Child Abuse Story From Red

by Red Stripes
(San Antonio, Texas, USA)

It all started at age 6. My life was like hell. My mom had married this guy I thought was pretty cool...at the beginning. He looked very intelligent and kind and stuff, but then his true stripes were shown when my mother married him.

He was so angry at my mom those days. It seemed like he was going to punch her in the face on the nights that they were yelling. I had a brother who was a baby at that time, and he would cry so hard. I took care of him when they were busy 'out at night.'

Then my stepfather turned his back on my mother and faced me. He was being really mean towards me, such as verbal abuse, which I didn't know what it was until I turned 9. He would say that he would "beat my ass until it turned red." Luckily, he only spanked me once. For a year and a half he threw comments at me I hated.

I thought everything was hell: worst teacher, worst school, worst friends (one friend, actually), worst stepfather, and the worst life.

The worst thing that he did was when I started second grade. My mother went to Mexico with a friend and left me with my one-year-old brother and my stepfather. He was outside barbecuing. My brother was asleep. I was inside reading while waiting for him to come inside with something to eat. I was so bored and got up to check on him. He was barbecuing and stuff, looking like a regular dad, and turned around to face me."What do you want?" he said in a rude tone. I was so disgusted.

"You're so stupid!" I yelled. "I hate you! Why can't you be nice to us? Oh yeah, that's right! You don't care about kids!" We fought back and forth at each other. That's when it happened. He pushed me to the ground violently. I gasped. Before I could get back up, he did something I thought he would never do: He lit a match. He turned around and threw it at me. Next thing I knew, I was shaking madly, on fire. The heat dug into my skin and pain shrieked through it. I didn't scream, though. I lay with my hands and legs sprawled out like I had gotten run over. I thought he had poured the gasoline from his barbecue on me because the fire rose onto my chest to my face. My mother never knew about what really happened. My stepfather had told me to keep quiet about it. And I kept my promise. I bet he would've killed me if I didn't keep my promise.

When my mom got back home she saw all the burns: two across one arm, three across the other, covering my whole chest, and up from my chin to my cheek. I told her that I had played with the matches and my stepfather had helped out as soon as he could. My stepfather approved of my lie.

I never did tell anyone else, even though some have asked. I tell them it was a fire accident. And to this day, nobody in my class really pays any attention to the burns, since some are replaced with new skin and others are hidden on my arms and my chest. This event that happened to me has made some of my friends call me "Red Stripes". But one thing I will never forget about the day that I was marked so badly that I had to go to the burn hospital...was the satisfaction in my stepfather's eyes as I rolled around in the fire. He was not just shocked...he was satisfied.

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