CHAPTER ONE - THE DRIVE
The other night, I found myself clearing out my home office. My mother would always tell me what a joy it was to have a good clear out: “To clear one’s space is to clear one’s head,” she would always tell me. I never agreed. That day was no different, a seemingly infinite number of obsolete files, unknown SD cards and beaten up wires for god knows what. The light was growing feeble out of my window, and the room was growing darker as it went. God knows I wasn’t going to finish the job, but part of me really didn’t care. That was, until something in particular caught my eye from under a pile of old papers.
It was my old flash drive. The flash drive I carried with me to high school, the flash drive I used to store everything on, the flash drive that contained all the evidence I gave to the police.
Let me give you some context. I grew up in a relatively small town with two big high schools. I was never what many would call a “popular” kid by any means, but I was happy to say that I had a very close knit group of friends. I remember so many nights spent doing whatever in the town park, stumbling home long after dark stinking of booze and cigarettes.
Audrey was probably my closest friend at the time. She was “the weird kid” to a lot of our classmates. She dressed goth, listened to metal and spent a lot of her time at school withdrawn from her classmates, but I didn’t care. I saw her for who she really was: a kind, pure soul. No matter what, this girl was always there for me. She was there for comfort in the darkest times of my life, and I was always there for her too. We were almost as close as a brother and sister. However, it wasn’t long after we came back for our fifth year that things started to sour.
You know how it is, I’m sure. At sixteen, you think you can take on the entire world. Audrey was no different. I remember that she used to tell us about her dreams of running away and making it big in some new town away from her old life. The times that we used to sit secluded behind the bushes of the town park, drinking and smoking, would become much deeper. She would open up to me like never before, going deep into her struggles with mental health, self-destructive behaviour and her turbulent life at home, not to mention the abuse she suffered at the hands of our classmates, no matter how innocent and comedic they seemed to think it was. Before long, the two of us would start meeting after dark without the others in the group, and in more formal settings. We would visit each other in my home, never romantically, but to talk deeply about how she was feeling.
She really did seem dead set on running away from her life and starting anew, ready to seize the day and “take life by the balls”, as she put it. For someone with such suffering in her life, I was so taken aback at how positive of an attitude she seemed to have, too. I know for sure I wouldn’t have been so optimistic if I had been in her situation. One night, we laid hand in hand on my bed, listening to an album play out. I, of course, stayed silent and motionless, letting the music take me and fill my brain entirely, but at quiet points, I couldn’t help but notice her quietly cry, trying hard to move as little as possible and to keep her shaky breaths quiet, so not to let me notice. I said nothing, just holding onto her hand tighter as if to say “I know you don’t want to talk, but I am here.”
It wasn’t long before I thought I found out the reason why she wanted to leave so desperately. But what I could never have known is just how deep the rabbit hole really went.