~ Prologue ~
They say every story has two sides.
That morning — the one everyone in town would remember as the morning everything changed — was a beautiful morning. I know, because I stood at my window and watched it the way you watch something you know you will never see again. Golden light splitting between the rooftops. A cat crossing the road with the lazy confidence of a creature unbothered by the weight of the world. Somewhere down the street, a child was laughing — a pure, unguarded sound that had not yet learned to protect itself.
My tea went cold. I did not notice until later.
Then the news moved through town the way cold moves through a cracked window — slowly, quietly, and then all at once.
One of the kids was dead.
Then another went missing. Then another. A kid every day, it seemed, vanishing or turning up pale and still somewhere in the woods or behind a dumpster or just — gone. Swallowed by the silence only the dead know how to keep.
The town spiralled into that particular grief that comes when the victims are the ones everyone loved. The golden ones. Whose smiles decorated trophy cases. Whose names the teachers said with reverence, as though they were already legends before they'd earned it.
People wept in their driveways. They made vigil candles and taped photographs to telephone poles. They said, over and over: who could do this, who could hate them, no one hated them.
That part always made me smile. Just a little. Just to myself.
Because that is the thing about hate that no one who has never truly been hated understands: it does not announce itself. It accumulates. It layers itself into the fabric of ordinary days until it is no longer hate at all — until it is simply the texture of being alive, of being you, of waking up every morning inside a skin the world has decided does not count.
They did not know who would be next.
But I knew.
Because it was me.
My name is Jessica. I am seventeen years old. I have brown hair and unremarkable eyes and I have been eating lunch alone since I was eleven. I am, by every external measure, a nobody. A background detail in other people's stories.
I want to tell you my story. All of it. Not the version they will construct from evidence and testimony. The real version. The one that starts not with a murder but with a laugh — a single, careless, bell-bright laugh — in a school cafeteria, on an ordinary Tuesday, six years ago.
I want you to understand how a person gets here. I want you to sit with that understanding and decide, at the end, what to do with it.
I am not asking for forgiveness. I am only asking you to look. To really look, the way no one in this town ever did.
Pay attention. That's all I ever wanted. That's all any of us ever wanted.
