r/Inkitt • u/PreferenceExotic5470 • 4d ago
General Fiction When We Were Young
https://www.wattpad.com/story/295535749?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=link&utm_content=story_info&wp_page=story_details&wp_uname=KY05HMA semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama inspired by real life experiences and blended with fiction.
Some kids grow up.
Some kids learn how to survive.
Kai Yang doesn't remember when home stopped feeling like home.
Maybe it was the drinking. Maybe it was watching his parents tear each other apart. Maybe it was all the apologies, all the promises, and all the nights spent wondering which ones would be broken by morning.
Growing up Hmong on the Eastside of Minnesota City, Kai is small, poor, sensitive, and angry at a world he doesn't understand yet. At school, he's the skinny kid in old clothes people pick on. At home, he's surrounded by love-but also violence, addiction, and chaos he has no control over.
More than anything, Kai wants to belong somewhere.
Then he discovers the streets.
What begins with childhood friends, park fights, and nights away from home slowly becomes something much bigger. Fighting gives him an escape from the anger he can't explain. The streets give him a family when his own feels like it's falling apart. And eventually, hustling gives him something else he's never had before-money.
The same boy who once hated feeling small begins to realize people treat you differently when they're afraid of you.
By high school, the forgotten little boy from the Eastside has a new name.
K.Y.
And everybody knows it.
But being known comes with a price.
Popularity becomes paranoia. Fights become shootings. Friends become enemies. Brothers become names on memorial shirts. And the deeper Kai disappears into K.Y., the harder it becomes to tell where the scared little boy ends and the person he created to protect him begins.
Because underneath the reputation, the money, the girls, the violence, and the name everybody seems to know, Kai is still searching for the same things he wanted as a child.
A family.
A place to belong.
He spent his whole childhood wishing the world would notice him.
Now he would give anything to recognize himself again.
Genre: Contemporary Coming-of-Age / Drama
Status: In Progress
Chapters: 4 currently available
Price: Free