Chapter 1


The idea that life was as fragile as a glass ball had never occurred to me. The very idea that it could all just end in a split second was never something that I thought about. I had grown up thinking that I was in gods arms and that he would protect me from everything. Apparently god hasn’t done his job for me in these past 4 years. My father died in a shooting at his work six months ago. Imagine the base of your existence being ripped from your heart and crushed into millions of little pieces. That’s what it felt like. It didn’t even register in my brain. I only felt a numb, cold, feeling that wouldn’t leave. Just that morning he had kissed my forehead and called out “ goodbye jellybean, I love you” as he climbed in to our family’s Toyota Solara. My final memory is of him running out the door and calling to me because he was late. When I was little my dad and I were inseparable. I followed him everywhere and wanted to be just like him when I grew up. Then as I turned into a pre-teen and a teenager he started to seem like he was stricter, meaner, and just never happy. I became the same way. Always wishing for more and never happy with the way I was or what I did. I basically hated my life and myself, and everyone in it. There were times when I wished it would all just go away. You know, those moments where the world seems to be spinning around you and getting faster and faster until all of a sudden it is about to pop. Well I wish that sometimes I could just make it stop, make it all stop. It was painful to lose someone that you are so close to, I wish that I had seen it coming and I could have delayed him, or not let him go to work at all. He would be safe warm and home with us for me to kiss and hug and love for the rest of my life.

Chapter 2


I can remember the day that he was taken from me life a page in a book. I woke up late. Normally I am up and awake at about six O’ clock. But I woke up at 6:30 this morning. My dad did the same thing. I stumbled down the stairs in a daze and gobbled down a granola bar and some banana slices. My dad came running out of his room and poured himself a cup of coffee. Hazelnut rum cake. His favorite. and ran out the door calling out to me, he wasn’t really social because of the delayed start to his morning. About five minutes later he came back and grabbed his briefcase which he had left sitting on the coffee table in the den. At 6:45 I ran out the door and barely made it to the bus stop with enough time to breath before my old rusty bus pulled up. The smell of ancient bus exhaust and that odd smell of a bus you can never quite place ran rampant through my nose. I honestly wished with all my heart that my dad could have taken me to school. For a moment I was actually angry that he hadn’t but by the time that my bus had turned the corner I had forgotten about my dad and him driving me to school and was lost in the pounding music that lifted me away from this world.
. . .
After 30 minutes of Andy Sixx screaming in my head and wishing that the obnoxious girl behind me would shut the frig up about her damn boyfriend that she was carrying on about to her stupid little friend…. Cheerleaders….. I thought, yeh I’m stereotypical like that, we finally got to my school… Riverview High School, Home of the, oh how I hate our mascot, Fighting Hedgehogs…. Yeh, we are the ferocious HEDGEHOGS, fear us! I walk slowly inside wishing That I could have had ten more minutes of sleep. I see my friends Brynna, Emma, Marina, and Vanessa all sitting at a table in the far back. We are a very, how do I put this, eclectic group of People… Brynna is a hopeless romantic who worships kingdom hearts, art, and her boyfriend Jack (who she never shuts up about), Emma is very chill to say the least. Her main thing is HOCKEY, she is the ONLY girl on the hockey team and is a beast! She won MVP for the last Two years running…she also writes poetry and stories… her binder is EXPLODING with Writing Stuff… our English teacher freaking loves her. Then there is marina, how do I describe Marina? She loves emo boys. That’s about it. She is very fun to hang out with but her music Taste consists mainly of screaming, death metal, and songs about slitting your wrists. But she is Happy As can be…. I think….. she also has a boyfriend, Devan, we’ll get in to him later… Vanessa we’ll get into later too, I wouldn’t want to bore you with unimportant details. Well When I come in this is basically how our table looks, Brynna is concentrating intently on a pad Of paper drawing a picture of Alice in wonderland with her head cut off and bleeding, lovely Right and only taking a break to demand a color from marina who is sitting on the table in some Odd position that looks like yoga listening to her iPod at an unnecessary volume that you can Year from across the room (the song is Twist by Korn) Emma is typing furiously away at her Laptop working on some story that she thought up three days ago in Geometry and flips between That and a live stream of a hockey game. I sit down unnoticed by anyone at my table, only by Ms. Jenson the obviously lesbian Assistant principal who is on uniform patrol, she tells me to stand up while she measures my skirt awkwardly and then stands up saying, “3 and 1/16th inches, the cutoff is 3, to the office, NOW!” As I march off to the office I slowly inch my skirt down to the appropriate length and I am let off with a warning. As I make my way to first period I can’t help but notice a moderately tall boy who I have never seen before in my life. He must be new, and my god… he is so fine! He has shaggy blonde hair and grey eyes, he looks eerily similar to Marina’s boyfriend Devan but he doesn’t have snakebites, gages or have the overwhelming scent of cigarette smoke and weed. He is dressed in black skinny jeans and converses with an escape the fate t-shirt on, I think I have just experienced love at first sight when, the vulture swoops in for the kill. Janie Morgan. The most popular, and slutty if I might add, girl in school. She is really hamming it up and he is falling right in, she just about has him when the bell rings and he hurriedly says “sorry I have to get to class” as he walks away his face reflects an exaggerated look of relief.


