You're born in rough, dirty floorboards and wet, slimy unwashed laundry. And you suppose that's where it started. From the day you were born, you were scum, you were the scrapings on the bottom of society's hypothetical boot.
All the other children that two-year-old you sees through the boarded up windows of your tiny, hovel-esque house have two parents that walk next to them and hold their hands and pat their heads, and you ask your mother in the babbling child language you have why you haven't got a daddy.
She shakes her head and says that you do, and he's just not here, and that it's better that way. You don't understand, but you nod and go back to drawing make-believe real families for yourself in melted crayon on the floorboards.
x
You forget about your father until you're four years old and he comes to visit.
When the door opens, you know it's not someone you know because anyone your mother knows would knock. Your mother isn't the type of mother who befriends people who don't knock on doors.
He's tall and imposing and you want to run and hide, and your mother greets him even though her hands are shaking. She says that you've been doing just fine, and she doesn't need his help. His eyes are shielded by sunglasses and his expression never changes, and you hide in your room, clutching your stuffed bunny.
He pushes past your mother and stands in front of you. "Son," he says. You look up, eyes wide with awe and terror. "Son, do you know the path by the river?" You nod. "I want you to walk back and forth on it four times. Do you understand?"
"Why?"
He strikes you across the face, and you come to realize that your father is not at all like the fathers of the children on the street.
x
Walking is all that you understand anymore.
Your father's visits are frequent and always angry, always telling you that you haven't walked far enough or haven't kept quiet enough. You swear that you've seen his face on posters up by the school (which you still haven't been to, even at the age of eight), but you convince yourself that he is not that man.
You read, when you aren't walking. The dictionary is in the best condition out of your mother's tiny collection of books, so that went first. You store it under your bed and read it whenever your father and your mother are yelling and you come across the word self-loathing and you wonder if that's the name for what you feel about yourself, because every day when you walk by the river you feel as though if you just fell in, no one would miss you.
Your mother laughs and pretends that things are still normal, but when you aren't listening you hear her crying and praying, although she never mentioned being religious to you. When atheists (you learned that word in your dictionary, your source of logic and reason in your unreasonable word) pray, things must be wrong.
x
When you stare longingly at the boys playing hop scotch on the street, your father hits you, so you always look down at the concrete, at the yellow lines spliced along the middle of the roads.
Some days when you do the wrong thing, he hits you, and other days, he touches you gently, and those are the worst because his hands are in private spaces that you were always told belonged to you only and you feel dirty and the word self-loathing comes to mind again.
In your spare time you watch people, you watch them and try to see in them what's wrong with you, because there has to be something there that sets you apart from everybody else. You take longer walks simply because it isn't being at home, and you find that after awhile the searing pain in your feet numbs, and you love that because you can conquer it and make it go away.
The holes in your sweaters become larger, you dig at them with your nails and watch the fabric unravel and imagine that it's your own skin, ripping and tearing away because you're sick of this skin, this dirty, filthy, hate-worthy skin.
Your mother pats your shoulder and wraps her arms around you sometimes and you fold into yourself and recoil because it reminds you too much of the black, wrong thing in your chest in the space where you heart should be.
x
You're thirteen when you realize that you like boys.
A voice in the back of your head taunts you that it's only because you've been touched by a man, that you've only ever felt men, so how can you feel anything for girls?
You flip through the anatomy book at the library one day, and marvel at the male body, at the curves and dips and muscles and strong facial structure, so different from your own small, frail, effeminate one. A girl could never be that way. The idea of being with a girl makes you sick, and the anatomy book teaches you more than you need to know about the way being with a girl is.
The books about growing up make you sick, and you stare down at the page that talks about consent for so long that your eyes burn and you fall over, your head black and fuzzy and when you wake up your mother is fanning you and the librarian is asking if you're alright. You say that you are, and the librarian asks if she can speak to your mother privately for a few minutes.
You walk home by yourself, but tonight, you don't count your steps one by one and you look around at the world for a moment and wonder how much different it might be if you'd never been born.
x
At fifteen, your father seems to have disappeared from your life.
He never visits anymore, and every night you dream that he comes back, that he opens the door and doesn't knock and makes bruises on your body and on your mind. You dream about him threatening and yelling, and then one night it hits you that you have nothing left to lose anymore, and you cannot be threatened like that.
You see a flyer on a telephone pole of that-man-who-is-not-your-father and you pull it off and you stare at it and you laugh, a humorless, bitter sound because you finally understand what he wanted you to do all those years.
The next year, you sign yourself up for the Long Walk and for the first time in your life, you are sure of something. You're sure that you'll win, you'll win and you'll be able to have anything you want and the materialistic, shallow value of that will make the dirtiness go away and make you feel whole again.
x
You hate Peter McVries and Ray Garraty, you hate the way they look into each other's eyes and the way McVries guides Garraty's every step and wraps his arm around his shoulders during the night. You watch them, you watch how oblivious Ray is, how pure and innocent and clean, and you remember self-loathing and wonder if you really do want to win after all.
written based on a headcanon that klara had. i claim no ownershp to the long walk.