I wasn’t sure why I was so upset. I hadn’t witnessed the boy getting burned – I’d been way down the hall.

So how come it bothered me so much?

People around me found the story amusing. A girl asked if she would get in trouble for making a shirt that said, “I Heart Firecrackers.”

But I didn’t find it amusing at all. And my father didn’t either when I gave him a letter that teachers had passed out at school.

And even now it feels like something that belongs in someone else’s life. You read all those newspaper headlines about kids getting hurt or killed at school, and you feel sad and all, but you imagine it happening to people you know and care about.

So now, just like before, I was asking for answers. And I wasn’t getting them.