When I was about 9 years old, our classroom became a surreal place, with the arrival of two sisters, Betty and Katie Cole. Even though they lived on my street, they lived way down near the end; anything on the other side of 13th Street may as well have been the moon. On that side of the world, families had even less than we did. Betty and Katie were shocking to us little innocent, catholic girls, who new very little about life, beyond our white bread borders. And they were Coles. Everyone knew those Coles were bad news.
Betty was nine, chubby, and wore clothes too small for her. Her hair was dark and greasy and looked like someone had put a bowl on her head and kept on cutting. Katie was a whole other species. She was ten, so skinny and wiry, and wore clothes too big for her. Her hair was a rat’s nest of long, mated strands, of a color I’d never seen. She had these wild eyes…even naïve girls like me knew instinctively she was just plain demented. They thought nothing of brawling with each other at the drop of a hat. They had green teeth and they smelled of urine.
The first time they decided to pee themselves in class, we were distracted by what sounded like running water. When the whole thing became clear, we just looked at each other, not knowing what to think. We were red with embarrassment and shock. Betty and Katie just laughed insanely. Eventually, they got bored and stopped peeing where they sat. We’d heard they were very poor and their father was a drunk. What we didn’t know then, was that they were abused…physically, mentally, emotionally and…sexually, by every male in their family, from the time they could walk. We’d never even heard of such things, until we were in high school.
There they were, two little girls, just like us, but not like us at all. Two little girls, who knew dark things that we were not even aware of. They’d been sent here, to this school, to what? Tame them? Make them normal? They’d had their childhood destroyed from the get go and they knew nothing other than madness and this environment was suppose to make it all better. Someone thought they could be turned around. Did that someone forget they had to go home, go back to hell at the end of the day?
Everyone stayed away from them. They wanted to skip with us but we were afraid of them because they’d inevitably go berserk on each other and whip each other with the skipping rope. They were vicious with each other and used curse words to curl your hair. We’d never heard these words but we’d remember them for later, so we could find out what they meant. We got some pretty interesting surprises that way. We stood there, helplessly watching them pound each other, until the teachers separated them. Oh and the look in Katie’s eyes….I don’t think I’ve ever seen that again. She was murderously insane.
Someone told us that Betty and Katie ate lunch at school, because there was not enough time for them to go home and back. More than likely, if they went home, they wouldn’t come back at all. That same someone told us that they had no lunch and the nuns would make them something to eat and that they devoured the food like animals…Then came the day I wore my new sparkly barrettes to school and they caught Katie’s wild eye.
Next -> Peace Offerings
Tags: sexual abuse, urine, white bread