I didn’t see it coming. Usually, I never did. There was a surprise, explosive pain to the back of my head, followed by a weird numbing sensation throughout my body as I was thrown to the floor. Suddenly, my older brother was on top of me. My shoulders were pinned to the forest green carpet by his knees, and he sat on my upper body, eliminating any defense or escape. It was a move he perfected over the years from all the times I got away.   

Just minutes before, I was arguing with my younger sister in the living room. She was on the stairs. My back was to the kitchen. …Something about sneakers. Despite being years older and a good foot and a half taller than her, we had the same shoe size. Only once had I mistakenly worn her sneakers; they were by the back door, and I thought they were mine. In a normal family, a simple, “Oh, sorry, my mistake,” would have been sufficient. In my family, it was another outlet. From that day forward, any dirt or new scuff mark on them HAD to be done by me because she believed I was secretly wearing her sneakers.

I wasn’t.

It was dumb sibling bickering.  

However, our arguing set off my brother, and I was his target. I was always his only target. The blows to my head started. Repeatedly. One after the other. Not to my face. Never to my face. Well, not since that time he couldn’t explain his way out of why I had a black eye. (He got grounded for a weekend, and I had to say I fell.) Left and right punches to my head, his face twisted with rage while screaming “I HATE YOU” over and over.

I screamed for help, but mostly I just screamed. My parents weren’t home. My grandmother was napping in her room. My sister continued to accuse me of wearing her sneakers.

Five, six, seven, eight. Maybe nine, maybe twenty fists to my head before they stopped, and he put his hands around my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t turn my head. I couldn’t fight back. I felt my face getting hot as I heard the thundering of my heart over the ringing in my ears. All sounds became muffled, and my sister, who was still yelling at me about her sneakers, sounded like she was at the end of a tunnel. My brother seethed one last “I HATE YOU” before spitting in my face.

His eyes were black with rage, and a Joker-like grin spread across his face. The panic. The fear. The complete helplessness. My vision dimmed. My thought, he’s really going to kill me this time.

Suddenly, air filled my lungs with one desperate gasp. I glanced up. Behind my brother stood my grandmother with a broom. She was hitting him with it, yelling at him to stop, to get off me, to leave me alone. She whacked him in the face with it, and he jumped up to grab the broom. She yelled, “RUN!” I scrambled to my feet, bolted up the stairs, and down the hall to my room. I locked the door, and as I pushed my dresser across the room, I heard the weight of his body slam against the thin wood.

The lock wasn’t really a lock. It was one of those cheap doorknobs that could be unlocked if you stuck your fingernail in the slit and turned it. But it was enough of a hindrance for me to get my dresser in place that when he got it unlocked, he couldn’t open the door. It was a move I perfected over the years from all the times I got away.

He was mad. Almost rabid. He threw himself against the door a few times, screaming that he was going to kill me, he hated me, and that I was going to pay. I heard the wood crack under each blow. The drawers rattled, but my dresser didn’t budge. I was safe. But I was also trapped. I had a phone in my room, but who could I call? Not my parents, they were at work. I’d get in trouble for bothering them. Not my friends. I couldn’t tell them about the routine violence. It was embarrassing. Besides, all my friends liked my brother. He was popular-ish. Good looking-ish. Funny. Nice. No one would believe me. And, even if they did, there was nothing they could do.

The police? No, no, I couldn’t do that. That would embarrass my parents.

I wrapped myself in my comforter and sat on the floor of my room, trying to sob quietly. A few minutes later, everything was quiet. Too quiet. I knew better. I pictured him hiding in the adjacent bathroom in the dark, waiting, listening for me to pull the dresser away from the door so he could charge in and finish the beating he started. I fell for that before. Twice. The second time, I waited over an hour, convinced he had gotten bored and left. I was wrong.

Because he couldn’t get to me physically, the psychological attack began. An hour would go by, and he’d scratch at the door like a rat, “I’m waiting for you. And I’m going to kill you.” Thirty minutes after that, “The longer you wait to come out, the worse it’s going to be.” Then came the insults, I’m fat, ugly, nobody likes me. I was stupid, a loser, and he’d be doing everyone a favor by killing me. My sister even tried to lure me out by saying he was gone. I fell for that once before, too.

At some point, I fell asleep. Maybe from emotional fatigue, maybe from a concussion, but when I woke up, it was dark. I could hear my grandmother’s TV through our shared wall. She only watches TV after dinner when she retires to her room for the night. That meant my mother was home. As quietly as I could, I pulled the dresser away from the door and listened. I heard noises in the kitchen, confirming my mother was home. I threw open the door and ran as fast as I could down the hall, past the bathroom, through the living room, and into the kitchen.

That night’s dinner had been cooked, served, and eaten. The remainder of it sat in casserole dishes on the table. The plates and silverware had been cleared except for the untouched setting in front of my chair. My father was still at work, but my mother had been home for hours. She stood at the sink washing dishes.

Her back was to me. I approached from the side, tears welling up in my eyes. “…Mom.” It came out as a raspy whisper with only a hint of my voice. She turned her head to me. I heard her gasp. And, for a split second, I saw her shock before she turned back to the dishes in the sink.

“Your brother already told me what happened. I don’t need to hear it again.” It was her standard dismissive response. He got to her first. He always got to her first with a watered-down version of what happened. He’d confess to just enough to make it sound believable but not enough to get in any real trouble. And she always believed him.

“No, Mom, you don’t know what he did.” She wouldn’t look at me. She couldn’t look at me because if she did, she would see the bruises on my neck or the terror in my eyes, still puffy and swollen from crying for hours.   

“Yes, I do. He told me. He admitted it was bad and said it won’t happen again.”

“Mom! He was strangling me! Ask Gram! She saw it! She stopped him!”

“She’s old. She doesn’t know what she saw. You always do this. You always make things bigger than what actually happened. And you know how he gets. Why do you provoke him?”

For as long as I stood there trying to tell my side of what happened, my mother continued to wash dishes without looking at me or responding. She had made up her mind and tuned me out. This, too, was another lesson I had learned.

As I headed back to my room, my mother said over her shoulder, as if an afterthought, “And don’t go to your father with this. He works hard and doesn’t want to hear any of this crap when he gets home.”

I went back to my room defeated and exhausted. Since I wasn’t allowed to wedge the dresser against the door at night in case of an emergency anymore, I set up my DIY booby traps to wake me up if someone opened my door while I was sleeping. It was the only protection I had.

*The provocation for my attempted murder was because, while arguing with my sister, my “big mouth” interfered with my brother watching TV in the adjacent wreck room.