[Not single-page] One year later, the survivors of the 2011 massacre in Norway recount what happened:
“At a pub across the street from the courthouse, he is seated at a sidewalk table with Anita, drinking beer and hand-rolling cigarettes. He has sad eyes and stubble and a gold hoop in his ear. On his right wrist is a black rubber bracelet embossed in white letters with a thought that a young woman active in the AUF named Helle Gannestad tweeted eight hours after Breivik’s arrest. ‘If one man can cause so much pain,’ it reads, ‘imagine how much love we can create together.’ It’s become sort of a national sentiment.
“Freddy also has a copy of Dagbladet, which in that day’s edition has a story about Elisabeth and Cathrine, and there is a large photograph of both girls spread across a page, their heads tilted together, both of them smiling. Elisabeth’s family didn’t want her to be remembered as victim number nineteen on the seventh page of an indictment.
“‘Elisabeth,’ Freddy says, ‘she was the perfect one. She was pretty, she had a lot of friends. If one of her friends had a problem, they came to her.’
“And Cathrine? She still gets winded climbing stairs, but Freddy says she’s doing better, physically. ‘Cathrine, she says, “Why me? Elisabeth was the pretty one. She had all the friends. Why did she die? Why not me?” ‘ Freddy looks away for a moment, then turns back. ‘What do you say to that? Speechless.’”
Get the Longreads Weekly Email