Hate List

by Jennifer Brown

“It’s like, you know, even if the whole world hates you, you still have someone to rely on. Just the two of you against the whole world. Just us.”

“Life isn’t fair. A fair’s a place where you eat corn dogs and ride the Ferris wheel.” “I hate it when you say that.” “So do my kids.”

Or was that how a spider’s life was spent—forever scrabbling to reach a peak of something, the scrabbling its only goal?

“No,” he said, without facing me. “Maybe it makes me a bad parent, but I don’t know if I can. No matter what the police found, you were involved in that shooting, Valerie. You wrote those names on that list. You wrote my name on that list. You had a good life here. You may not have pulled the trigger, but you helped cause the tragedy.”

In a way, Nick had been right: 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.