Indigo

The girl sat trembling in a seat not meant to be oversized, but that looked comically large against her tiny frame. She still couldn’t entirely tell if the shaking was from the icy wind creeping through the window across the room, or from the incredible sadness of her day, or from the deep fear she had that the men would recognize the guilt behind her eyes… that they would know. Whatever the cause, she had been shaking so hard for so long that she now felt completely numb, both inside and out.

The fussy old woman behind the desk walked over and handed the girl another candy with a small smile, just as she had been doing for the last few hours. The woman knew it was pointless to try talking to the girl. She didn’t utter a word and could hardly pay attention, poor thing. So she brought the girl candies and tried to be as welcoming as she could, though she hated sharing her workspace with people as a general rule.

Unwrapping the cellophane with shaking hands, the girl put the candy in her mouth and stopped to listen for the men who took her from her home and tried to make her talk. She didn’t like the woman, but she liked the men even less… they tried to make her remember things that she didn’t want to have to think about ever again, but just the thought of the men coming back flushed all the bad memories back into her mind and she saw the terrible events again like a movie in her mind. The girl started shaking from a new source as she silently sobbed into the torn piece of fabric in her hands.

She went to school that morning wearing her mom’s favorite scarf- the one that was dark blue and silky and that she let her daughter wear when she was feeling sad. Her mom didn’t know the girl wore the scarf, but she promised herself she would take extra good care of it and her mom would never know it was gone.

The boys at school always laughed at her for her dirty clothes and broken toys, but that was all the girl had. Just wait till they saw her today- they couldn’t laugh anymore! With the scarf around her neck, the girl imagined she looked like a princess and stood tall as she stepped off the bus.

During recess, she left the scarf in her desk so nothing would happen to it… but something did. When she went back to her desk, the scarf was replaced with a pile of blue fabric and strings. The girl saw the boys in her class laughing and holding up their scissors, and all she could do was cry.

Stepping off the bus, the girl cradled a small strip of what used to be her mom’s favorite thing in the world and tried to be brave enough to tell her mom what happened. The closer she got to the door, the louder she could hear the shouting. One voice was her mom’s, and the other was a man’s voice. Not her dad’s… he lived in a big house somewhere, or at least that’s what everyone told her. No, this was one of the many men who would stay at the girl’s house for a few months and then leave so another man could come. They changed so much that the girl stopped trying to know their names.

“You know that scarf is the one good thing I have, and you took it and gave it to another girl?”
“I didn’t touch your damn scarf, woman.”
“Then where is it? Where is my indigo scarf?”

“You sound so pretentious when you call it indigo. It’s dark blue, it’s not fancy.”

The girl hesitated with her hand on the doorknob. They were yelling about the scarf. They were yelling because of her. Trying to gather her courage, she pushed open the door to stop their fight, but instead she had to run straight into another room and shut the door behind her to avoid getting hit by things that both her mom and the man were throwing around. The yelling got louder and turned to things the girl didn’t understand… something about other men and women and pigs. Eventually, her mom just started screaming one word over and over: “Indigo” she screamed. “Indigo, indigo, indigo!” The screams got louder, until they were punctuated by a loud sound the girl knew came from a gun. She slowly creaked open the door and saw her mother lying on the floor surrounded by broken glass and the insides of pillows and the man holding a gun who glanced at the girl and ran out the front door.

The girl cried in the room alone, knowing it was her fault they were yelling in the first place. It took a while before the men came to get her and put her in the car with lights… the one where bad guys go, and she knew she must be bad. She clutched at the strip of fabric as they drove far away and the men talked from the front seat. Her mother’s yelling of “indigo” echoed again and again around her head. Indigo… Indigo… Indigo…

“What’s your name, kid?” the man with a mustache muttered.

A single tear finally broke free and rolled down her cheek and she whispered “Indigo.”