Chapter Excerpt

A streetlight flickered a couple houses down.

“You know what’s crazy?” she turned to look at me.

“What?”

“We’re seniors. I mean, we really aren’t kids anymore. It’s kind of weird when you stop to think about it. We always knew it was coming, but now that it came I think I want to go back to when it hadn’t. I miss being able to just fool around.”

“Yeah.”

“Like, I don’t think anyone really appreciates being a child until they have to deal with being an adult, and at that point, it’s too late. It’s just crazy how literally everyone tells you not to rush childhood, but everyone does anyway. And it sucks. It fucking sucks,” she pushes her hair out of her face.

“Yeah, I know,” I let out a deep breath. “It really fucking does.”

The truth is, we stopped being children a long time ago. Once the world began to shape us into the monsters we’ve become. Each of us hiding evil in our different ways, hiding the monstrosity of a world destroyed by chaos and violence and hate.

A child who has not yet been shaped by the world will never know prejudice or judgement, will never look at another person with the same hatred that you see in adults.

A child is not born with hate. Or prejudice. Or evil. The world holds every child’s future in its hands, and we continue to shape children with the same hatred that shaped us.

We all stopped being children a long time ago.

But it doesn’t change the fact that we all wish we still were. That we all wish we were still those kids, the ones who played pretend on the playground, performed fake marriages with dresses. made out of toilet paper stolen from the bathroom, the ones who made up stupid nicknames we wish they’d never made up, the ones who thought the world was made for them, that they could do anything.

The ones that watched the world become a war-zone and thought they would be the ones to escape the draft.

One of the great ironies of life.

It’s funny how, when we’re children, all we want to do is grow up, but once we grow up, all we want to do is be children.

One great irony, alright.