This will be my last year, Lord. I have gotten what I can. Thank You.

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....

A friend is someone who can brighten your day with a simple smile, when others try to do it with a thousand words.

I finally understood what could drive kids to show up with guns and shoot up their schools.

Journalism is not a precise science, it’s a crude art

It was an oddly satisfying idea to feel bereft as I left my mother this time. We only feel bereft when we’re deprived of something meaningful.

With a damp palm, I turned the knob and cracked open the door. She was asleep in her freshly made bed. I can’t explain how relieved I felt for this simple mercy. She was here...

The ice cold fear I’d felt, not knowing if Wyatt was alive, pressed into the wall with other girls and surrounded by guys who were unspeakably brave, hit my body again in a wave. This...

We bumped into other silent lines of kids going in the same direction. We looked like we were much younger and our lines were headed to the cafeteria or recess or the carpool line. Or...

My brother died because someone was jealous.

Something still exists as long as there’s someone still around to remember it.

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

Bear no malice for the ones who leave you.

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...