She was why he couldn’t end his life. He’d tried with razors and he’d tried with knives, knowing that if he didn’t there would likely be other blood on his hands, blood far more innocent than his own, which had begun to feel like rocket fuel igniting at the craziest times. I needed to die, he said. I just couldn’t bear never seeing my mom again.
this shows how much his mom truly meant to him. he wanted to take his life so bad but couldn't stand the thought of never seeing her again.
“She’d let my sisters do her hair, make it elaborate and huge, then pick me up from elementary school like that,” trying to ease him out of his seething when his friends saw her. He knows she was trying to loosen his hard little third-grade ego, help him worry less about controlling people, console him for the dad who’d passed his rage on to him and then died young. He loved her for it, he said, though of course the hair thing bothered him, the way it would bother most worried sons under pressure in the Midwest.
this gives us a peak at what his family was like. that his mother was goofy but caring. that his father was not the most calm person and had raging issues. and that his father has passed.
My students cried when given half a chance, and I cried too and wanted desperately to tell them that this is not his whole story.
this teacher knows that this does not define who he is. she knows more about him than anyone else that is judging him. and she wants them to know that's not his whole story.
And Jacob, who packed the girls’ apartment a week after that because their dads couldn’t—just look away from all the blood, they told him, as if he could.
this shows how big of a toll their deaths took on their fathers.
He sometimes repeated what I’d said word-for-word later in my office or in his writing.
this shows that he's a good listener. he can go and recite what was said in the office word for word.
Then, in April, his two closest women friends dead of kitchen knives and screwdrivers and a hammer and his hands. He turned himself in the next day.
the author described this so well that I am able to see an image in my head of what's going on in this sentence. its helped me understand what exactly was going on when these two girls were killed.