Twenty-Five Shots

​On October 15th 2009, Thursday, at almost 10:30 p.m., we were at my mom’s. My sister and I were in my mother’s room, when we decided to go get some orange juice.

​“It happened on Monday, from what we saw on the news,” we heard my mom say.

​Being little, we didn’t understand what she spoke about. My mother, grandma, and grandpa kept talking for about thirty minutes, so we stayed to listen.

​“They shot him about twenty-five times when he was on his way to a date,” my stepdad then said.

​My sister and I kept messing around as though we were not listening. They weren’t mentioning any names; we had no idea who they were referring to. As the conversation kept going, we started getting the hint. We went to my mother’s room and cried for a while, staring at the newspaper we had found, as if it was speaking to us.

​Hours later, my grandma took us back home. Two in the morning, fresh out of the shower, preparing to go to bed, my sister comes to my bed, hugs me, and we cry again. My grandma comes in the room and says, “What’s wrong, why are you girls crying?” and we reply with, “We know who you were speaking of.”

“What do you mean?”

​“My dad. We know it was him.” I felt like my world was going to end.

​Still crying, we hugged each other tighter. My grandma had a blank look on her face. She kept apologizing for something that wasn’t even her fault. I felt angry. Very angry. At the fact that if we wouldn’t have found out ourselves, they wouldn’t have told us. At the fact that we had to figure it out ourselves, one week later. At the fact that we hadn’t seen him in over five years. At the fact that he was gone.