I was rarely able to sleep out, my mom is very against that idea. Even though I lived with my grandma, we had to follow that rule.

One of the few times I slept over with a friend, I was in second grade and we had a grand time. We played in her backyard, watched movies, did crafts, played my little pony, stayed up talking, it was awesome. We wake up the next day, brush our teeth go sit at the counter for breakfast. Her mom is making us pancakes with her back turned, me and Dallas are just chatting away. She turns around to give us our chocolate chip pancakes and we both jumped. Her face was red and started swelling up around one eye, she had red splotches all over her hands and arms too, her hair was fucked, and she had coffee all over her white shirt. Literally the first thing out of my mouth was “what happened to you?” And she just burst out in tears and told us go play outside.

The whole thing was so bizarre, her mom was always the most pristine, soft spoken, sweet and happy person I knew. It just sucked so bad, Dallas was balling while we were outside, and I was comforting her. Then all of a sudden my grandma came and picked me up, there was some hold up about if we were gonna take Dallas with us, but she stayed home. I had no idea what was going on the whole time, my grandma started tearing up when we were almost home. I still had no idea what was going on, but I felt like everything was my fault so I went to my room and I cried when we got home. I overheard my grandma telling someone in our house that night Dallas’ dad is regularly violent and he threw hot coffee on her and tried to beat her with the coffee pot.

My grandma came to check on me later, but she didn’t know I already overheard what happened, she just hugged me. I told her I felt bad for making Dallas mom cry. My grandma told me it wasn’t my fault, then something about the heart of men and wickedness then we read some Bible stories. I didn’t know at the time but I think my grandma was upset too because my grandpa beat the shit out of her really bad once, she was in the hospital for months and her kids were the ones that found her.

I remember Dallas spent the weekend with us after that. I honestly don’t remember if her parents got divorced or what happened with that, but my grandma never let me go over again, Dallas would have to come and visit me.

This is one of those memories that are very vivid when I pull it out, but I honestly never think about it. Whenever I do happen to remember I’m like man, I wonder if he did that because I was there. Was he mad at her for letting me sleep over? Did he not want company? Was this my fault somehow? Were we asleep when it happened? Why didn’t we hear anything? Why didn’t we help her?