THERE IS NO GOD! STUPID CHAPTER POSTING WRONG DAMMIT I HATE YOU FANFICTION.NET! DIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

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"When I Run"

Sometimes when I finish selling my papers, I walk around the city. I don't go anywhere in particular. I explore. Unlike the others, I don't have bad pasts to run into, not here, anyway. I've run too far from home for them to find me.

I feel free when I run.

My father, and I know it's so typical and cliché, used to beat me and give me the hardest manual labor to do. I was a slave, in more ways than one. He whipped me with his riding crop when my work was unsatisfactory or when I displeased the company. I used to run away from the plantation in Virginia, run into the grove of trees nearby and run through the woods. It made me feel free.

I feel free when I run.

My father had company at least once a week. It was usually his perverted, rich friends. Friends who liked having sex with little boys. I was another kind of slaves on those days.

I feel clean when I run.

Those bastards, those twisted fiends! They put their hands all over me, made me do horrible things just for self-gratification. They hit me too; they hurt me and twisted my own mind until I couldn't speak anymore.

I feel so much better when I run.

My mother had run off with a black man who had been our servant since before I was born. My dad called me a bastard and never treated me as a son, but he has no proof. I'm as white as he is, despite looking nothing like him. So I'm still a bastard probably, mother had a history of running away too.

I feel like myself when I run.

I wonder if dad made mother do things against her will too, if that was why she kept running away. Maybe she just didn't like him. She was born into a high-class family here in New York, she grew up drinking champagne on her birthdays. All I remember of the night she left was that it was her birthday. It was her birthday and dad was drunk, again. And when dad gets drunk he does the same things to me as his friends do, and that was what he did to mom that night.

I feel happy when I run.

I don't talk at all anymore. Father finally pushed me over when he whipped me for twelve days straight-hardly sleeping and barely eating. I had kissed the Reverend's daughter.

I feel like a leaf in the breeze when I run.

Damn, that girl was the most beautiful I've ever seen. It was worth maybe four days of that horrible episode, but not nearly worth all twelve! I cried and screamed until my voice was gone, and even as I sobbed without sound, the bastard forced me to perform oral sex on him.

I feel like a rebel when I run.

I refused. Of course I refused; I had endured more than enough from him. I ran and I ran and I never stopped, I couldn't stop. Eventually I found the train yards and hopped an engine headed for New York City, city of dreams.

I feel so incredibly good when I run, it's impossible to describe.

The first days were hell. Then I snagged a few apples and ran like nobody's business. Luckily cops are slow. Unluckily, they're smart. They waited until I hit again, and they were ready this time. They cut me off, threw me in jail. I didn't know someone had been watching both times. Not the police, someone else. Somebody who could help.

I feel so liberated when I run.

This person's name was Jack Kelly. He found my cell and busted me out that very night. He said I was lucky he knew so much about the refuge, or he wouldn't have bothered, no matter how fast I was. Fast? I didn't know what he meant.

I feel so brilliant when I run.

Yeah, fast, he had said. He told me he needed a runner for his newsies in Manhattan. A runner, he explained, was someone who would take messages to the borough leaders. He said he had seen me running and knew instantly I was just the kid for the job. I would sell papers with his crew and run messages if he needed it. I agreed.

I feel so amazing and fast when I run.

In exchange for my services, he gave me a newsie nickname. Swifty.

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I think it's cute.

--Chronicles Bailey