Hello again everyone, it’s me. Again. I really do appreciate everyone’s support with me on this in my fight against Andrew. It does give me the motivation and drive I need to keep going.
That being said, I know I probably alarmed plenty of you with the ending of my last update, and I can safely say that I am now out of legal trouble and free from the hands of the police.
Roughly 4 minutes after I posted my last update, the police eventually came and took me away, putting me under arrest for the murder of another student at my school in the bathroom. A junior named Matthew Preston. I tried to defend against my arrest, even yelling at the cops that I didn’t do it, but they didn’t let me speak and instead threw me in the back of their patrol car, interrupting me whenever I tried to say anything.
It was a long, grueling drive to the police station. I wanted to break down because I knew my future was going to be ruined from this, all because of Andrew, that sick fuck. I knew it was him, but I didn’t know he was willing to kill somebody.
That’s when it hit me. That’s why he told me the other day to not go into the school bathrooms. He was going to kill somebody and pin it on me.
When we finally pulled up to the station, the cops didn’t say a word as they grabbed me out of the car and took me in and into an interrogation room. They sat me on a chair, telling me they’d be back in a few minutes to ask me some questions. They exited the room, leaving me alone in the cold, lifeless interrogation room.
I began fiddling with the handcuffs, wondering about Quintin and Mia. What were they going to think about this? Part of me knew that they’d know that it wasn’t me who did it, but another part started doubting that, afraid they would leave me behind. I sighed. Andrew had probably already won.
I waited 5 minutes for the cops to come back. No signs of them. I waited another 5 minutes, but they still hadn’t come back. I started getting anxious as I waited another 10 minutes but still, they weren’t back yet.
Finally, after what felt like an hour, they both walked back into the room, straightening their uniforms. One of them sat in the chair in front of me and took a deep breath, almost like he was perplexed about what he should say.
He eventually looked at me. They told me they looked at the evidence again to double-check and said that absolutely nothing led back to me. They said that the teachers went into the bathroom to investigate the smell and saw the kid dead with a sticky note next to his body that read, “He asked for it.” And had my full name signed at the bottom.
The kid was brutally murdered in a complete horrid scene. He was bashed in the head seemingly multiple times with what was ruled to be a hammer and then stabbed multiple times in the face and a couple of times in the stomach to the point you could see his organs. To make matters worse, the police even noticed that his neck was cracked in multiple places, and they think it was smashed against the toilet seat.
The school doesn’t have any cameras installed, much to the surprise of the cops, so they don’t know who actually did it. No kid also saw anybody go into the bathroom with him, so they don’t have any more suspects.
Weirdly enough, they checked the DNA on the sticky note and actually found my DNA on it, but they didn’t find it on the kid’s body. In fact, they didn’t find any DNA anywhere on his body, and no weapons were left behind. They also thought it would be stupid if anyone did something like that and then wrote on a sticky note admitting to it, so they knew I was being framed.
I gagged as they explained everything, disgusted at the death details and the lengths Andrew went to even do that. I thought about telling the cops everything with Andrew, but then I remembered what he said about telling the cops and decided to keep my mouth shut. I figured I could show them his messages on Snapchat, but that wouldn’t work, since Snapchat messages get erased.
So with that, I was let go. The cops told me they were going to keep looking into the case and that they told the school, and with that, I was no longer expelled. They drove me home and explained the same thing to my mom, who was furious at the fact I was framed. It took me a lot of courage to not tell them that it was Andrew.
Later that night, we got a call from the school, apologizing over and over again to us, saying that they saw the sticky note in the bathroom and just called the police, saying it was me, and even went into their system and gave them our address. They were THAT convinced it was me. In a way, I was impressed Andrew was able to actually fool people.
I was happy that I was no longer expelled from school and that things were cleared up with the cops and the school staff, but I was also afraid that my reputation at school was ruined. Everyone was going to think I was legitimately a murderer and still think I did it. I wasn’t anticipating going back to school on Monday.
It was the weekend now, and it gave me time to regroup. The first week of school was only two days, and it was already going down as one of the worst school years of my life- scratch that, it’s already fucked my whole life up.
As I was sitting quietly in my dark room, I felt my phone ringing. I slowly reached for my phone as the screen lit up. Quintin was calling me.
I quickly answered and put the call into facetime. I saw the top of Quintin’s head, but even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was worried.
“Dude,” Quintin spoke into the phone. “You good? I heard you killed someone in the bathroom at school,”
I shook my head. “No, Andrew framed me. I had a whole thing with the police,”
“Why don’t you just tell the cops everything?” Quintin said with an eyebrow raise, yet also relieved that I was innocent.
