She has brown eyes, scraggly hair. She’s ten going on thirty and wants, desperately, to be liked. She knocks on our door and asks “Is Reagan home?” If Rea is not, she steps into the kitchen and offers to wash the dishes, help me with dinner. We chat. One time she tells me “I know what ’scarred for life means;’ It means when something happens to you so bad that you can never get over it.”
Later she says “One time when I was eight a man came to our house. He was a foreigner; he needed directions to Peoria. He climbed in bed with me and we watched sponge bob, square pants.”
It makes me thankful that my children’s definition of ”scarred for life” is having their parents chaperone their dance; not getting to go to the movies; being ignored by a classmate.