Her Sleeve Was Buttoned For Seven Weeks, Then The Squad Leader Tore It Open
"Roll it up, Sergeant," Mullins said, and his thick fingers went into the fabric above her left elbow.
Recruit Rae Ellis has seven weeks of basic training left and one thing she has never let anyone see. Squad leader Duane Mullins has decided that today, in front of the whole platoon and the post legend on the observation deck, he is going to show it to them.
Rae came to Fort Moore to be invisible. She stands centre-right in every formation, never at the front and never at the back, so that nobody gets close enough to notice the fabric. When the heat index hits triple digits and drill sergeants call for sleeves up, she keeps her left cuff buttoned and takes the correction. Her right hand drifts to that cuff whenever voices rise. She has learned exactly how far to stand from people.
Mullins has spent seven weeks circling her silence like a man working a splinter out of his thumb. He is twenty-nine, six-four, two hundred and forty pounds, and he has rolled his sleeves to his biceps since the day he arrived because there is nothing under them worth hiding. He watches the way she keeps pace on the ruck marches with her jaw set and says nothing back, and it irritates him the way a light left on in an empty room irritates a man.
On the observation deck above the combatives pit, Command Sergeant Major Otha Brantley stands with folded arms and does not move. Fifty-eight, lean, grey at the temples, three Silver Star ribbons on a chest that has been through worse rooms than this. The whole platoon feels him standing there. Behind his dark glasses Brantley is watching the pit the way a man watches weather come in.
Drill Sergeant Coker pairs the platoon for hand-to-hand and Mullins calls for the little one himself.
She does not go down the way he expects. He rushes, she ducks under his reach and lands an elbow that snaps his head sideways, then hooks his ankle and puts him flat in the sand. The platoon gasps. Somebody laughs once and cuts it off. Mullins comes up out of that sand with red in his face and something new in his eyes.
He drags her down on the next pass. Traps her leg, gets his weight on her, and paws at her shoulders and arms looking for a handle — and that is when he finds the one thing she has been protecting for seven weeks. When she grabs at her left cuff to keep it shut, he sees the weakness he has been hunting all along.
His right hand hooks into the fabric above her left elbow and hauls backward and down.
The issued cotton splits from the shoulder seam to the cuff with a harsh ripping sound, loud in the whole pit. The torn flap swings. Her bare left arm drops into the late-afternoon sunlight, ridged and netted with pale old burn scars from just above the elbow down to the wrist, skin tight and shiny where it healed wrong, two deeper gouges near the crease. The platoon goes completely quiet. Rae's right hand flies up to cover the arm, and it is already too late.
Above the pit, Otha Brantley's face drains of colour.
He does not shout. He has never once needed to. He walks to the edge of the deck, both hands landing on the rail, and looks down at the arm of a girl he has seen exactly one time before — twenty years ago, in Columbus, Georgia, in a house fire that he has never once forgiven himself for.
The caption stops right there.
What did Otha Brantley know about those scars? Is he about to come down off that deck for Rae Ellis — or for the man standing over her? And what happened to Duane Mullins on the pit floor the moment the Command Sergeant Major took his hands off the rail?
The full story — who carried Rae out of that fire, and how a squad leader who wanted a legend to watch him brought a different legend down off a deck — is in the first comment. If you've ever kept something buttoned up just to survive a room full of people, this one's for you.
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