Unfair

The hardest part for me to accept is the fact that she was right where she was supposed to be. She got off the bus with plenty of time to get to her first class. She went to the crosswalk to go across the street to school, and that's when the car hit her. Then it backed up over her to escape. An eleven-year-old girl died yesterday morning because she was doing the right thing.
I knew her. Last year she came to our school a little after classes had settled in. She was "the new girl," but she handled it well. I respected the fact that she had to find her way in a group, some of whom had known each other since Kindergarten. Part of that persona was not taking any guff from anybody. Just because she was new, she wasn't going to fade quietly into the background. She was in a class with a number of very large personalities, and she wasn't about to be forgotten.
Now we are assured that she won't be. I won't forget the PowerPoint presentations she made in my class. One was an illustration of Cause and Effect using the tumultuous relationship of Rhianna and Chris Brown. The other was a no-nonsense biography of Abraham Lincoln, in which she pointed out, "He wasn't very handsome, was he?" At the end of the year talent show, when most fifth graders get up and lip-sync their way through the current hits, she wrote her own song and sang it a Capella. In front of the whole school. Her school. No fear.
It would be wrong to remember her as an angel. That would be too simple. She was a little girl who was finding her way. Sometimes she was picked on. Sometimes she picked on others. Like most fifth graders, she was fixated on what was "fair." Her fifth grade teacher made a point of writing, on the first day of class, this message on the board: "Fair is when everyone gets what they need."
This little girl was on her way to school and got killed by a hit and run driver. That's not fair.