Kayla Hayes
Personal Essay
Reading and Writing Texts

	Childhood is all about learning what you can and can’t do, testing the boundaries, and perhaps getting hurt in the process. It is a time of learning the hard way that superman capes don’t make you fly and that scars are really just permanent reminders to be cautious.
	My story starts on a bright spring day - or perhaps it was fall. It doesn’t really matter. The events are what matters. What is certain that I was around 10 or 11 years old, and I was hanging out with one of my good friends, Casey. Casey had to go inside her house to talk about something with her father, and told me to stay outside, which I did. Not being a very patient child, I got bored within a couple of minutes, and looked around for something to do. My eyes settled on the egress window (a window from the basement set into a pit in the ground for escape purposes), covered not with one of the standard thin plastic covers, but boarded up with wood and a thick sheet of plastic. My first thought was, I bet I could walk on that. I slowly approached it, giving it a closer inspection. If I stayed centered on the thick board of wood, I determined, and went fast, I’d probably be okay. Without thinking it through any further, I started to run across.
	Halfway through, there was a cracking, splintering sound, and before I could take another step, the wood and plastic buckled up under me, sending me a yard down onto the hard, rock covered ground. I lay there for a few moments before getting to my knees, dazed. Nothing hurt. Everything hurt. Was I hurt? I wasn’t sure. At least I wasn’t bleeding, right?
	A drop of bright red falling to the ground disproved that theory fast. I looked myself over, seeing no evidence of a cut anywhere. A hand went to my face, and came away covered in blood. Still, though, I didn’t feel anything, so it must have been just a small cut, right? I clambered out of the egress window by way of the rungs bolted on the side, and stumbled into the house. The first sign of something wrong was probably when Corey, Casey’s twin brother, looked at me and yelped, but I was far too deep into shock to pay him any mind. I resolutely made my way to the bathroom, and looked in the mirror.
	I stared. Was that a flap of my chin hanging open? There was so much blood, I wasn’t sure. With shaking hands, I grabbed some toilet paper to stem the bleeding, still unable to feel any pain. A desperate chant started up in my head – a bandaid will fix it, a bandaid will fix it, oh please, let a bandaid fix it. Before much time had passed, Casey burst into the bathroom, likely notified by her brother as to my condition.
	“I c-called your parents, Kayla, your mom is gonna drive you to the hospital, let me walk you to your house, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
	“A bandaid will fix it.”
	Both lost in our own worlds of panic and shock, we walked the block to my house, where my mom was waiting. With a final flurry of apologies, Casey ran back home, pale, as my mom helped me into the car. I don’t remember much of the ride to the hospital, still completely and utterly convinced that a bandaid would fix it.
	My next clear memory is of the hospital room, where it had finally broken through to me that I’d need stitches. I’d gotten stitches before, and the memories were not entirely pleasant. It took a long time for the nurses and my parents to calm me down and convince me that, no, a bandaid would not fix it, and no, I would not feel the stitches. They held me down as I shoot and cried, and injected the anesthetic, which I’d dubbed ‘stinging juice’ from my first experience with stitches. If you’ve never had the dubious pleasure of experiencing it, the pain gets a lot worse before fading into the blissful numbness it’s designed to produce. They let me kick my legs at the pain, but nothing else, and soon the operation was underway.
	I ended up getting 15 stitches, 12 on the outside and 3 on the inside, holding the loose flap of skin and fat to the rest of my face. Unlike the first time I needed stitches, I ended up with a scar, but like the first time, I wasn’t allowed to go to school for a week or so afterwards, to keep my stitches from getting jostled. The last truly vivid memory relating to that event was recovering after getting stitches in the hospital, drinking terrible hospital orange juice and wishing the anesthetic would fully wear off so I could eat.
	To this day, if I look in the mirror and raise my chin, I can see the  ragged V - pointing to the tip of my chin and centered on my jawline – that’s my permanent momento of that day. For the first year, it was red, angry, and swollen, and then it faded to pink over time, eventually bleaching to the white of today.
	Childhood is all about learning what you can and can’t do, pushing your limitations and maybe getting hurt in the process. Even the pain can be a valuable lesson, though, and it’s a lot easier to bounce back from pain when you’re young.
	And besides, facial scars are kind of dashing.