Lightspeed: Year One

Allison holds the shed door open while my friends walk in and grab their weapons. She looks very scared. All the adults that are gathered around look very scared. My parents are crying. I look at them and I cannot feel sadness. I cannot cry. Maybe I have already cried out all the tears that are in me. For the last two weeks, they have stopped us from taking our empathy lessons. Instead they flash ugly pictures in our minds. The pictures do not stop and I cannot get away from them. I see bodies, piles of them. Some are being eaten by wolves and vultures. Some are being burned. I see humans turn into bodies after a thing called a bullet is fired through their heads. The change does not even take a second. I see people beaten to death by lots of other people. I see one man get his head chopped off. It takes the other man who is doing the chopping several chops to get the thing done, and the man who is getting chopped makes terrible sounds while it happens.

At first when the adults showed us these pictures we cried and screamed and we closed our eyes really tight because it felt like it would make them stop, but it didn’t. One time, Tom started banging his head against the wall and some of the other children did too. The adults had to come in and stop them. After the fifth day, it seemed like everyone was getting kind of used to the ugly pictures, I think. I know I kind of was. No one screamed anymore or banged their heads against the wall. We all just sat at our desks staring straight ahead.

Everyone in the world knew what was happening. Everyone that I loved and who loved me was trying to interact with me and send me their love. But ever since I stopped taking my empathy lessons and started seeing awful things, I could barely interact with more than 200,000 of them at a time. I felt their love though, and it made me feel better. It made me feel strong. I knew that what I was doing was for them because they could not do it for themselves. And I knew it was for me also. And so I keep posting for the people that I cannot interact with.

We are gathered outside of Nick’s house now. All the parents and the teachers from the school are behind us. They are crying still. I am starting to have a terrible feeling about their crying. I am starting to hate it, I think. All they do is cry. My classmates and I are walking up to Nick’s house, surrounding it, holding garden tools that are meant to kill Nick, and all the adults do is cry.

Katie lights Nick’s house on fire with some liquid that Jake’s dad gave us and a lighter. The adults are all hoping that Nick will stay inside and die without anyone having to see it. I was hoping that too before, but now I am hoping that Nick will come out and the adults will have to watch while almost a hundred of us children beat Nick to death with garden tools. I want them to see something like what they made me see.

But that does not happen. We stand there for I don’t know how long, a really long time, and watch the house burn to the ground. Nick does not come out. We don’t even hear him scream. I feel disappointed somehow. I know it is wrong to feel that way, but that is how I feel.

I am mad at the adults now, more than anything. It seems to me that they could have lit that house on fire just as easily as we did. They didn’t have to show us all of those awful things. They are still crying now. I want them to shut up. They didn’t even do anything.

May 2

It has been over a month since I stood outside of Nick’s house and watched it (and him) burn. Now there is only one of my red hearts showing in my profile. I am looking at that red heart all the time these days. I am scared that it will go out, but I am also not scared. I wonder what will happen if it ever does go out. Will the adults—will my parents—send my classmates to kill me? If I don’t love myself anymore, will I become a sociopath? I really don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if Nick was ever going to kill people at all. I wonder if we killed him for no reason. I was intimately familiar with Nick before he died. He liked music a lot, and he was really good at playing it on the clarinet. I remember that he didn’t have very many people that he loved, and there weren’t many people that loved him. Mostly he played his music. And he also had plants. I remember that he had plants and he took care of them really well. He watered them every day and he gave them special food that would make them grow big and strong and healthy. I remember Nick. I am sad for Nick.