Saving Andrew

02. An Escape Route

as Ryan Wellington

◆ R Y A N ◆

SHE'D KILL TO SEE HERSELF SMILE. Right then, she looked untidy and utterly exhausted. It didn't make much sense to her on why they would abuse an already broken girl, but at the same time, it didn't make much sense why they wouldn't either.

Sometimes the kids her age would beat her up with a stick. It happened since she was six, when she was outcasted from the suburb, a myth that lived among all of the people who lived there making her life a living hell.

Sometimes mothers would be stupid enough to tell their children that the people who lost both their parents at the same time were most likely abominations who were good for nothing. Saying that she was hated by God and that her parents died because she disrespected them while they're still alive, since the people here encourage the children to treat the elders like gods; to obey them, to take care of them, not to cross them.

When she had rolled her eyes at some elderly pedestrian who was yelling at her from far away for no apparent reason, and with the unexpected attention that she got, the kids started throwing pinches her way.

And from the tiny but hurtful pinches, it turned into slaps, and then punches, and kicks. Sometimes they would pull her hair, not caring if she had begged for them to stop, and the parents would support them.

They supported their children beating a six-year-old to teach a lesson for rolling her eyes at a crazy mad woman.

And when word got out that she lived alone since her parents died, which was at an extremely young age of four, and that she had to hunt and trade the items that she hunted in return for some money to survive off of, everyone was shaken. It was as if something snapped in them, something brutal, and that not only the God and her parents rejected her, but the rest of the world too.

She lived in a town of lies, a suburb of deception, a home of abandonment. It was always her, only her, alone in her wooden cottage with a loaf of mildly warm bread and a cup of boiled water, but it would suffice. It always does.

Strangely enough, she was bullied - or in a sense, abused - and never fought back although she knew how to work with daggers and arrows. Even if it was just a slight tear through the skin with a blunt knife on the bully's arm, she couldn't do it. She couldn't find it in her to threaten them, let alone inflict any kind of pain on them.

If she tried to hurt them, they will tell their mothers, and that would mean more trouble for her. Their mothers' slaps were harsher than theirs and can leave a pretty large impact. One time one of their mothers smacked her upside the head and called her a whore because her son wanted to protect her. And for the kid, well, let's just say he got a pretty good of a beating.

As she grew up, she found herself in a safe distance away from them. Sometimes they'd pick on her for being so weak and vulnerable, but she knew better than to take it all in. She knew that if she did, her insides would crumble, her heart would shatter and she would feel utterly empty again.

But recently, what she usually received had become a lot worse.

Her properties would vanish one by one when she got home from hunting and sometimes she'd have to do 'community service', which consisted of being a punching bag to most of the stressed out kids. It was to make sure that she at least had a place to stay, for if she skipped a day of being the stress reliever of most teenagers her age, she'd get thrown out of the suburb.