I thanked them and tucked the laptop under my arm when I left. My mind was buzzing with even more questions than before. I hoped she would have wanted me to have something of hers, but why her laptop? I drove home in a fog. I spoke to my parents on the way in, but didn’t tell them about the laptop. I had been doing so well and I didn’t want them to worry I was going to slip back into depression with this new development.
I cracked the lid open slowly, as if when I opened it, it would release the fires of hell on me. A popup asked for a password. It didn’t look like the typical Mac screen. It was a black screen with a whole bunch of red 1s and 0s printed behind it. In the middle the word ‘password’ glowed, and under it a textbox. Just below the textbox were the words ‘I love you, Mady’. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like since she left this to me, if I was able to get it open it would give me something. Maybe a goodbye note — anything. I just didn’t know how to open it. Mady wouldn’t have given this to me if she didn’t know I could figure out how to open it. I stared at those words. ’I love you, Mady’. I said them hundreds of times when we were dating, so what did that have to do with the password? Then it came to me.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, typing in the first place I ever said those words to her. I took her out for a nice dinner at the bistro in town, and after, when I dropped her off at home, just as she got out of the car, I said it to her and she said it right back without hesitation. It was one of the best nights of my life. I typed in the name of the bistro and hit enter. The answer disappeared and nothing happened. I tried every single variation of the name I could think of, not a single one worked. I only stopped when Dad knocked on the door. I quickly closed the laptop and slid it under my bed covers.
“We’re hitting the sack,” he told me. He was already in his pajamas and his grey hair looked a mess. I got up and followed him to their room.
I said goodnight to my parents and shared my plans for the next day. I was supposed to meet up with Jason and Kent in the afternoon and we were heading down to the lake to go swimming. They were fine with that and reminded me I had to be home around six for dinner. It was family game night, something we started doing in the past two months. It helped us talk about stuff and we all made sure to set aside time for it every week.
I went back to my bedroom and sat on the bed. When I was sure they were sleeping, I pulled the laptop out from its hiding place and opened it up. Nothing happened, and for a second I worried I tried putting in the password too many times and the stupid thing had self-destructed. I tried the power button with no success. I crossed my fingers it was just a dead battery. I plugged it in, sliding it under my bed so my parents wouldn’t see it when they woke me up before they left for work. I turned over and went to sleep.
Ever since Mady’s death, my dreams consisted of times we shared together. Some I made up in my mind, wishing she was still around so we could make them come true, and some were very vivid memories of what actually happened. Even after two months, when I only thought about her a couple times a day, my dreams still focussed on her. At first, it was just painful, but I had learned to love them. Tonight’s dream was no different. I was standing on the top of a mountain, Mady by my side. We stared out over the town of Flankstone, leaning against each other. I remembered that day. We had gone on a hike up Mount Flank, which was more of a large pile of dirt and rock, and stared out over the city just as the sun started to set. I put my arm around her and said, “I love you, Mady”.
“What was that?” she said.
“I said, I love you, Mady.”
I woke up in a cold sweat. My forehead was on fire and my vision was blurred, but I could tell it wasn’t morning. My room was shrouded in gloom, the moonlight cast strange shadows across my room. I threw off my covers and pulled the laptop out from under the bed. I unplugged it and opened the screen. It came to life instantly. I remembered now. The first time she said those words wasn’t the first time I said them to her. I said it a month before she did, more than a year ago. She was caught off guard when I first said it, and I guess I blocked the memory out. I worried for the next month that she was going to break up with me and I didn’t mention those words again until I was sure she was ready to say them back. I typed in Mount Flank, and hit enter. The instant I did, the entire screen went black and I waited for something to happen. The apple icon popped up along with the loading bar underneath it. I was in.
Chapter 6
The computer took longer than I expected to load, probably because it had been shut down for what felt like years, but was probably only around a month. I left the lights off, not wanting to alert my parents I was awake in case they left their room for some reason. They would come check on me, and that was the last thing I needed right now. After what felt like forever, the computer finally loaded and a background popped up. It was a picture Mady and I took a week or two before she disappeared. We were standing in my backyard, my arms around her. She wore one of my oversized hoodies and the light flickered off the pool onto us in the most beautiful way. Those moments were when I was happiest.
The first thing I did was check the time. 4 A.M. I couldn’t stay up long or I’d never get up in the morning. My parents would know something was up. I accessed her files on the hard drive. There was nothing there. Not a single school project or download. There weren’t even any pictures. Maybe she wiped it clean? Maybe Mady just wanted me to have a new computer. No, that didn’t make sense. Mady knew if I wanted a new computer it would probably only take a day or two to convince my parents, and if this was brand new then the background wouldn’t have been a picture of us.
I stayed up for another hour, checking everything on the computer. I went through the emails, the text conversations, but nothing seemed important. Soon I decided I wasn’t going to find the information I needed and I gave up the search. I went to bed around five, and before I knew it I was in a deep, dreamless sleep.
