Andie's Story (1)

 This is a piece that I have plans to continue with one day but I don't know when that will be.

The idea came to me when I was watching a bunch of YouTube videos.



My best friend died the day I turned seventeen. I didn’t find out until the next day. We had a fight earlier in the day about him not coming to my party that night because his parents needed him for something. It was clearly a lie because his parent’s knew about my party and have always had my birthday cleared of anything to do. My parents did the same for Shane. I called him out on the phone and he told me that he never wanted to see me again for reasons unmentioned. I then told him to go fuck himself and hung up on him. That was the last thing I ever heard from him.

The next day my mother walked into my room with a tear streaked face. Her voice wavered as she told me the news. Shane was killed in a drive-by on the way to my house. He was sitting at a stoplight and some idiot pulled up next to him and shot him through their window. Shane was in his convertible with the top down so he was an easy target. I said nothing when my mother relayed the story to me. Not a tear, not a tremble, nothing. I asked her how did she know he was on his way here. She told me that his parents told him to come over because they knew he’d regret not being here. We never missed each other’s birthdays.

I thought it odd that he’d listen to his parents after the conversation that took place that day between us. My mother then came over to where I was sitting and took me into her arms and cried. I sat there still in shock of what happened. I was more shocked by the fact that my best friend had died and I felt nothing.

“Mom, could you give me some time to myself?”

“Of course, sweetie.” She then dried her eyes and left my room. I closed and locked the door behind her. I needed the time to think over that last week Shane and I had together. What went so terribly wrong that he refused to see me? Who implanted the thought in his head that I was such a terrible person? I went to my computer and found the loudest and angriest song I could find and blared it so loud that my speakers could hardly stand it. Ironically it was the song Shane and I did when we went through our angry metal garage band phase. We went through a lot of phases together. I remember the first time we met. It was in the first grade and I rescued him from being hung on a hook in the coat closet.

“Whatcha doin’ up there?” I asked.

“Billy Mavis and his friends put me here.”

“Oh. Well do you need help?”

“Kind of.”

I helped him down and we were inseparable from that moment. Apparently we had the Billy Mavis and friends bully factor in common. They picked on Shane because he was an open target for almost anything, and they picked on me because I wasn’t the prettiest girl in the first grade. Plus I had a weird name. I laugh now at the odd official meeting of my best friend, but it is kind of fitting. We were both misfits until the end. Well the end for one of us.

With our song blaring in the background and the now even fonder memory of our first meeting, I escaped to my online world that I normally drowned myself in when I wasn’t feeling up to anything. I logged into my normal sites and my IM. I looked at the list of people to see who was online. Everyone but one name had an online symbol next to their name. My stomach turned a bit.

Within the first few seconds that I became available online a flood of IM boxes popped up on my screen. Apparently everyone knew by now what happened to Shane. My stomach turned some more. This wasn’t going to be easy. Why do the best friends of the deceased have to be their spokesperson for their afterlife on earth? The replies that were sent to the morbidly curious students of Westchester High School were that of half-hearted thank yous and I’m okays. Half of the people who got a hold of my online identity didn’t really care about Shane. They only wanted the details of how he died so they can act like they knew him when they go to his memorial service to get out of school. Now I will have to give Shane’s parents the warning of the fakes at their son’s service. They’d probably make me official funeral bouncer.

After the online hoard was taken care of I finally had time to check my e-mail. I had one message in my inbox. It was from him. He sent it an hour before he died. Maybe it was an apology or an explanation of his attitude towards me. Either or I didn’t want to open it. I mean it’s kind of weird receiving something right after that said someone died. Right?

A box from someone I did not know popped up on my screen with a link in it. I clicked on the link and it took me to a video that said Shane posted it, but Shane wasn’t in the video. A person with their eyes hidden in the dark and their mouth and upper torso exposed by a desk lamp was in Shane’s room. I knew it was his because of the poster in the left hand corner. It was a silly glow-in-the-dark poster of a lizard he had won in a contest in middle school. I clicked play.

“Hello Andromeda,” the strange person said. Their voice was doctored to where I couldn’t identify the person. “I know you are now wondering who I am, and I’m not going to tell you that for the sake of information that I have obtained about your friends death. I’m not going to tell you all I know, but I can tell you this right now that his death was not an accident. That’s all I can say for right now. Good-bye.”