I Thought I Knew You

The Locker Room Fight (Extra Chapter)

Part 1 - Young, Orphaned and Alone

Like all cliche tragic backstories, mine begins with the death of my parents. Like many others, I wasn't old enough to remember them, to know what they looked like or how I'd been with them; all I remembered was the string of foster homes that followed.

Home one was a place I stuck around in for a year or two. I think it was a manor house, big and spacious and owning lots of fields and orchards. It was located far out from the city, so not at all close to my birthplace of Megadoza, but I don't think I minded at the time.

I remember arriving there all tearful and snotty, all of the other kids looking at me with sympathy. I only carried a small backpack with me, the only possessions I was allowed to keep after my parents passed, and clung to my social worker like crazy.

However they eventually got me to stay - or rather the staff dragged me away and told my social worker that they'd calm me down.

Then the door shut and my life as a kid out the system ended forever.

The staff at home one were strict, scary and mean, often pulling the children into itchy uniforms and forcing us to read from the same book each night. The book we read from was supposedly about religion, about a branch of religion, and it taught it us to be thankful for what we have and to never envy others.

I had remembered relying on that book growing up. I had carried it around and held it close to my heart. It was my guidance, my solace, in this world and so I never wanted to lose it. I didn't want to lose it like my parents.

But it turned out the book was a lie. It was created with the intention to brainwash foster children, a ring of adults deciding to start a cult within our home.

As soon as that was found out home one was shut down and so the next followed.

Home number two was the place I was shuttled to next at the age of five. I stayed there for a few weeks, not really fitting in with the other kids. While they were loud and boisterous, I was more shy and unsure of what to do.

I was larger than most of the girls. Stronger too. I once broke a girl's hand when we were playing a clapping game, my hand causing her wrist to twist. 

I remember crying over that. 

It was then I learned that I had never been a normal size. Nor had I ever had normal strength. I was abnormal - a descendant from giants - and so I was a lot more special than others. I was not like the human children in my home. Not at all.

That's when my envy of them began. That's when I began to wish to feel some of the normality, some of the sameness, that they all got to feel.

So after the incident, the caretakers decided to give me pills during the morning. They told me that every day I must come for my dose. It was a special medicine designed to keep me tiny, to stunt the genetically giant height and strength I held in my blood, to help me be normal. It was meant to help, meant to stop my jealousy, but the other kids saw it as weird. I saw it as weird. 

And so did everyone else.

Girls would whisper about how I was more like a boy than a girl; boys would say I'm a freak of nature; and I would never be invited to play with them. So I didn't entirely fit in. I didn't know where to go because no-one wanted me around. No-one wanted to associate with me.

That's why I started to run away. I stopped taking the pills and ran away, triggering the endless revolving doors of my foster homes.

Home two had to let me leave as I had scared the other children. I ended up growing during the night, my size collapsing the whole east side of the home and giving majority of the children trauma.