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.

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

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 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.

It’s crazy how much you forget about a person when you don’t see them every day. All the little details that make up who they were drip out of your head like water falling though cupped hands.

Maybe the lesson here is that it doesn’t matter how many times you rewind, there’s always something you’re going to regret.

“I guess that’s the problem with those horror movies you’re always watching. They make you think everyone’s really simple. You know, the pretty girl, the bad boy, the geeky sidekick. But real people are never just one thing. Life’s a lot more complicated than that.”