How it ends...Maybe

***HERE IS A SMALL FACT***

You are going to die

If you’re reading this, then I’m very sorry to inform you that you are mortal. Hopefully this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But, here’s the good news: I know when and how, if you ever want to know. Not in, like, a creepy way, like an I’m going to murder you kind of way, that’s just my ability. I knew my first grade teacher would die in a snowboarding accident. I know my cousin Eddie will die lighting a thousand balloons filled with hydrogen as an online video challenge.

I know my mother will die of asphyxiation.

It’s two years from now. My stepdad will do it.

What would you do if you had that information?

Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing for that past year, ever since I had the courage to look into how she’ll die. I have a small wallet-size picture of my mother that I carry around everywhere, and every time I come up with a plan to save her—convince her to fight him, tell her the truth about my power, kidnap her and run away to Liechtenstein—I pull it out and see if her death changes. It hasn’t yet.

After a while, I began losing hope, I began growing impatient, and I stopped carrying her picture and started carrying my stepdad’s.

Those plans are a little different.

Right now, he’s going to die at age seventy-four of old age in a federal prison in Kentucky.

For now.

But I’m not about to try anything if it’s not going to work. So, every time I come up with another plan, I pull out his picture and see if it’ll work. It never does. I don’t know what his deal is, but nothing I ever come up with changes how he’ll die. He must be some kind of supervillain or something. Or maybe I’m just too young? Or maybe there’s just something about fate that can’t be messed with.

They say knowledge is power. But I’ve never felt more powerless. I’ve never felt more hopeless. Nothing I ever do or think of changes the fact that my mother will die. And my stepfather will kill her. What do you think is worse? Having that come as a surprise, or knowing it’ll happen and not be able to do anything about it?

I can tell you what I think. I wish I’d never known. I wish I’d never been born. I wish my mother had never been born.

I wish I could just kill my stepfather. But I can't.

Yet.