“Andrew said if I told the police or any adults, he’d kill me. I can’t risk it,” I responded. I saw Quintin nod his head, understanding.
“Anyways, I got back into Andrew’s email, and I managed to see the email he sent to this random guy,” Quintin said. I heard some typing on the other end.
I lit up a little. “Nice, what did he say?” I started listening carefully. There was silence on the other end momentarily as I heard more typing.
“Let’s see here… Ok. He said; ‘I will pay you a handsome amount of money to help me end one of my past friends named Ryan. Deal?’” Quintin read it carefully.
My heart sank a good amount. He was trying to hire someone now to come after me as well?
“Did the guy he emailed respond?” I said, trying to regain concentration. I saw Quintin nod on the other end of his camera.
“Yeah, I can’t read most of it, but he said he’d do it,” Quintin said. I felt my lips mouth ‘fuck.’ Quintin kept going. “…And Andrew responded back and mentioned a USB cord stored in some abandoned warehouse that he’s sure nobody will think about checking,”
Hearing that made a bell ring in my head. Andrew had a hard drive stored and hidden somewhere. I knew we needed to get it. “How far away is the warehouse? Can you check?”
“I can try,” Quintin responded back. I heard more typing on the other end, the computer screen lighting up Quintin’s face. I checked the time. It was 8 PM, too late to go out to some warehouse. A minute passed by before Quintin said anything else. “Oh shit, I actually found the location,”
“Where is it?!” I said in a heartbeat, hoping that it’d be close. There’s more silence on the other end for a few seconds.
“It seems it’ll be a 10-minute walk for you. I have a car, so I’ll just drive there,” Quintin said. A 10-minute walk wasn’t so bad. “You wanna go check it out tomorrow morning?”
I took a deep breath, worrying about the consequences that could happen if we went to the warehouses and stole Andrew’s hard drive. It was for a good cause, though. We needed to. I looked at my phone and nodded my head. “Let’s do it. We should go at 9:00. Sharp.”
I went to bed that night, confident in our mission, yet still in doubt and afraid that we’d screw up and be in the wrath of Andrew. I woke up this morning at 8, realizing I had an hour left, and quickly showered and got dressed while having to deal with my mom shouting at me, reminding me of something I had to do later.
When it turned 9, I told my mom I was going to hang out with some friends. She didn’t question it as I walked out the door and started walking to the location of the warehouse. As I walked, I kept looking at the directions on my phone, making sure I wasn’t going the wrong way.
As Quintin said, I found the location the warehouse was at in 10 minutes. There was a long, muddy trail down to it, and it was surrounded by trees, obscuring most of it. Soon after, a car pulled up close to me, startling me heavily until I realized it was just Quintin.
I bent down, breathing a sigh of relief as Quintin got out of his car and slammed the door shut. “Damn, man, you scared the shit out of me!”
“Sorry, not sorry,” Quintin said sarcastically. He stepped to the front of the trail and looked down it, surveying the trees. “Didn’t expect it to be so hidden,”
“Let’s just make this quick,” I said, getting next to him. We started walking down the trail, getting dirty and mud stuck at the bottom of our shoes with every step we took unveiling more of the warehouse.
Neither of us said a single word as we walked farther down the trail, past the trees until we were in front of the warehouse. I checked the bottom of my shoes. They were completely dirty and stained. I began getting irritated as they were new shoes, but I regained focus on our task at hand.
I examined the warehouse. It was definitely abandoned- The paint on the walls was peeling off, there was moss growing on the corners of it, dirt was scattered all over the roof, and there seemed to be a few windows smashed with a couple doors knocked over. I started getting an ominous feeling standing there. There was a ton of land surrounding the warehouse, leaving another minute walk to the warehouse.
Quintin noticed that I was frozen stiff like a statue staring at the warehouse and hit me on the shoulder to snap me out of it. “Come on, let’s go,”
We found an opening into the warehouse and quietly went in. There weren’t any signs that anybody was in there so we weren’t as cautious when we searched the warehouse.
The inside of the warehouse was dirty and uncleaned. There were shelves and desks knocked everywhere, bags of chips laying around on the floor and even leaves and branches were stranded throughout. There were multiple rooms so we didn’t know where the USB could be stored at.
