Red on a Green Ghost
Father and son killed in cold blood last night, read the headline. Though Rose, Dave and Jade were all miles apart, they saw the same words on their screens. There stood the same profile of a buck-toothed, blue-eyed boy, recreated in millions of little pixels and likely covered in sticky blood.
John's chumhandle was greyed out when the three last saw it in Pesterchum. Now, as far as his friends knew, it would stay that way forever.
Rose found the headline to be an absolute sucker punch, a shatter of fantasy back into reality.
She was leaning against the wall that afternoon, a thick book resting open against her knees. It was a time of calm for the heroes in that story, a calm that seeped into Rose's mind and locked her into a deep flow. Turned pages gently guided the tranquility, shielding Rose from any sense of her true surroundings.
That was, until her mother knocked on the door. Mom's fist rapped against the wood with both speed and lethargy, as possible as that was for a human being. Her lips let loose Rose's name in a slurred pile of hiccups and god-knows-what, repeating itself in inebriated cycles. Rose huffed, hopping off her mattress seat and turning her room's doorknob. There stood her mom, slouched with a martini in one hand and a PDA in the other.
"r-Roze look ta thsi…this. Hic!" Mom drawled. A shaky arm extended the PDA towards Rose, dropping it into her right palm. Rose lifted her eyes in a glare for a second, then let them fall to the screen on the phone. Father and son killed in cold blood last night. A slideshow with John and his dad's images fading into one another. All of it happened while they were watching a movie, late night on August 15, there were no bodies found…The young Lalonde found herself just as shaky as the woman who showed her the news. Why? How did it happen? She wanted to know.
Such was the reaction of one Rose Lalonde, to the happenings of what may have been a normal summer night.
Dave was crushed by the headline just as Rose was, though his upbringing prompted him to swallow the blow.
Complete Bullshit truly was the pinnacle of stupid when it came to browsers. Dave was aiming for the IMDB page in slick black, but with a jerk of his arm his cursor was on CNN's neon eyesore yellow. He cursed beneath his breath, about to close the tab as soon as it loaded with its unimportant news stories and black banner, but he didn't. Up in the left corner of the webpage, Dave saw someone he knew.
John looked exactly the way Dave imagined him to be, buck teeth and glasses and all. It was the picture of a boy dead at age 13, as the coolkid knew when he read the headline. Lived with his dad in Maple Valley, watched movies – there was no mistaking it. This was ghostyTrickster, John Egbert, Dave's best bro. And he had been stabbed full of holes until he died. House security cameras didn't lie about this kind of thing.
Dave did well hiding his reaction. If Lil Cal or Bro ever passed by his computer, neither of them saw anything wrong nor any sad news pieces sitting around on a screen.
And so for many nights on end that year, a particular Dave Strider wondered if he could have been quick enough and saved anyone on a normal summer night.
Jade was the last to know what happened, and as such was hit with not one but two emotional blows.
Her lunchtop had been malfunctioning for a myriad of reasons. Jade had done all she could have to fix the computer, grandpa not required, so it simply had to rest for a couple of days. In the meantime, Jade took this opportunity to mess about her island in exploration, completely oblivious to the events that August 15. She camped for days in the ruins, the jungles, smiling while her best friends were mourning. Finally when she returned to her tower, 5 days had already passed since the time the news article was released.
The first thing Jade did was check Pesterchum. It was odd that John didn't return her messages about her lunchtop not working and that she was going to take the time to camp, especially since Rose and Dave did. Seeing as there wasn't anything said to her otherwise, the gardener then went to close her Pesterchum, mark herself idle until…wait a second. Someone did message her while she was gone. Rose had sent her a link to what Jade assumed was a news site, with an article detailing a murder and the ones killed.
It explained everything, the article did – it explained very well why John was so idle all of a sudden. Jade's head buzzed with so many questions why, why that Jack Noir would want to kill anyone as nice as her online friend and his father, and why she didn't check back earlier. The lunchtop didn't need that much time to cool down, Jade thought. Why couldn't I have come back? rang amidst ideas of I was having fun while something horrible happened and many other things.
These thoughts never ceased. They would always return to the mind of a certain Jade Harley, again and again, of just what had happened on a normal summer night.