Scars on Her Back

The thing about growing up where I grew up is that the noise never really stopped. Not the kind of noise you could tune out, either. I mean the deep, bone-level kind—sirens at two in the morning, arguments bleeding through thin walls, and the constant, low-stakes theater of the streets. While other kids were just playing, I was calculating. I noticed the rhythm of the projects early; I saw how money moved and how people stayed stuck. I noticed everything, which I guess was both a gift and a curse.

Walking home from school, I would take the long route past the corner where the older guys huddled over the sidewalk. I didn’t do it to be social; I did it to observe. I watched the dice games, the way the craps shooters held their breath, and the quick, practiced hand-offs of drug deals that happened in the shadows of the brick buildings. I was sharp enough to see the patterns, the math of the hustle, and the desperate cycle of it all. I didn’t want to be a part of it; I wanted to understand it so I could beat it and find my way out before the house swallowed me whole.

Because the noise outside was loud with the sound of gambling and the frantic energy of a quick buck, but the silence inside was louder.

My mother, Denise, worked long hours at the factory, her body becoming a map of exhaustion. She was up before the sun and home after dark most days, and by the time she walked through that door, you could see the toll the minimum wage life took on her. She wasn’t cruel, but she was depleted. Seeing her like that fueled my fire. I spent my nights not just listening to the sirens, but reading by the dim light, sharpening my mind like a blade. I knew that my intelligence was the only currency that would actually get me past the city limits.

Dinner was the main time we sat across from each other, and even then, the conversation stayed light. Careful. Like we were both walking around something neither of us wanted to name.

"How was school?" she that was usually the end of it.

I never told her about the days that were not fine. I never told her about the weight I carried home alongside my backpack, the anxious hum that lived somewhere behind my ribs and never quite went away. I did not have the words for it then, and even if I had, I am not sure she had the energy to hold them. So I kept things simple. I kept things surface-level. And I got very, very good at it.

What I did instead of talking was perform. Out on the block, among the dice games and the smell of cheap weed, I became a character. I was the funny girl, the one who could distract the lookouts or make the dealers crack a smile. I used my wit to navigate the danger, learning to be quiet and observant when the tension spiked. While other girls were focused on their looks, I was focusing on improving my mind and plotting my escape. I was quick with a joke, but my brain was always three steps ahead, counting the dollars and dreaming of a life where I didn’t have to hustle for peace.

Humor was my armor. I figured that out young. If you could make people laugh, they were not looking too closely at what was underneath. And I had a lot underneath that I did not want anyone looking at. It was easy to hide behind a joke when people were already staring at the surface. I was a beautiful girl, or so they told me—standing about five-foot-five with a complexion like warm mahogany and eyes that were dark, deep, and always searching. I had a slender but athletic build that carried my one hundred and thirty-five pounds with a certain grace, even when I was just walking to the corner store. My body was developing into something that drew eyes, but I wanted them to see my mind instead.

There was this particular evening I remember, somewhere in the middle of a long summer, where I had the whole block going. I was doing impressions of the school principal, walking stiff-legged and talking in this low, puffed-up voice, and everybody was losing it. Even the older kids, the ones who usually ignored me, were watching and grinning. I fed off of it. I kept going, kept pushing, kept making it bigger because every laugh felt like oxygen. It felt like proof that I was okay. That I was somebody worth paying attention to.

Then I went inside, and the quiet came back, and I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling while the neighborhood sounds seeped through my window. A car alarm wailed in the distance, a lonely, mechanical sob. Two men were barking at each other down the block, their voices rising and falling in a jagged rhythm. A siren screamed from somewhere nearby, its sharp cry winding up to a fever pitch before it finally bled away into the night. I lay there listening to all of it, and I felt this hollow, sinking feeling that I could not name and could not shake. Like the girl who had made everyone laugh on the porch was a costume I had taken off, and what was left underneath was just this anxious, watchful kid who did not know where she fit or what she was supposed to do with all the things she felt.

over small moments from the day, replaying conversations, cataloging every little thing that had gone wrong or could go wrong. I would lie awake for hours sometimes, and the longer I lay there, the more the sounds outside took on weight. The arguments felt closer. The sirens felt more urgent. I would wonder who was hurt, what had happened, whether the people inside those situations had seen it coming or whether it had just arrived without warning the way so many bad things do.

That was the thing about growing up surrounded by chaos. It trained you to always be waiting for something. Your body learned to stay a little tense, a little alert, even when there was nothing immediate to worry about. Even when the night was quiet, some part of me was always listening. I did not know then that there was a name for that feeling. I did not know it was something that could build up over years and eventually become something much harder to manage. I just knew it as the way things were.

What I wanted more than anything, and this is the honest truth, was somebody to notice. Not the funny girl on the porch. Not the quick-witted kid who could make the whole neighborhood laugh. I wanted somebody to see past all of that and ask dinner and look up from their plate and say, How are you actually doing? And mean it.

But Denise was tired, and the neighbors loved my show, and so I kept the performance going. Night after night, I would make people laugh, then go home and lie in the dark and listen to the city breathe its rough, restless breath around me. I would pull the covers up and try to find some quiet inside my own head, and sometimes I could manage it and sometimes I could not.

The love I was looking for felt close sometimes. Close enough to almost touch. Like it was just on the other side of something I had not figured out how to open yet. And so I kept going, kept laughing, kept watching. Because that was what I knew how to do. That was how I survived the house, the neighborhood, the noise, and the silence in equal measure.

I kept moving, and I kept my eyes open, and I waited for the world to give me something worth holding onto.