Ghetto Girl

Chapter 8

Everyday no matter how much the sun would shine; it always seemed gloomy and murky inside my world. There is no way to beat this self revulsion for myself or this world. It’s like I was sinking deeper and deeper into the nowhere land, where misplaced souls go. No one in my life would ever understand or imagine that damage that I had in my mind and body. I lost my whole childhood, as so I thought, to people who stalked on the helpless little girl who had to power or strength to fight back. Why should I go onward with my life? Did I really have a choice? If life is like this, I didn’t want to live it at all.

I hated school and mu home life. Where could I go to escape? Weirdly, enough I started to break out of my shell where I have been hiding all these years. I started to fight back the bullies and the cruel people that talked about me, or tried to beat me up. I didn’t care no more, what did I have to lose? Nothing!

I really so not know where the strength came from, all I knew is that I couldn’t go on being a pouncing bag for people no more. All I knew that I was not going to lay there and just take the abuse no more. I started fighting back and being aggressive. I started to have friends, but I was still the outcast because of my skin color but at least I had a few others to play with now.

It was now past my seventh birthday and I was being accepted more in my neighborhood. I finally cut out a little pinch of the world that was meant for me.  I had three close friends. It was Keith who was two years older than me, Tamika and her cockeyed sister Dee. They were all project kids too, so they knew nothing but poverty and despair. Keith and I were inseparable and Keith lived with his grandmother who he adored with all his heart. Keith’s mother was a crack head and lived on the streets. Keith’s family is from down south so his grandmother was very old fashioned, she would polish her wooden floors once a week on her hands and knees, even though we lived in a very disgusting, ran down housing project. Keith’s grandmother was an elderly woman who went to church twice a week and the only music she listened to was gospel music. Keith and I had plenty of things in common, we both were fat, we both loved our grandmas’ and we were both poor.

Now Tamika and Dee were sisters out of six children. Their mom was a skinny, funny looking, dark skinned, ball headed, mean as a whip woman who carried a old fashioned leather belt around her neck so that when ever she felt one of her kids pissed her off, she was always ready to knock them off their feet. Everyone knew that all six of her children were very neglected and abused but no one ever offered help or said anything about it. It was like no cared about us poor little kids who lived in the projects. Tamika and Dee were treated like animals, they never ate, they were never looked after, and they never went to the doctors when they were ill. They never even got a huge from their mother.  Tamika and Dee’s mother changed boyfriends like she changed her underwear.

Even until this day, I can still see their house and how it looked in the back of my mind. The downstairs was descent, it was clean and had furniture in there to occupy the space.  The upstairs was very different! As soon as you walked up the steps and turned the corner, you might of thought you entered some kind of inner city zoo. That is how bad the smell was. Every wall upstairs had a hole in it, and there no barely nothing, only pissed out beds and soiled clothes left on the floor, that looked like they have been there for years.

There were two rooms upstairs that always stayed locked up for some strange reason and people in the neighborhood always wanted to know why, those only two rooms were always locked and no one was to ever enter there.