Chapter 3:

My English class has always been boring but today I was very excited, new kid is in my class! Emma is sitting behind me typing furiously at her laptop, which she does through all of her classes, and drinking a huge cup of espresso. All of her teachers just let her do this because they have all come to the conclusion that they cannot stop her even if they bring in the us army so they all give her a passing grade and send her on her way. She hasn’t done any work what so ever in any class in over 4 years. But back to new kid, I discovered his name is, wait for
it…. Romeo…. Really, ROMEO! Well his full name is Romeo Malachi Dicaprio, yeh turns out he is Leonardo Dicaprio's Nephew! Even more of a reason to worship the ground he walks on. For the rest of the day I do nothing but stare at Romeo, turns out he is in all of my classes. At the end of the day I walk out to my car. I look at my phone that I had left in the cup holder in the center and see that I have 49 missed calls from my Grandma, this is beyond strange. I pick up the phone and call her back. It seems like the phone rings for hours before she picks up the other end of the line. She has been crying, this is really bad, I think to myself. I have never seen my grandma cry before. She tells me that she will explain everything when I get home and to hurry. As I hang up the phone I am in a panic! How could she do that to me! Pick up the phone crying and then just tell me that she will explain things when I get home! It’s probably that Nana died or uncle Rob is in the hospital again because his cancer came back, something that isn’t very significant, I was in for a huge shock when I get home.






Chapter 4:

As I pull into the driveway I see through the window that grandma is on the phone. She is pacing back and forth and half screaming at the other person on the line and half crying uncontrollably, I was so confused. When I walk in the door she hangs up quickly and then explodes on to me in a ferocious hug that seems to last for hours. When she finally lets go she cannot stop crying. I ask her to tell me what is wrong and that I deserve to know. Just as she calms herself down she takes me by the shoulders and guides me to the couch where she sits me down. Almost instinctively I know this is something much bigger than what I originally thought, I ask her in a small voice “Where’s daddy?” she looks me straight in the eyes and says with tears welling up and says the words I will never forget… “Honey, daddy is dead.”



Chapter 5:

My entire body goes numb. I must have not heard her right, or there must be some mistake. My dad can’t just be dead this morning he hugged me, gave me a kiss, called me his little jelly bean and I had just nodded and said yeh see ya dad. Like any other morning. This can’t happen1 there should have been a sign! Something to tell me that this was going to happen. I stare back at her blankly and then reply in a voice that is barely audible “What?” she only looks backs at me sympathetically and looks like she is about to cry again. Then she explains it all, “at you dad’s work today there was a shooting, one of the men who work there brought a gun and just walked through the halls firing. Your dad stepped in front of tammy miller, she would have died but he saved her because it was her first day back from maternity leave and she had a newborn baby at home. He is a hero Abbey and we must honor him for that-“after this I zoned out. I felt numb all over. I couldn’t breathe. The room was spinning, faster, faster, faster, faster and I just slipped away into my dreams I closed off the world and went back to the days when my dad and I were together when everything was ok.

Chapter 6:

I woke up in my bed with the covers pulled tight around me, at first I thought that it was all a dream, that it was a nightmare, but like with most things, I was wrong. I walked out into the house and it was still slightly dark. It was about 6:30 and I walked into my dad’s room hoping with all of my heart that I would find him lying in bed snoring and his old leather jacket resting on the back of the chair by his desk. This of course did not happen. I only saw his bed made to the military standards of my grandmother and his jacket hung up in his closet I immediately fell to the ground and began to cry. Curled up on his old soft rug I cried, until I thought that the tears would come no more and I would just die right here right now with him. Eventually my grandma was awakened by by cries and came in to comfort me. When she had finally gotten me calmed down I told her I wanted to be alone for the day and she agreed that would be best. So I left and went to my room and curld up under the covers. I picked up my phone and dialed the first person I thought of to call… Emma who coincidentally was staying at marina’s house the previous night. I dialed the number and pressed the cool phone against my tear streaked cheek and begged for her to pick up, she did alright, “WHO THE HELL CALLS A PERSON AT 6:30 IN THE MORNING ON SATURDAY ABBEY! I SWEAR TO GO IM GOING TO KILL YOU! DOYOU HEAR-“ “Emma” “- I AM TRYING TO SLEEP AND SO IS MARINA! WHY WOULD YOU-““EMMA! Please listen! Emma I don’t know how to say this but, my dad died and I need some comforting, that sounds selfish but I really do, can you and marina come over… please” –SILENCE- “ Emma? Please…” “we’ll be right there,” Emma said flatly. After sitting in my room for about 45 minutes listening to the silence I hear the doorbell, I open the door and see marina and Emma standing there, Emma with a bowl of spaghetti in hand. After an extremely long period of hugs and crying we go and sit in my room with the bowl of spaghetti and eat while I am comforted and hugged by Emma and Marina. Eventually we get down to the hard questions, Emma looked me dead in the eyes and said it, said it flat out, “how did it happen” I looked at her with fire in my eyes and lost it I lost my control on myself, my tears, my mouth, my life. I said some things I probably shouldn’t have said about Tammy Miller and Her Goddamn Baby and wished that some people would go to H-E double hockey sticks. But in the end it felt good to get it off of my chest. And Emma and Marina didn’t mind listening to me freak out, they understood.

Chapter 7:

After Emma and Marina left I sat in my room and stared at my ceiling fan for a couple hours. Finally grandma came in and gave me some lunch that I barely touched. I was about to throw up anyway, food in my stomach would just have made it worse. I couldn’t believe it… he was gone. I turned on the television and saw that the news was covering the story I wanted to change the channel but I was mesmerized by the story, then I saw it, through a window, Tammy Miller standing there, the gunman at the door with a huge gun pointed at her head and then I saw it happen… my dad step in front of her, the burst of flame from the gun, my dad crumple to the ground, the news crew freaking out and replaying it six more times. It was like they were torturing me. But I couldn’t turn away I just sat there, mortified as the news crew talked about casualties and then threw in some other information that didn’t really matter to me.