Only two hours later I was shaken out of sleep. I blinked at Mom. She was leaving for work and asked if I would do the dishes. I said I would. I was supposed to meet up with Jason around eleven, and it was seven now. That gave me four hours to try and crack the mystery of what the laptop meant. There was a reason Mady gave it to me, now the only thing to do was find out why. As soon as my parents left the house I took the laptop out. I looked at the background, thinking about how none of this would have happened if she hadn’t killed herself. Nancy told me I shouldn’t think like that. I should only think about what my life was now, not what it could have been, but it was hard not to wonder. I stared at the laptop for ten minutes, out of ideas about how to figure out what Mady left for me. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, and to make my odds worse I had no idea what the needle even looked like. Nonetheless, I wasn’t going to give up until I found something, and I could put this to rest once and for all.
I went over everything I had already checked before, just in case I missed something, I went onto the internet and googled how to find hidden files on a computer. Things popped up, but nothing worked, and soon I was at step one again. I was about to type her name in the search engine, sometimes I called up the news reports and re-read them. It helped me in some way to accept things. It dawned on me that I hadn’t checked her search history yet. I clicked on the history icon, and up it popped.
The first item on the list was my search for hidden files, but as I looked further everything looked pretty normal. She googled all sorts of makeup and beauty tips, as well as watched a lot of movies. As I scrolled down further I noticed a pattern. Every single day Mady logged onto this website called ‘SadyMithm.com’. I never heard of it before, and almost thought nothing of it. It was probably some woman’s beauty website. I kept scrolling, but when it kept popping up over and over again, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to check it out.
As I clicked on it and the website loaded I knew what it was right away. It looked like some sort of blog by a woman named Sady. Strange name to have, but I guess these beauty peopl
e were all eccentric to start with. The first post was titled ‘Welcome to my Blog’. I still thought that it was a beauty blog, but something intrigued me. Maybe it was the way the website was set up, or the way every colour on it was one of Mady’s favorites. I started reading the post.
Welcome, one and all
Welcome one and all to my blog. To start off I need you to know that this isn’t my real name. I used a fake one, because on here, I’m not going to hold back. Everything in my life seems so fake, but I just have nobody to talk to about it. Everyone is so caught up in the hustle and bustle of life that they don’t see the beauty around them. I’m the kind of person to slow down and take it all in. I’m a people watcher, and during the last year of living in this town I have learned many things about the people here, and most of them aren’t good. I’m in high school, and as most of you may know, high school isn’t for the faint of heart. Every day I walk into that warzone they call school, and every day I have to suffer through it, putting one foot in front of the other. I’m just lucky I have my boyfriend. I guess you could say I have a lot of friends. A lot of fake ones really, but in all honesty, it feels like I’m a loner in this world. I hang out with these people because my boyfriend, let’s call him Steven, likes hanging out with them. It’s to the point, where at one party I pretended to drink too much, and then went into the bathroom and continued my amazing portrayal of a drunk girl throwing up. I convinced Steven I needed to go home just so I could leave that toxic place. Don’t misread that though, not all of them are horrible, just most, and I love Steven so much. I would do anything to make him happy, and for some strange reason hanging out with these people makes him happy. If you don’t like reading rants you may as well forget about this website forever, but who am I kidding, nobody will ever see this anyway, and if you somehow stumbled across this, then hello. You pretty much know everything you need to know about me, and if you’re some sort of creep that loves reading teenagers journals than you’ll feel right at home here. Anyways, I have homework to do, bye.
It was so simple. A little paragraph that would change my life forever. It was like Mady was talking to me again. This had to be her, there’s no way it wasn’t. Every single sarcastic remark was hers, and I remembered that party. I knew she hadn’t actually puked, but I thought she was just bored, not that she hated the people I hung out with. If I had known, I wouldn’t have hung out with them. I would have picked her over them any day.
I was chilled to the bone. My eyes blurred with tears. I hadn’t cried in a month, but this was different. Why did she leave this for me? Why didn’t she ever tell me how she felt about the people we hung out with? Why did I never notice?
I stood up on shaky legs and went to my desk, pulling out a piece of paper and a pen. On one side of the paper I wrote down Mady Smith, and on the other I wrote Sady Mithm. I looked at both of them and realized they were made up of the same letters. She created an anagram.
I returned to the bed, with more questions ever before. I looked at the bottom of the post. There was a number. A very big number, 1,276,487 to be exact, 1,276,487 people had seen and read that post, and many of them left comments. It was all too real. I went from thinking I had moved on from all of this, to doing a complete U turn and going straight into the danger zone again. I checked my phone and 8:34 flashed on the screen. I couldn’t wait any longer. I didn’t know what to do with this new information. Jason would. I called him, and he picked up on the last ring.
“Hello?”
“Jason, I know it’s early, and I probably just woke you up, but I need you to come over right now.” Within minutes Jason’s old Honda Civic pulled through the gate and roared up the drive. He burst out of it and ran to the door.
