Oppression Read Online Free PDF Page A

everyone, before we check Benny’s bingo card, let me introduce our new student.”
    “Her name is Elyse,” the silky-haired girl interrupted.
    “Yes, her name is Elyse. Everyone please make her feel at home, okay? Anna, why don’t you let Elyse look off of your bingo card while we go over the answers?”
    “Okay,” she agreed scooting her desk so it was flush with mine. I saw her hand slip into her pocket. She passed me something in a closed fist and waited with a smile as I examined it.
    “Don’t let Ms. Kay see,” she whispered. “It’s a secret.”
    I slipped the wrapped candy into my pocket—the first of many secrets we would come to share.
    From the moment her desk grazed the edge of mine, we were inseparable. Our friendship came naturally. Being with Anna was effortless, comfortable.
    I was nobody but myself around her, and she was the same. There were no secrets, no secrets but one, and for the next three years, that secret was mine and mine alone.
    Middle school was a vicious beast of cliques, bullies, and peer pressure, a monster that would have eaten me alive if not for Anna. Her gruff and forward personality countered my timid demeanor making us two perfect halves of a single entity.
    The level of education was still a breeze, so school became a place to congregate, a place where we could join forces and slip into our own little world far away from the workings of junior high savagery. The summers, however, were boundless. How and where the days were spent didn’t matter, as long as they were spent together, but this happiness was two-faced. The more I grew to love Anna and need her, the more pain I would feel at the loss. With every second, the joy of friendship burrowed deeper, so that when the time came for it to end, I knew it would rip out my soul.
    “Did you ever hear of blood sisters?” Anna asked from the bed. She was lying on her stomach flipping through our newly printed yearbook.
    “No,” I told her. “What is it?”
    “Just something April said at school.”
    “Well what did she say?” I pressed from the floor of my room. I skipped to April’s class photo in my own yearbook. She was such a bully. She even looked the part.
    “She said her and Susan should be able to get their picture taken together because they were sisters. Of course I told her ‘no you’re not,’ but she said they were blood sisters, because they put their cuts together and mixed the blood.”
    I thought briefly about what Betsy would say, how the nurse in her would disapprove. “Elyse, that’s how people spread disease. Be safe.”
    Anna must have taken my silence to mean that I too was contemplating the decision to make ourselves blood sisters.
    “We’re more like sisters than they are. Susan doesn’t even like April that much. I think we should do it. Best friends for life, right?”
    I froze. It wasn’t safe. Not because Anna wasn’t healthy, but because I wasn’t . . . normal. Would something happen to her? What if I made her sick? My condition was something I hadn’t considered in a long time. It had been so easy to push reality into the back of my head over the years, to pass off my growth-stunted body as being petite, small, or fragile, but here it was, staring me in the face. Anna wanted to test the biology of it all. She didn’t know what she was getting herself into.
    “Here, I’ll pick this scab on my knee from yesterday. Do you have a scab or anything?”
    “No. It’s okay though, we’ll do it later or something.”
    “Oh come on, don’t be a baby. I know you have a blister on your hand from the monkey bars.”
    She grabbed my right hand and pulled open the cracked skin without warning.
    “Ouch! Are you crazy?” I yelled as I yanked my hand back to examine the damage.
    “Hurry, before it dries,” she insisted.
    Before I knew it she had my palm to her knee, rubbing the two sores together.
    “There, see?” she asked looking for my approval, but I couldn’t respond. My eyes