How to Survive Your Murder

by Danielle Valentine

No other genre would cast the girl who liked science and reading in the leading role. Real life didn’t, either. In real life, girls like me stood on the sidelines and didn’t place in competitions and stayed home on Friday nights.

Compliments from Claire always meant more than compliments from other people.

“Well, fear’s good for the soul,” I said, and his smile widened.

If you watched enough horrible things happen on-screen, you could figure out how to avoid them in real life.

If you don’t come with me, I might die. Those were the last words my sister ever said to me. Really.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do. —Eleanor Roosevelt

But this was real life. No matter how well you know the rules, no matter how smart you think you are, you’re never prepared for your life to turn into a horror movie.

And so I watched as Owen Trevor Maddox lurched forward and stabbed my sister once, right in the chest. I watched him kill her.

I was the one who was always saying the rules of scary movies were perfectly applicable to real life, and that if everyone just lived like they were in the middle of a truly gruesome slasher, things would turn out okay.

Give me a good slasher any day of the week. I want to see lives ruined. People destroyed. I want to listen to other people screaming. It’s the only time I can drown out the screams still echoing through my head.

When am I going to stop being surprised by all the things I’ve lost, all the things that suck now that never sucked before?

I don’t have even the slightest idea what “okay” feels like anymore, but I’m going to keep moving and thinking and talking, and I guess that’s close enough.

I heard somewhere that people say “I can’t imagine” only about things they can imagine perfectly and wish they couldn’t.