Hate List

by Jennifer Brown

mean, I know it’s his own fault that he’s gone, but still. Why couldn’t they have just seen it before? Why did it take this? It’s just not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair. A fair’s a place where you eat corn dogs and ride the Ferris wheel.”

“Never too much purple,” she muttered. “The world needs more purple. More and more, dontcha know.” “I like purple,” I said.

“One’s my favorite number,” Bea giggled. “The word won being the past tense of win, and we can all say at the end of the day that we’ve won once again, can’t we? Some days making it to the end of the day is quite the victory.”

“Just like there’s always time for pain, there’s always time for healing. Of course there is.”

You may not have pulled the trigger, but you helped cause the tragedy.”

I knew what she was thinking: Being pretty isn’t everything, but sometimes being ugly is.

For once the future seemed heavier than the past.

Beneath the struggle there would always be that basic love, that safe place to come home to.

We all got to be winners sometimes. But what he didn’t understand was that we all had to be losers, too. Because you can’t have one without the other.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to take hate away from people. Not even people like us, who’ve seen firsthand what hate can do. We’re all hurting. We’re all going to be hurting for a long time. And we, probably more than anyone else out there, will be searching for a new reality every day. A better one.”

“We do know that it’s possible to change reality,” she said. “It’s hard, and most people won’t bother to try, but it’s possible. You can change a reality of hate by opening up to a friend. By saving an enemy.” Jessica looked at me. She smiled. I smiled back, sadly. I wondered if we would go on to be friends after this. If we would even see one another again after today.

“Nick Levil,” she said, “loved Shakespeare.” I held my breath. When had Jessica talked to Nick’s family? Why had she? Did she do it without me on purpose? I squinted at the bench. Sure enough, Nick’s name was there, last on the list of victims. I made a small noise in the back of my throat and covered my mouth with my hand. This time I couldn’t keep the tears from falling, especially when she dropped Nick’s old battered copy of Hamlet, the one he’d read passages of to me so many times, into the time capsule.