Joel Downie | The Shadow (sciophobia) wrote in monsterheartic, @ 2017-04-14 15:43:00 |
|
|||
Current music: | Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Joan of Arc |
we should've known better than to give her away
Who: Joel and Lu
What: When you find out that your friend is dead from Buzzfeed.
Where: School parking lot.
When: April 14th, after school.
Warnings: Likely just language.
Status: In progress.
Joel had sent a text to Izzy a couple of days ago, mentioning that he'd talked to Ezra about the exorcism thing, and hadn't heard back from her. He hadn't given that too much thought—she was probably planning to talk about it next time they saw each other at lunch, he figured. Or whenever she had a minute. She did, after all, have a lot of shit to worry about on a daily basis. But then she hadn't been there at lunch either, and Joel had been wondering if it would look weird to ask her friends if she was okay. Not weird at all? Completely fucking weird? He had no yardstick for that kind of thing. So many strides made recently in the field of social skills, and yet so little progress.
He was sitting on one of the concrete dividers in the parking lot with his crutches propped next to him, waiting for his ride home; Amanda was supposed to do it, and then she'd texted him to say that his father would be driving him home instead, because Dad was back from D.C. for the holiday weekend and wanted to take him to a Good Friday service at St. Mary's. But he'd be half an hour late. Fine. The weather was okay. On the chilly side but sunny.
Joel had his sketchbook open on his lap, idly doing a figure sketch of a couple of kids from the cross-country team who were warming up and chatting, while some other ADHD cases were goofing around. "Who's the little bitch now?" one of them yelled, shoving his friend.
"Dude, everyone's saying that today, is it a thing now or something?" the other guy said.
"Oh, you haven't seen it yet? Check this shit out. Trigger warning, though, bro, this is not a safe space."
Joel hadn't been paying much attention to the exchange, and wouldn't have if he hadn't clearly heard the voices from the phone's tinny speakers. Who's the little bitch now? Coop's voice, or the demon's, not the kind of sound that was easy to forget.
What the fuck happened this time, Joel wondered, wearily getting his own phone out again to google the video. It had clearly gone viral, and the search result popped up right away, even with a Buzzfeed post: This Terrifying Clip Will Make You Believe in Found-Footage Horror Again. Maybe Coop had just been doing something constructive with his time and had made a cool video.
Joel got to enjoy that imaginary possibility for about five seconds before he saw what was actually happening. It was Izzy.
He didn't want to watch it. He didn't want to be seeing this. He definitely didn't want to be hearing it, the sounds of what had to be her last breaths. She'd been strung up like an animal in an abattoir, in some shadowy abandoned building. It looked very, very much like a horror movie, or it would have if Izzy's reactions had been just a little more fake. But this was real. She'd been gone and this was where she'd been.
The sketchbook and pencil slid right off his lap unnoticed, knocking his crutches over onto the asphalt. Joel couldn't look away from the screen, looping the video a few more times, searching for any hint that this was just a really good fake.