We investigated every room thoroughly but still didn’t see the USB cord. I started losing hope that it was even here and even started getting scared at the fact that it could be a trap. Me and Quintin went into opposite rooms, the last rooms we had to check. We knew that it had to be in one or the other. I tip-toed slowly in the room. I noticed instantly that this room looked more organized than the others we’ve gone in, but not by much.
I still didn’t find it anywhere I looked, and I could swear that I heard a loud clanking noise above me. I locked eyes on a knocked-over drawer. I walked over to it, kneeled down, and opened it, looking inside the darkness of it.
“I found it!” I shouted for Quintin. I snatched the USB out of the drawer, holding it up. It was just like any other hard drive. Except it had custom writing on it. I took a close look at it. It said “Private Information.”
Quintin came running in, beaming when he saw I had the cord.
“Bet. Come on, let’s get out of here now. This place is giving me the creeps,” Quintin turned and started walking out of the room, and I quickly got up to follow him, putting the USB in my pocket.
We tried navigating our way out of the warehouse, not being made easy by the lack of light and by how messy it was in there. I found myself tripping over stuff from time to time, which Quintin laughed at every time. We finally found the way we came in and stepped out, the sunlight coming through the trees nearly lining us as we came accustomed to the sheer darkness of the warehouse.
Quintin and I began walking back to the trail to get the hell out of there, but my heart stopped when I saw a black truck driving through the trail, pulling up to the warehouse. It was made worse when I saw Andrew through the front window, in the driver’s seat.
I panicked, and so did Quintin. We both ran for a place to hide, and I practically jumped behind a nearby bush near the warehouse, and I saw Quintin go behind another bush, nowhere close to me.
I felt nothing but fear as the truck came to a complete stop in front of the warehouse, and Andrew opened the door and stepped out, standing there and looking around closely. I saw another man step out of the passenger’s side, and I noticed that he was wielding a steel baseball bat.
Andrew took a few steps closer to the warehouse as he continued looking around as if he was trying to find us. That was impossible though, how could he know that we were here?
I saw the other man twirling the baseball bat in his hands as he spoke the words; “We know somebody is here. Come out, and we won’t have any problems,”
Andrew gave the man a nasty look. “No, you dumbass, we’re not playing nice. We both know Ryan is here,” he hissed at him.
I started frantically searching for ways to get out of there without Andrew catching me. I tried locking eyes with Quintin, but I couldn’t see him through the bush he was behind.
Andrew continued taking controlled steps as I started trembling. “Come on out, Ryan,” he called out. “I know you’re here for my hard drive. Let’s just talk this out like men, one on one,”
I didn’t comply. I stayed hidden behind the bush, closing my eyes, praying that Andrew wouldn’t find me. I saw the other man looking around the other side of the warehouse, and I was hoping Quintin wouldn’t be found. I watched as the man walked up to the bush Quintin was behind, poking his baseball bat through it. I knew Quintin had been found.
However, the man didn’t see him, and he walked by the bush, continuing to search.
It was silent the whole time. The only sounds I could hear were the sounds of Andrew’s footsteps around me. I looked up and was terrified when I saw that Andrew was right in front of the bush. He hadn’t seen me yet, but he could find me at any moment.
I heard the birds start to sing as Andrew started taking slow, unnaturally steady steps around the bush. I held my breath. I didn’t want to imagine what Andrew was going to do when he found me.
Right as Andrew was about to turn the corner around the bush and see me, there was loud ruffling in the bush Quintin was in, causing Andrew to get distracted and turn his head to the noise.
I took the opportunity and got up and started sprinting towards the trail, past Andrew. I felt him tug at my shirt, but he wasn’t able to get a full grip on it. I saw Quintin begin sprinting out of his bush too, catching up with me. I looked behind me and saw Andrew running after us, his attention on me. The other man was close to him. I picked up my pace, breathing heavily, as I had never been this scared in my life, nearly tripping over rocks hidden in the mud.
I heard a door slam far behind us, and I could only assume that they had got in their truck, though I never turned around to check. I never heard them start to drive after us, though. We had lost him.
“Get into the car!” Quintin shouted at me. I took his order as we ran to the end of the trail, and I was never so happy to see a car in my life. Quintin quickly unlocked the doors and hopped into the driver’s seat, and I opened the passenger door and practically jumped into the seat, slamming the door.
I didn’t even bother putting on my seatbelt as Quintin started the car as fast as he could. I looked down the trail to see if Andrew was driving down the trail, but he wasn’t. He hadn’t even continued coming after us. Quintin practically slammed his foot on the gas pedal and started speeding away from the warehouse.
