Chapter 5 – Rough Seas II

A new environment awaited the girls. They were already visiting their grandmother because they lived next door. It wasn't a romantic relationship because when their grandmother called them, it was more to do some forced work that the men in the family didn't want to do. The visits from the Children's Court happened once a week at their grandmother's house and they were told to say that their mother's partner was really doing something or they wouldn't come home. They knew it would be a little worse. The three of them were sent to the doctor to have their virginity tested. Julia felt violated, extremely embarrassed and with the trauma from before. When she arrived at the doctor's waiting room, he was in front of a room exhuming a corpse. Everything seemed to spin in Julia's head at nine years old and she wondered why all this was happening, why everything had changed. On a random morning after a month at their grandmother's house and not wanting the possibility of returning to their mother, Julia and Ane were playing in the backyard and their mother gave them treats through a small gap. That same day, Anne and Julia performed their last act of desperation. They fled their grandmother's house and hid in their mother's house, passing through a loose tile in that little familiar world. Once again at home, they did not think about the consequences of their actions. Their grandmother knocked on the door, calling for Nora, and she did not respond until she turned down the volume on the TV that she was watching from the comfort of their mother's bed. Nora's mother knew that her daughter was not home because at that time she had already gone to work. The children's grandmother had done everything she could to get them to leave their mother's house, but without success. After a few hours of being there, they heard something breaking down the window of their mother's room. It was the police who were there at their grandmother's request to remove Anne and I. They turned everything upside down in my mother's house and took us to the police station. Listen to the recording of our escape. and a lot of lecturing from the police officer, I felt like a criminal. They didn't know that when they got home, their older sister Sandy called them to get ready. Until then, okay, they thought it was just a trip and ran. And everything was prepared in detail, they got ready and soon a distant aunt arrived in a car and there was so much joy because they were going to go for a drive. It would be great. Her grandmother took pictures of the whole family as if everything was perfect, at least it seemed that way in the pictures.

The car was going so fast on a long road, a place Ane and Júlia had never been. A good wind was blowing because the car windows were open and through a shelf, the grandmother saw that the girls weren't wearing seatbelts, so she lost both of them with only one seatbelt. Because all the seats were occupied in the car, there were her two aunts, the grandmother and the sister Sandy to keep Júlia safe. It was strange because the others were no longer well. When the grandmother finished buckling the seatbelt, there was a sudden stop and a terrible fright. Everyone was very shaken and Júlia knew that everything was dark. We crashed behind a bus when the brakes failed. My aunt was going very fast, but luckily we didn't get hurt, just the car was damaged. We were in such a rush that they didn't even take us to the doctor, I had a terrible stomach ache from the seatbelt in the accident, we took a taxi and continued on the road and the conversation continued and I still didn't understand and complained about my pain, I could only hear my sister saying, everything will be fine, just sleep a little.

So I slept for I don't know how long, yesterday we only passed Sri Lanka and then an hour later I woke up disoriented and saw what looked like cows, that's right, cows, all I could think was, are we going to a farm? And I asked questions and no one would say anything to me, it was all very strange, it was as if I were invisible, no one would answer me anything.