The Beginning

Wish you Were Dead

By: Todd Strasser

Wishing can be a complicated situation, especially if what you wish for is to make someone disappear. In the book Wish you were Dead, we can see how the lack of attention in a teen’s world can affect tremendously in their life and their perception towards the rest of people.

This is how I pictured Str-S-d on the
 outside, lonely. 

It all started with one simple blog. Str-S-d begun its first entry. This one explained how hurtful it was to be treated like if you weren’t important, or worst, like you didn’t fit in. by cruel kids at school, the worst of them was Lucy Cunningham, a cruel girl who didn’t cared much about people’s feelings, just herself. All of the loneliness the writer of these blogs had in the inside and start to believe that maybe Lucy and the rest of school was right about not being important and creating hate in the bloggers inside. 

After many more blog posts, Str-S-d started to wish Lucy to disappear which eventually came true. One night, after a party, Lucy solicited the service of Safe Rides. Tyler and Madison were the crew on duty and had to drop off Lucy at her house and wait till she went inside. But they were both tired so decided to leave and that is when someone drugged Lucy and took her away, leaving her missing for several weeks. No one knew where she was. Family members and close friends of her where left with sadness except for one person. Str-S-d was really glad that Lucy had disappeared because now there was no one to bother the writer behind Str-S-d.

While I was reading this book, a quote caught my attention because several of the values that we are all taught like honesty and forgiveness were denied because of grudges towards another person.

“Oh, Lucy, we really don’t think you should have said that. No, no, it’s too late to say you’re sorry” (Strasser 27).

After I read this I didn’t knew how to react towards it because it went against most of my values and morals. But after a while of thinking what it meant I realize that maybe sometimes when people do really bad stuff affecting others it could create a lot of damage and hate treat towards a specific individual and maybe, just maybe that is why whoever has Lucy treats her so badly and does not accept her saying sorry. 

Along my reading journey I found many interesting quotes but I chose the following one because it seemed to me that it reflected one of the most frequent question that one has in life, why.

“Why pick on me? I wondered. There were other girls who were prettier and more popular (at least they cared about popularity more than I did)” (Strasser 53-54).

This quote represents the many questions that we all ask and never get the answer to. I believe that every time we ask this question of why us, we know we won’t get the answer but it is one of many situations that we would just have to adapt to in order to keep on going with our life’s. 

Remembering one's values is the easy part of life, but putting them in practice is what creates depth in it. I believe that in the future, Str-S-d will realize this and will let Lucy go because deep down everyone knows what is right and what is wrong. I can predict that this could be a potential message in the story creating a significant idea of moral in the readers mind.