Temptation

Six years old, with the hand of a boy, nearly a man, a 15-year-old neighbour, under my short red cotton sun dress. I let his hand wander up my long brown childlike legs because of greed. I coveted something. A small set of rosary beads with an ivory Christ, arms spread on his cross. It seemed perfect and I wanted it desperately. So this boy/man had his hand up my dress. He’d touched my panties, but he wanted more. If I wanted my rewards, I had to let him have more… he wanted my skin.

I knew it was wrong. As we sat side by side behind the old laundry block, with the feeling of the cold concrete creating dents on the back of my thighs, and the sounds of my friends, his siblings, playing in another part of the garden, I knew what I’d already let him do was wrong. And I was afraid.

How was I going to explain how I got the rosary beads? When I had first seen them, they were hidden in a drawer at the Browns’ home. I played there with his younger brother and sister, children my own age. But when he, Don, had showed me the little Christ, I wanted to hold it in my hand, to own it, to have it as something of my own, so badly.

But not badly enough. No matter how hard I tried, I knew I couldn’t have it, that my mother would find it and want to find out what I had done. What I had let him do.

As I tried to pull myself away from him, yet another of his brothers, Raymond, came around the corner. He was not much younger than Don, and so angry. That scared me, as he was the kindest person, but he gently collected me up and took me to play with the other children. I don’t know what happened, but I heard about a fight and bad blood between the two brothers after that. I stayed away until the end of my holidays when I went back to the city. By my next holidays, Don had a job and no longer was around to tempt little girls.

It was my guilty secret. One that I have always kept to myself. It was confirmation that I was a bad person, ugly on the inside… someone who didn’t deserve to be loved. That reasoning made the things that were happening in the rest of my world make more sense. It would explain why people always left me, if I was too bad on the inside to be lovable.