How to Survive Your Murder

by Danielle Valentine

No matter how real something might feel when it was happening in a movie, we still had the luxury of closing our eyes, turning away. Real life, not so much.

Movies, even horrible ones, were safe. High school parties, not so much.

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.

I knew my role, and I was okay with it. Why wasn’t anyone else?

Everything Claire did was dramatic, but the eye roll was truly a work of art.

prosaic

cheugy,

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

The Wilhelm scream

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 thought I was done wanting things, but maybe not. Maybe I want this.

all those cameras pointing at him, lights flashing so that he seems to be glowing.

I blink and poof, the images vanish: just another Claire memory. I thought I’d used them all up by now, but I’d forgotten about that one.

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.

I inhale so quickly that the oxygen burns my lungs.

I force my eyes back open, not wanting to even blink in case she’s still waiting on the inside of my closed lids.

I am not a Final Girl. I watch Final Girls in movies. That’s my greatest skill.

stop signs and traffic lights popping up like fireflies.

I never realized how important it is to have someone who believes in you.

“You are not everyone,” she’d told me. “They’re all sheep. You are a stallion.” Even at ten I knew that stallions were boy horses, but gender is a construct, and besides, I got what she was saying.

I’m the definition of an inside person.

something she expects me to accept without question.

trope called a Flash Sideways.”

necromancy?

I hadn’t realized until this moment how bad things had gotten, how far I’d let everything fall.

kitchen. I lost so many things over the last year that I never really gave myself permission to mourn losing the house on top of all the rest,

It’s so loud, you can’t hear yourself freak out.

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

There have been lots of stories about fighting and drugs and parties, stories that make his life seem big and exciting and full of adventure. This story is the opposite. It makes his life seem small, lonely.

“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.”

Sometimes divorce is the best thing that can happen to a family; believe me.”

And then he licks his lips, like he wants to keep tasting me.

There are some things that are so broken you can’t put them back together, no matter how hard you try.

Everything I thought I understood about death rearranges itself inside my head.