The first one to volunteer was a young man who had had shoulder length hair and it was colored in faded streaks of rainbow. He wore John Lennon-esque glasses and he looked like he had seen better days…

My name is Spencer Logan and I’ve been all over America, but I chose here as my final destination and yes, I use that to its literal interpretation. I was told I was being selfish and that I should have thought about how others would feel. How I would leave people in a lurch and longing for something they would be missing. The funny thing about that is, that it was my agent who told me that and he was referring to my publisher and all the readers out there who bought my books. That by denying them of future books would be criminal.
I wasn’t being selfish; I was at the end of my line. I didn’t want to take the slow method of liver poisoning or some other organ failure, I wanted it to end at that moment. You see, I waited years to find answers about a death. One death that never should have occurred. And you know what happened? The answer never came. It didn’t come from God, it didn’t come the state, and it sure as Hell, pardon, come from the person who caused it. She just looked at me from beyond bullet-resistant glass and smiled. I so wanted to kill her at that time. It should have been her dead, not her sister.

Her face, her sinister grin, haunted me for months as I went to different cities to speak about my, I had decided at that moment, final book. I had dedicated it to Skylar, the sister who was killed and I wanted her face to be the last think I thought of, but it wasn’t...it was her sister, Katie. I feel nauseous trying to even say that name. I stood on the side of the bridge and thought back to the first day I saw her on the beach and tried to hold onto that feeling of seeing her eyes but the last thing I remember seeing was Katie. The last thought running through my mind was her grinning face.

It wasn’t fair!

And no, I’m not talking about how I was cheated out of a possible life. Okay, yeah, well, maybe I’m talking about that too but more of the life that was taken for no reason. It was so empty. You know those movies, those mystery books where we find out the "why”? We learn the reason that the villain did it. They say it’s an escape form real life when we can put evil and pain into these little boxes, books and DVD’s and know why they did it. Man, you do not know how much I wanted to play into that. I went to the sentencing, and it wasn’t anything. They placed her into a psych ward where they allowed her to express her concerns and talk about the trauma she experienced growing up with abomination—her words—of her sister.

Abomination, she called her sister that and no one called an objection. I had already said enough that I would have been thrown out of the court and had I known that K…k-kat-Katie wasn’t going to spend a day in jail or a second at the end of a noose then I would have killed her right there. I would have jumped out of the gallery and put my hands around her damned neck.
She would have deserved it!
She threw Skylar down nine f’n floors to her death and no one noticed until morning!

And there was nothing I could do.

I lived with Skylar’s grandparents while waiting for the day that I could speak with her murderer. They spoke so highly of her but regretted of the limited time they had with her. They had met the former shell their granddaughter tried to break from and, they told me, that they first me her when they met me. A part of me loved hearing that, but the other side was crying because, if I hadn’t met her, then she would still be alive. I thought, for a split-second, that it was my fault but that was what her sister and parents wanted to me think.
I paid for Skylar’s funeral. Her parents wanted to keep everything, as they stated, “normal”. The announcements were to go out about the loss of their son. They even had a suit picked out. I protested and so did the grandparents…and so the ceremony was kept private to the immediate family and anyone who knew them. The announcement did go out, but the suit was nixed and replaced with the skirt I bought for her during that fateful week.

The casket was open, but it was hard as the shell there showed no glow, no inner life, no sarcasm, snark or human-like quality that it once had. I know it sounds heartless, but I would have preferred to see Katie in that casket.

So, after being found by the police, sent to a few hospitals, an institution for a few weeks , and ultimately released only to have to come here, I had to come to the reality that dying won’t help anyone and that ones like Katie and her ilk would win if I drowned my sorrows in the river. I plan to go to Seattle and assist with an up-and-coming treatment facility. As long as I’m here, everyone will remember Skylar Aylesea Dorian