Born Bad, by Blanca

Blanca used a vignette title from "The House on Mango Street" to inspire her to write about a particularly violent moment in her past.


1515 Lanes Mill Road is a beautiful white house with three floors in Lakewood, New Jersey. Through the blue-shuttered windows, you can see the front yard, covered in a sea of lush, green grass and dotted by three large oak trees.

Inside on the third floor, a young girl with brown hair cowers on the blue carpet of her room. The calloused fist of a brown-haired man repeatedly slams toward the crying child's body, the "swish-whip" of a wire hangar in his hand leaving welts of swelling red on her small arms, back, and legs. The man's green eyes are wild with fury as the eight-year-old begs for Daddy to stop.

Tears are streaming down from her chocolate eyes as she wonders why he's doing this. But she has an idea why. She procrastinated on putting her numerous multi-patterned dress Daddy always made her wear on the rows of wire hangars in her closet, and is now being punished for it. However, in the back of her mind, she knows it's only an excuse, that her father's anger was from another source.

Daddy always wanted a son, but never got the chance. He never got to take a young boy of his own fishing. He was never able to have a son to work in the garage with him, the garage that one could never walk thorugh without getting stained with oil. He tries to substitute his daughter, taking her to the fishing pond in the next town over, having her sit with him while he works on his big, black Dodge 4x4. But it isn't the same. Because of this, the girl believes that with every meeting of his calloused fist to her young skin, she is not just being disciplined for her mistakes. She thinks she was simply born bad.

Her mother, sisters, everyone tells her that it isn't her fault, that her father is to blame. They say the drugs make him do it; all the beer, wine, marijuana, the rainbow of pills. But she doesn't believe them. Maybe she wants to think she's to blame. She doesn't want to put the excuse on drugs.

Now six years later, she no longer hangs her dresses on those wire hangars, for she owns none. The white house with blue shutters is now owned by a Jewish family of four. The girl lives with her mother, far away from that house in Lakewood.

She still talks with Daddy, but she doesn't call him that anymore. Now it's simply Father. Or "Jailbird" if she's in a bad mood. The police found his rainbow of pills and little drug trees. She hasn't seen Father for five years, but she still remembers the "swish-whip" of those hangars and the swelling red welts. And from time to time, she still believes she was just born bad because she wasn't born a boy.