in their swirl of activity and noise, are just ignoring it. She decides she comes from the kind of place where the latter could be the truth.
—
Sitting in church, four years old, and she is whimpering quietly, wanting to leave. Coloring in all the “o’s” in the bulletin has become dull, and she doesn’t know how much more she must endure. Her dress is itchy. Jesus and his friends laugh together from the mural behind the altar rail. Everything up there is white and gold; where the congregation sits is polished oak and worn green upholstery.
She winds up to make another complaint, but before it leaves her mouth, she feels something bite the underside of her thigh, sharp and stinging. She looks down to examine her leg under the striped skirt and sees her mother’s hand, poised and readied to pinch again. The smallest act perpetuating the most monumental betrayal. She smooths her skirt and is quiet after that.
Later, during the sermon that lulls her eyelids heavy, her mother takes her hand and caresses the tips of her fingers with a dry, chapped index finger. She looks at the wedding ring on her mother’s finger, gold band with the little chip of diamond too small to be sparkly. Her mother gently rubs the fingernails first one way and then the other, as if trying to softly peel them back from their fleshy attachment. This is affection—meant as a reward—but she hates the sensation, will hate it her whole life. She knows better than to pull away, knows that she is very little and this is supposed to be love.
—
Her nana is visiting, and the house has been meticulously scrubbed top to bottom. Her mother, perpetual motion, talks to herself during this ritual. The bathroom smells like bleach and clean towels, the hallway and stairs of furniture polish, lemony and chemical. This preparatory routine always chases her father outside and presses her and her sister down firmly in submission and obedience, like thumbtacks. She always wonders about her mother’s hushed tantrums; sometimes she will sneak close and strain to hear, but all it ever sounds like is a snake hissing a warning.
She doesn’t know anyone else who openly has conversations with themselves except for one of the kids who rides her school bus and gets off at a different school. When confronted, his voice will get shrill, dancing up several octaves before reaching a summit so high-pitched it makes you cover your ears, and he will wave his arms as if being attacked by birds.
By the time her grandparents pull up the driveway, dust cloud blowing across the field, they and the house are scrubbed and ready. There are gifts. She and her sister receive tiny cedar boxes with rosemaling on the lid. There is a brand-new Singer fabric scissors for her mother. There are also some pieces of carved wood, one a long plank with a wooden horse on one end, flower petals in relief spanning the length of the board.
She’s playing with her sister before dinner when Nana calls them into the sewing room. The doors of the cabinet housing the sewing machine are open, and her mother’s mother points to the disorder, disapproval pinching her lips tightly: scraps of fabric, loose bits of thread, the button and ribbon boxes out of place and askew on their shelf.
She likes to make doll clothes and does her best to clean up after herself. She doesn’t get store-bought outfits for her dolls very often, but the scraps in the sewing cabinet can be used to construct her own. She learned by watching her mother and, later, through trial and error when nobody was watching. She knows that stretchy fabric cut into a big circle with a little circle cut out of the middle is a skirt; a triangle with long tentacles, one of them split down the middle, is a halter top. Capes are easy and so are hair ties.
After she has helped to straighten up the sewing cabinet, Nana takes out the new chestnut-colored box with silver embossed letters. She opens it up, and the scissors shine; their long, sharp, stainless-steel blades look futuristic, and the little gold screw they hinge on gleams in contrast. They are so flawless, so perfect that she nearly drools. Her arm aches to touch them, to try them out.
Just as her longing reaches a pitch, the box snaps shut. The message is clear and venomous: “I bought these for your mother,” the last word emphasized. Then a command that sounds like a threat: “Don’t use them.”
She believes her nana would cut off one of her fingers with the scissors if she touches them. Still, this fear does not cow her into obedience.
Hers is a world in which mothers dictate the direction you grow. At seven she has already needed much correction because she is curious and distracted, running crooked and wild, weaving among the straight and dull and confined with a deft agility learned by executing her heart’s desire in secret. Not using the scissors, as far as she is concerned, is not an option—not getting caught is. When she is sure there is no chance of being discovered, she will slide them from their brown sheath, a chastity belt, and use them to cut shapes for her doll clothes. The feeling of using them is a delight, like scooping through soft butter.
—
When she is almost nine, she will see one of the big boys from the bus throwing stones at a squirrel in a leafless tree. He has a bigger posse now, three of them, all laughing in that same way. Gone are the moonboots; now they all wear battered sneakers. She thinks of the little boy from under the seat, how she saw his little body jump from the blows. When the squirrel falls out of the tree, stunned and scrambling, she knows she will do something to replace when she did nothing.
The squirrel runs into traffic and is hit by a car. The same rage but this time she doesn’t look away. The biggest one, the one from the bus, notices her and returns her gaze. A tiny ripple of shame moves over his face while the other boys run to examine the corpse. His head bows for a split second. She does not soften for him, cannot feel pity for this boy. He is already much more than a bully. She picks up a stone and throws it at his head, hitting him right between the eyes.
She watches him while the world spins around them; the human constructs of good and evil reinforce the stark vindication she feels. It dwarfs fear. The boy is stunned, and the others haven’t noticed yet. A little trickle of blood begins to slither down his nose—eye for an eye. Then she turns and runs, as fast as she can make her legs go, before they come for her.
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“Taproot Rebellion” first appeared in Perceptions Literary Journal.