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“I know about the lunch boxes. I know what’s been going on with Drew. I heard about Josie punching him. I know the kinds of things he says to you.” Lacy felt her eyes fill with tears. “The next time it happens, you have to stick up for yourself. You have to, Peter, or I . . . I’m going to have to punish you.”
You couldn’t fight the injustice of fate; you could only suffer it and hope that one day it might be different.
“One day, Peter, everyone’s going to know your name.”
The foreshadowing is crazy
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask . . . with nothing beneath it?
A gun was nothing, really, without a person behind it.
Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it’s your fault—that if you’d tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn’t have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance? I know people who’ll hear about the people who died, and will say it was God’s will. I know people who’ll say it was bad luck. And then there’s my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn’t you?
When the person is so young and so full of potential and skill, the feelings of grief and loss can be even more overwhelming. At times such as this we turn to our friends and family for support, for a shoulder to cry on and for someone to walk that road of pain and anguish with us. We cannot have Matt back, but we can rest easy knowing that he’s found the peace in death he was denied here on earth.”
People could argue that monsters weren’t born, they were made. People could criticize her parenting skills, point to moments when Lacy had let Peter down by being too lax or too firm, too removed or too smothering.
But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated.
“When someone dies, their lives aren’t the ones that stop at that moment, you know?”
Patrick shook his head. “I’m a coward. The only reason I ran into that building was because if I didn’t, I’d have nightmares for the rest of my life.”
When you love someone, there’s a pattern to the way you come together. You might not even realize it, but your bodies are choreographed: a touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A staccato kiss, break away, a longer one, his hand slipping under your shirt. It’s a routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. It’s just the way you’ve learned to fit,
I know you don’t think of me. And you certainly would never picture us together. But probably peanut butter was just peanut butter for a long time, before someone ever thought of pairing it up with jelly. And there was salt, but it started to taste better when there was pepper. And what’s the point of butter without bread?
It would be like that fairy tale, the one with the princess who could feel a bean or a pea or whatever. Except Peter wasn’t a prince, and the lump wouldn’t keep him up at night. In fact, it might make him sleep better.
When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.
Sterling isn’t the inner city. You don’t find crack dealers on Main Street, or households below the poverty level. The crime rate is virtually nonexistent. That’s why people are still so shell-shocked. They ask, How could this happen here? Well. How could it not happen here? All it takes is a troubled kid with access to guns. You don’t have to go to an inner city to find someone who meets those criteria. You only have to open your eyes. The next likely candidate might be upstairs, or sprawled in front of your TV right now. But hey, you just go right on pretending it won’t happen here. Tell
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I know what it’s like to feel like nothing you do or say is ever going to make things better. And I know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night replaying one moment over and over so vividly that you might as well be living it again.
And he realized that this was a sort of happiness, too: you would say anything—do anything—to keep your son smiling like that, as if there was something to still smile about, even if every word felt like you were swallowing glass.
I think a person’s life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the director’s cut—the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way. There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you’ve survived, or the minutes you’ve been stuck there. Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.
Something still exists as long as there’s someone around to remember it. Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would have to be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive.
Here was the amazing thing: in his dream, Peter wasn’t scared. He knew, somehow, that he was headed exactly where he’d wanted to go.
Josie had been charged as an accessory to second-degree murder and accepted a plea of manslaughter, with five years served.
