Because I love you. And I hurt you. I hurt the person I love most in the world, and i will never forgive myself.

At Garvin High we were dealt a hard dose of reality this year. People hate. That’s our reality. People hate and are hated and carry grudges and want punishments … I don’t know if it’s...

I’d spend about an hour, my room darkening around me, wondering what the hell happened to make me so unsure of who I even was. Because who you are is supposed to be the easiest...

I didn’t answer. Just shook my head and let the tears roll. “I just want it to go away. I just want all the drama to stop. Nobody would believe me anyway,” I whispered. “Nobody...

It’d felt good to be part of an “us,” with the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same miseries.

Because the truth was, and we both knew it, he’d gone long, long ago. I’d just made him stick around when he really wanted to be somewhere else. In his own weird way, he was...

you can get past a mistake, but it’s much harder to get past being a cruel person.

I sat back and looked at it. It was ugly, dark, uncontrolled. Like a monster’s face. Or maybe what I saw there was my own face. I couldn’t quite tell. Was the face the image...

Why shouldn’t Mom trust me, Dad” Why are you so determined to make me out to be the bad guy all the time?” I stared at the side of his face, willing him to make...

But now the other half of “us” was gone and, lying there in my shadowy room, I’d be struck with this realization that I had no clue how to be just me again.

I couldn’t make myself imagine Dad holding some creamy-faced baby, cooing at it, telling it he loved it. Taking it to baseball games. Living some life he’d probably consider his ‘real life,’ the one he...

His fingers gouged into my leg harder. “My sister was in that cafeteria,” he said. “She saw her friends die, thanks to you and that puke boyfriend of yours. She still has nightmares about it....

At one time it really felt like forever might happen for us.

Sometimes, in my world where parents hated one another and school was a battleground, it sucked to be me.

Some days making it to the end of the day is quite the victory. — Bea

Life isn’t fair. A fair’s a place where you eat corn dogs and ride the ferris wheel.

Getting on with her life is important. But right now it may be more important to put the feelings out there, deal with them, and find a way to be okay with all that’s happened.

Just like there’s always time for pain, there’s always time for healing.

We drove on in silence, Dad shaking his head in disgust every few minutes. I stared at him, wondering how it was we got to this place. How the same man who held his infant...

Time’s never up”, she whispered, not looking at me, but at my canvas. “Just like there’s always time for pain, there’s always time for healing. Of course there is.

Sometimes even stuff you expect to happen can still hurt

…But would that be enough? Because at the moment it felt like it could never be enough. People needed more than a place to stay, more than a porch to sleep on. They needed a...