“No, stop!”
That should have been enough to get them to end this pointless game of theirs, but it never was.
I didn’t know her name, so I just called her “Em,” which was short for “emerald,” the color of her eyes. Every time I walked all the way to the small church, where I attended school, I would see Em sitting in the center of the dirt path, and she would always be playing with dolls and lead soldiers. Her auburn hair was long and messy, and always wore a white nightgown that would sometimes been covered in dirt and mud from her playing. Whenever someone passed her, she never acknowledged them, and whenever they spoke to her, she would only keep playing with her toys. Sometimes she would mumble things, but the ramblings were never words but just little sounds that small babies made.
I didn’t know what was wrong with the girl or how to make her better, but I felt as long as I tried that I was already doing better than everyone else.
When I had first seen the girl, I had just stared at her, just like everyone else, but once I realized she was there every single day, I started walking to school earlier. At first, I would call to her to try to get her attention, but once I realized that would never work, I started just sitting and watching her play.
Every day, I sit just a bit closer to, and we were at the point where sometimes she would pause in playing to watch me instead. The first time she had done that, I had frozen in place, afraid of frightening her, but then she had gone back to playing.
Most people ignored her. Some would throw little pebbles at her to get a reaction out of her until a teacher from the church would shoo them away from her. As far as I knew, I was the only one who tried to reach her in some way (I’m sure whoever took care of her knew how to do that better than I did), but there was a group of boys who tried to reach her in the worst way.
They would grab her arm, push her onto her rear, or even grab her toys from her hands, and when they did this, she would scream and pull her own hair. I could never get a good enough view from the inside of the church to see how the adults would get her back to playing with her toys.
It was not until I saw them raise a hand to strike her while she was screaming that I bolted from the class and shouted at them to stop, but that—
That was when they raised their hands against me instead.
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