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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gregg Olsen
Read between
February 7 - February 7, 2024
“She feels so bad.”
The girls noticed she’d shed a torrent of tears for dead pets, but never for another person.
told Nikki and Sami that she didn’t want them talking behind her back.
“Sami, your sister is a bad influence.”
After Kathy died and Shane disappeared, they stopped altogether.
my sister just not being there.
think she was being groomed by my mom not to be here anymore.”
None of Sami’s friends even knew Nikk...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Shelly turned to Nikki. “You need to stay outside and make yourself scarce.” Nikki promised she would.
Lara Watson figured her grandson Shane was being a typical teenager whenever she reached out to talk to him.
In fact, whenever Lara sent a check for Christmas or his birthday, it got cashed immediately—endorsed by Shane.
Except he never did.
Lara
He never called anyone except Shelly.
Yes, she was lonely and almost didn’t dare to hope for a future that involved happiness and love and freedom.
To show up on campus looking like that would chip away at whatever personal pride she’d been able to grow by being away from Monohon Landing during the day.
It was the same place she’d made Kathy sleep.
She had no car, and no money for bus fare.
see—to do anything with the space.
“Is that all you did today? You lazy bitch!”
Tears would come, and both of her parents would push it even harder.
‘You should have told me you needed a car! I had no idea that was your problem.’”
Gaslighting
“I just told Mom to fuck off!” she yelled, but kept running, this time out the other door and into the woods, where she slept that night.
Shelly gave her daughter some clothes, fifty dollars in cash, and drove her to the Greyhound bus station in Olympia.
Sami understood the reasons behind Nikki’s absence, of course.
Nikki was beautiful, and kind, and she always made time for Tori.
Early the next morning, she woke to her mom punching and slapping her in the face.
to cry. “You
“She just left this. She didn’t stay.”
Sami never brought Nikki up either. She didn’t dare. She didn’t want her family to know that she was still in touch with her sister.
tent adjacent
Nikki remained justifiably bitter about the punishments her stepdad had forced on her, but mostly she now saw him as pathetic, a loser.
Her mother would treat Nikki as though the exile to Canada and
conversation that no one wanted to have.
Yet by her senior year, Sami was taking a “fuck it” approach to life. She’d grown tired of covering up what her mom had been doing to her and her older sister.
Sami was called in front of the school counselor.
I guess I didn’t want them to make my mother mad.”
Then Sami would be sent back outside to sleep on the porch.
running to Kaley’s house. She’d had it. She wasn’t going to take it anymore.
but she let herself into the Hansons’ garage.
But Dave attributed those graduation-day bruises to Sami’s own side of the scorecard, saying that she’d been a daredevil and risk-taker and had injured herself in a fall.
1997,
enrollment period for Evergreen State College.
She even mused about seeing what kind of work she could get in Hollywood.
Sami let in on her plan were her friends Lauren and Leah—
Sami wanted to give Tori a vague heads-up.
“If I don’t come back later today,” she told her sister, “I will leave a little note for you—just for you—under my pillow.”
then eight.
Tori was only 8
“Mom, Lauren ran out of gas and I need to go pick her up,”
you. I started thinking about hurt and life and how much I hurt and how much hurt I cause.