“Where do we go?!” Quintin said to me, wildly driving around the road. We drove across a bump, shaking the car so hard that we nearly crashed into a tree, causing Quintin to swerve to the right, almost knocking me out of my seat.
I thought for a moment before saying, “Mia’s house, go!”
Quintin looked at me, his eyes in disbelief. “When the fuck did you get her address?!”
I shrugged, signaling him to pay attention to the road. “She gave me it last night. Just fucking go!”
Quintin didn’t ask any more questions as I put the address into the GPS. Her house wasn’t too far off where we were already going, considering Quintin just drove a completely random way. We shortly pulled into a neighborhood, her house at the very front.
There weren’t any cars in the driveway, so her parents weren’t home. We pulled into the driveway, and we got out a total mess. I checked my pocket to see if the USB cord was still there. It was.
Mia’s house was fairly large, and it was painted pink. Quintin thought it was ugly, but I thought it was nice. We went up to the front door, knocking on it, hoping she was home. A minute later, the door opened, and Mia was there, looking at us in surprise.
“Oh- hey guys! What are you guys doing here?” She spoke softly to us. I cleared my throat.
“We had to…” I started stumbling over my words, trying to figure out a way to explain it to her before Quintin cut me off.
“What he’s trying to say is, we went on a mission to get something that belongs to Andrew. A hard drive, to be exact,” Quintin said. I thanked him.
“Jesus, you guys look tired. Come in,” She said. We walked in, looking around the house. The living room was large, especially in contrast to the dining room and kitchen. Mia started walking upstairs and we followed close behind her.
We go into her room, which is average-sized with a bed in the middle, her desk with a computer in the corner, and a make-up stand in front of the bed, along with multiple movie and band posters dispersed across her walls. She almost looks embarrassed about it when we walk in and see.
Mia sits on her bed, and I sat next to her, tired. Nobody says a word for a couple of minutes before Quintin stepped out of the room, saying he needs to use the bathroom. Once he was out of sight and in the bathroom, Mia turned her body to face me, looking at me in the eyes. I tried keeping eye contact, but it kept getting awkward for me.
“Ryan, I know how you feel about me,” she said, cracking a little smile. I turn to her, trying to put on a confused expression.
“Huh? Oh, what do you mean?” I nervously respond.
“I know you like me,” Mia responds matter of factly. I felt my face go red as I look away. Mia puts a hand on the back of my neck lightly. I turn and look at her again. “You really don’t deserve the pain you’ve been getting, believe me. Let me make it all go away for a second…” Mia gets her face closer to mine, and I feel my heart pounding as we pull in for a kiss…
I felt my phone buzz in my pocket and I whirled away from her, pulling my phone out of my pocket. I had gotten a new message from Andrew on Snapchat. Mia takes her hand off me, sighing as I opened the message and looked at it. “Hello, Ryan. Come to Roseman Park so we can have a safe conversation. And also, come alone.”
I read the message over and over again. I knew what danger I could be suppressing myself into but Andrew had always kept his word, so if he said it was just going to be a safe conversation, I figured it would be.
I stood up, feeling a little guilty. I looked at Mia. “I… I gotta go,”
“Why?” Mia said, standing up as well. I looked at my phone and then back to her.
“I just need to go somewhere. I’ll be back, I promise,” I reassure her. “Tell Quintin that I went somewhere,” I walked out of the room and down the stairs, and with that, I was on my way to Roseman Park, forgetting the USB was still in my pocket.
I don’t know how long the walk was there, maybe 15 minutes? The journey was a blur. I just know I started regretting my decision halfway there, and I was a tad bit terrified about seeing Andrew again, but I decided it was for the best. I saw the sign for Roseman Park come into view, signifying that I had made it. I didn’t see anybody else around. The street was idle.
I turned the corner and walked into the park, surprised to see that it was absent of anybody. There wasn’t anybody on the swings, on the play structure, or running around. It was just an absence of anybody. I knew Andrew had to be here somewhere, though.
I walked onto the blacktop and moved beside a long brick wall as the clouds began blocking the sun. I observed the entire park from where I was, trying to see where Andrew was. I didn’t know where he was. I knew this was a bad idea because, at this point, he had to be hiding.
Instantaneously, I stopped in my tracks when in the distance, I saw the man that was with Andrew earlier standing at least 3 yards away from me, staring at me. My heart went into my throat. Andrew didn’t say that he was going to be with him. The realization came to me when it was too late; this was a trap.
That’s when Andrew suddenly ran up to me, grabbed me by the shirt and pushed me forcefully against the brick wall, holding a knife up to my neck.