Your heart is an empty room, let me hear the echo

Her parents’restaurant used to be her palace. She’d come home from school, pull the red velvety curtain across the bar section, press a few keys on the jukebox and do her homework sitting on a high stool in the peace and quiet of the evening. At lunch she could demand escargots smothered in garlic and herb butter and at 7 years of age she could pour a perfect beer. On weekends she would occasionally join a table of farmers drinking Schnapps and playing Jass until she was sent home to put herself to bed.
Her father taught her impeccable manners. He only ever smacked her for a racist comment she’d picked up at school or for calling him an idiot. She used the words please and thank you often and still to this day grits her teeth at bad table manners and is especially aware of them around her parents. Even though she herself sometimes struggles to find the confidence to hold someones gaze, she dislikes people looking away when spoken to.
Her mother taught her empathy, love and compassion. Also things she finds hard to shake, seeing them more as a hindrance these days. She was often quite lonely, though for a while at home she enjoyed the company of a couple renting a room in her parents house as they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. She was from Singapore and he was African and sometimes frightened the hell out of her mother when she came home late at night finding him sleeping on the steps outside the house curled in a blanket. Even in the middle of a snowy winter. He just liked the open outdoors, felt too claustraphobic inside. I guess habits were hard to shake for him too.
On her 8th birthday, she received a new pair of rollerskates. She practiced often and loved gliding across the smooth floor in the cellar of the restaurant, where all the stock was kept. One day she slipped and fell badly. Sahip, the new kitchen hand was walking down the steps with a few empty crates. He put them aside and helped her up. But he stood too close. And as the blood trickle trickled from her knee down her leg, he kissed her with his teeth and his tongue and his teeth and his lips and his teeth and his teeth and his teeth.
And as his hands started to fumble with her underwear, all the way up that skirt, all her confused mind could tell her was: not to be rude, not to be racist, not to be rude, not to be racist…