I think ever since we found out about Mady, Jason worried I would take my life too. I had no intention of doing anything like that, but I think the worry kept him watching over me. In a strange way, I liked the fact he cared that much about me. I ran down the spiral staircase and opened the door just as he was about to knock. Without a word, I charged upstairs and into my bedroom. Words couldn’t describe how I felt right now, so I thought it would just be best to show him. Jason’s feet pounded behind me and he skidded to a halt in the doorway of my room. I opened the laptop and held it out to him.
“Yeah Brian, that’s your… Wait a second, that’s not your laptop. Whose is it?”
“It’s Mady’s. Her parents gave it to me yesterday, and you would never believe what I found. I opened the laptop and the Safari page came up, still open to Mady’s blog post.
It took Jason a second of reading to understand what was going on. I could see the realization dawn in his eyes as he did, and he looked up at me, a question forming on his lips, but instead he looked back at the screen kept reading. My arms ached from holding the laptop, but I held it steady. Jason had to see what was going on so I could ask him what to do. After he finished reading the post, he sat down on the bed and stared at the gray wall for what felt like an eternity. I wanted to know what was going through his head. I knew he would have a plan. I didn’t want all of this responsibility only on me.
“We have to give it to the cops,” Jason declared.
My heart dropped into my stomach and anger stirred in my guts. Deep down I knew it was what he was going to say, and I thought I would be fine with it. If the cops had it they could look through it and maybe it would lead them to her body, or something.
“We can’t! We haven’t even read them all, yet! We can’t just let them have the laptop without reading them.” It felt like something that was rightfully mine was being ripped away, and I didn’t like it.
“I mean, it’s technically your call. She left it to you, so I guess you have the final say in what we do with it, but you know what I think.
Now I knew what he thought I should do, I decided it would have been a better idea not to get him involved. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. We went downstairs to the kitchen and made breakfast to get our minds off of the blog. We ate, and then Jason used the shower. He had thrown on clean clothes before he rushed over, so once he showered we were good to go. The entire time he was in the bathroom, I stared at the laptop, tempted to read another entry. I knew that wasn’t a good idea because if Jason came out and saw me he would worry I was falling back into the dark hole I was in when she disappeared. He would do anything to save me from that; including telling the police I unlocked the computer.
Jason and I hung around until Kent and Jessica texted us around one in the afternoon. Maybe it would be nice to get my mind off the problem. All I could think about was how over a million people saw that post, and nobody knew she was dead. How had nobody from town stumbled across it and realized it was her? I guess they wouldn’t have known unless they were really close to her. Maybe that blog held the secret of where Mady killed herself, but in all honesty, I didn’t want to know. At least without a body I could still hang on to the faint belief she was still alive, and that notion helped me through the day. No matter how little I thought of Mady, I was never going to get over her, but the idea that she might be out there somewhere living her life under a new identity doing what she loved, as unlikely as it was, made the days go by easier.
We met up with Kent and Jessica at Kent’s house. Once we were all together, we went into the backyard, armed with a 24 of beer and started drinking. We weren’t drinking to get drunk, but it was summer and that’s what teenagers do in the summer in our town. I drank just enough to catch a buzz and threw a couple of extra in my bag for later before we walked down to the city beach.
The beach wasn’t very busy, which made sense since it was the middle of a work week, and the only people off for the summer were students. We saw some of our friends, but opted to keep it just the four of us. After settling down in a less busy part of the beach on the sand, we lay out on the towels and enjoyed the summer sun warming our bodies. My mind wandered from Mady to the present. I missed Mady a lot, but life kept moving forward. I knew it would, but som
etimes it was just hard to see how and why. After a while, we went for a swim and before we knew it the sun was sending long slanting rays from the west. It was 6 o’clock and I had to get home before my parents started to worry.
I said goodbye to my friends and started back up the hill. We hadn’t brought a car since we would be drinking, and now I was stuck walking up the hill, the sun beating on my back. It felt hotter than it was, and the humidity had risen in the last couple days. I finally made it home at 6:30 and was greeted by the rich scent of food being barbequed. I was half an hour late, but I was pretty sure my parents didn’t mind. I think they were just happy I was out enjoying my summer instead of spending the entire time in my room. We all sat down outside for a nice family meal as the sun set and talked about how our day had gone.
After dinner, I helped them clean up and we all watched a movie together. Dad being gone so much forced us to enjoy the time we did have together. One of our favourite pastimes was watching movies as a family. I didn’t mind that this stopped me from running up to my room and reading more of Mady’s blog. It would be there when I went up, and maybe if I spread it out across a longer period it would seem like I could hold onto her for a little longer. I hadn’t really thought about what I would do with the computer once I was done reading all the posts. I felt it was only right for her parents to see them. Maybe they could get some closure, but if the posts got as dark as I imagined her mind to be near the end, it might hurt them more than help them.
After the movie, I went back up to my room and opened the laptop, and everything was just as I left it. I clicked on the internet tab and opened another one of Mady’s blog post.
Dangerous Past Page 5