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“I was actually telling you the truth.”
“About the spork?”
“Yeah.” Ransom keeps peddling our boat.
The water is so tranquil as there aren’t many other boats out. I guess because it’s so hot, but even the blistering sun can’t ruin this afternoon for me. I’m full from the most delicious picnic—Ransom’s Granny surprised us all by stopping for takeout along the way since we didn’t actually have picnic baskets, and she’d packed her car full of blankets, paper plates, paper cups, the whole thing. Now I’m sitting next to a man I’m wickedly attracted to in so many ways, and the water is sparkling and beautiful. What’s not to enjoy about this, even if I am a little hot? The ride probably won’t last for more than twenty minutes, so it won’t do anyone in.
“How does one get a scar from a spork exactly?”
Ransom shrugs. “Oh god, it’s such a long story. Should I start from the beginning?”
My hands are getting clammy, but I clutch his anyway and squeeze. “Yes, please, if you’re okay with that.”
“I’m okay with it if you’re okay with it.”
“If I’m okay with it?”
“I’ll tone it down. I just…it’s probably not the easiest thing to hear.”
Ouch. My heart aches at those words, and of course, I start imagining the worst.
“You’re imagining the worst,” Ransom says, reading my thoughts with ease. “Shit. Okay, I’ll just start then. You know I didn’t have parents. That was…I guess right from the start. I was in the system for as long as I could remember. The whole nightmare foster parents, foster homes thing applied to me. There was this one house I was in when I was six. I would say that I had just started school, but I hardly went, so I don’t know if I can really say that. Anyway, there was this other kid there. He was eight or nine, small for his age, but what he lacked in size, he made up for in vicious cruelty. I wasn’t always big. Didn’t hit my growth spurt until fourteen, actually. This kid…well, he always carried around this camping utensil with him. Honestly, I think he had it for reassurance. He was mean because it’s how he had to grow up. It’s how he survived.
“I wasn’t doing anything to bother him. I was in the backyard, poking away at this shit garden that our foster parents kept. It was mostly just weeds, and I was so hungry that I was scrounging around for anything. A carrot or something. But I couldn’t find anything. This kid, Russel was his name, came out of the house and started picking away too. I kept my distance. I ended up finding a few withered peas, and he wanted them. I offered him a few, but he wanted them all. He took out his spork. I didn’t think he could do much damage with it, but I also didn’t realize that he’d sharpened the edges of the spork until they were razor-sharp. He told me he was going to fuck me up, but I didn’t believe it. I stood my ground because I had to grow up tough too. He came at me, and uh, I don’t think he actually meant to hurt me, but when he was running, he tripped over this huge rock in the garden, unfortunately right in front of me, and his hand shot out with the spork, and it landed right in my face. He dragged it down as he was falling.”
“Oh my god! That’s…that’s crazy wretched.” I’ve seen some gruesome things—bike and mechanic-related injuries in my time—but I’m well and truly horrified by what Ransom just described. I can see it happening in my mind, can imagine the blood, and I can only guess at the pain he must have felt.
“It was the kind of pain you never forget. There was so much blood. Face wounds bleed a lot, and that cut was huge. My foster parents freaked out. That was the kind of thing that could make them lose the money we represented to them. So, instead of taking me to the hospital or a doctor, my foster mom, who was in no way the world’s winning homemaker and probably had never picked up a needle in her life before then, sewed me up. My foster dad went to the dollar store and got this little sewing kit and everything.”
I can feel myself vibrating with rage over here. I can’t imagine someone treating a child that way. It’s so horrific that I can barely swallow past the lump of anger forming in my gut and rising to lodge itself in my esophagus. That right there is bullshit, and I’d like to find those fuckers who called themselves parents and make good and damn sure they paid for what they did to those kids, especially Ransom.
