10,000 Words Part 12: Remember

She remembered traipsing: after older siblings, cooler classmates, busy parents. A large part of her childhood seemed to have been spent on the end of an invisible skein, pulling her by her upturned face, causing her gait to become awkward.
She couldn’t remember, though, what it was; the quality they had and she lacked, what kept her pleading for a fix.
She did remember the gleam in their eyes.
They’d enjoyed her dogged desperation; they’d gloried in it. She remembered understanding that.
The other thing she couldn’t recall was when the sharp edge in her psyche had severed the leash.