Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

burned as a child. She had taken photographs of herself as she slowly went through the healing process. She had to have an ungodly number of surgeries to help her along, and they continued well into adulthood. Throughout the years she kept her trusty camera in hand, documenting every step. Above the tiny article there was a photograph of her laughing, and at first glance I didn’t even notice the light ripples of scar tissue on her chest and collarbones. Only after reading it did I backtrack and realize there was indeed still evidence of her childhood trauma.
    The thing that really struck me about this article was a comment the woman made. What she said was that she was much stronger as a child than she is as an adult. She had to have an understanding and appreciation for the subtle mechanisms of the mind to have come to this realization. Perhaps sometimes the memory is worse than the pain at the time of its happening. And sometimes it’s not.
    The older I grow, the more I understand what the burned woman meant. Things I was able to walk through unscathed in my youth would mark me for life or damage me beyond repair now. Things I once shrugged off without thought would now bring about my collapse. I was much more flexible in both mind and body as a youth. I could absorb the impact and roll with the punches.

Twelve
    I t was amazing how quickly the hurt stopped. Humpty Dumpty had indeed been put back together again and he was a grinning fool. I sat slouched far down in my desk, lolling lazily as if there wasn’t a bone in my body. Deanna sat directly behind me, tracing the pattern of hair at the back of my neck and laughing low in her throat when I shivered. She leaned forward to whisper, “There’s only three days of school left. I don’t want to lose you again now that I’ve just got you back.” This was something I’d been contemplating but could find no solution to. We still had no way to see each other outside school hours. After a few moments she continued, “We can still do what we talked about.”
    She meant leaving, of course. We had discussed running away together as a last resort. I hadn’t believed it would come to that; I was certain a solution would present itself. But time was quickly running out. “I’ll be your huckleberry”—never have I spoken truer words.
    “Bring your things with you on the last day and away we’ll go.” That answer sealed my fate.
    We talked about it nonstop, yet had no specific plan. We had no destination or goal in mind. We would be going on an adventure, and our excitement was palpable. We settled on the vague notion of “going west.” Neither of us had any idea what the magnitude of our actions would be.
    When the final day of classes arrived, we came to school as usual. We would leave when it was over, simply drift off into the crowd, which would be delirious with the realization that school was over for another year. No one would even notice us. It was a daisy of a plan and came off without a hitch.
    We took an extra-long route that I had never before explored. Jason walked with us. If you’re roaming aimlessly, then why not begin with the magickal land of Lakeshore? It normally took only about fifteen minutes to walk from school to our places, but this day it took two and a half hours of constant walking. We trod through empty fields far from any road, where there was zero chance of anyone eyeballing us.
    At first Jason and I carried on with our usual bantering while Deanna laughed uproariously at our antics. She was amazed, because Jason never spoke in school, yet here he was chatting like a magpie. He and I could play off each other’s words all day, until eventually we were incapacitated with laughter. Not many people know it, but Jason is pretty hilarious. He has a caustic, smart sense of humor. After the first hour we got pretty quiet, though.
    It was the heat, which was right at one hundred degrees. The sun beat down on us without mercy, baking our brains in our skulls. On a day when the television was warning others to stay indoors and out of the heat, we were outside maintaining a strenuous pace. Every step we took sent bone-dry clouds of dust into the air, and my mouth was so dry I could barely speak. There was nothing but flat, featureless fields in every direction. No trees, no buildings, and no shade. Not even a living blade of grass. The three of us were dressed in black, which didn’t help matters any. At one point I thought I would