“Because you don’t need me at school,” he answered.“You need me here.”
“But what-”
“No!”Russ yelled.“Don’t touch her!”
I turned to see one of my friends trying to grab my leg again, but Russ was pulling me away, then pushing me behind him, and I didn’t like that my friends were fighting because of me.
“It only hurts a little,” I told Russ.“It’s okay if they touch me.”
“No, it’s not,” he said, “They can’t touch you, Elisa.No one is allowed to touch you.”
“Elisssssheva...”one of my friends said, but that wasn’t my name.“Come to us, Elisssssheva...”
“C’mon, Elisa,” Russ said.“Take us home.”
“But I want to play,” I told him.“Just a little bit longer-”
“No,” he said.“It’s time to go home.”
“Elisssssheva...”
I jackknifed on my bed, sweat seeping through my pores, my chest heaving, and the faint smell of sulfur still lingering in my nostrils.While the nightmare was a very familiar one, I hadn’t had one in decades, and I had no idea why it would come back after all this time.Even though I wasn’t a five-year-old boy anymore and was a grown adult, perfectly capable of rationalizing reason in everything, that didn’t change how affected I still was by the nightmares.
Or whatever the hell they were since I was now the little girl in the scenario.
Chapter 1
Elisabeth~
It was already past seven, but this also wasn’t anything that I wasn’t used to.Since I could remember, I had dedicated every breath in my body to this life, and despite the never-ending workload, I didn’t regret my life’s choices, nor did I bemoan how I had no life outside of work.
From before I could even walk, my parents had advocated for education like it’d been all that had mattered, and maybe it was.After all, what were you without an education?I also wasn’t referring to degrees and all that; I was referring to the basics, which included learning how to count, read, and process thought.Education was a must on a very fundamental level, and without it, it was impossible to exist with some degree of success.
There was also the fact that my father, Ishmael Batya, was a retired structural engineer, and he liked to claim that his career had been an endless opportunity of learning, and that he’d grown with each project that he’d ever been a part of.He liked to say that only a fool didn’t listen to learn.
As for my mother, Judith Batya, she was a retired lawyer, and her passion had been environmental causes, and she was another one that believed that you could learn something every day if you just opened yourself up to that fact.My mother also didn’t suffer arrogance gladly.However, when you were as intelligent and as knowledgeable as my mother, it was easy to take down the good old boys’ club of egotism.
