Her Fandom Friend Was Lethal Chapter 1

To afford front-row pit passes for her favorite band's sold-out arena tour, my older sister agreed to split a cheap room with a fandom mutual she had known online for a decade.

The concert ended, but my sister never came home. She vanished into thin air.

Forty-eight agonizing hours crawled by before the police would even file a missing persons report. And when investigators finally tracked down that mutual, the girl looked the detectives dead in the eye and swore under oath that she had never heard my sister's name in her life.

We searched for my sister for ten unbearable years.

When we finally found her, she was rotting on a filthy curbside in a forgotten border town. Both her eyes were milky, blind ruins. Her left arm had been crudely severed at the shoulder, her legs twisted and paralyzed beneath rags that smelled of infection and gutter water.

She stared toward the sound of my footsteps with dead, unblinking eyes. With the two remaining fingers on her withered right hand, she tapped an empty tin can against the cracked asphalt.

"Spare a dime, kind soul. Just a bite to eat."

Later, on the highway drive home in the back of our car, some buried splinter of memory must have pierced her delirium. In a sudden, terrible burst of lucid horror, she wrenched open the door at seventy miles an hour and threw herself onto the freeway.

Mom dissolved into grief, swallowed a lethal dose of sedatives, and never woke up.

Dad walked around in a ghost-like daze until a semi-truck ran a red light and crushed him on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

Our whole family was wiped off the earth. In the hollow aftermath, one relentless, gnawing thought drove me out of my mind: "If only I had stopped her from leaving that afternoon. If only I hadn’t let her go to that concert."

I gasped, my eyes flying open.

Warm morning light filtered through the dusty Venetian blinds of our suburban living room.

My sister, Wendy, stood by the front door, slipping on her denim jacket, her handmade canvas tote covered in enamel pins swinging from her shoulder. Her hand rested on the brass knob.

"I’m heading out, Abby," she called over her shoulder, her voice bright and untainted by tragedy. "Be good for Mom and Dad."

A sob tore through my chest. Tears flooded my vision as I launched across the room, wrapping my arms around her waist with the feral desperation of a drowning child.

"Wendy, you can't go! You can’t go to that show!"

* * *

Wendy startled, nearly dropping her car keys.

"Hey, easy, sweetie! What’s gotten into you? I swear I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon."

No. She wouldn't. Tomorrow, there would be no Wendy. Tomorrow, the nightmare would begin.

I wept hysterically, clutching the denim of her jacket until my knuckles went white.

"Listen to me! That friend from Twitter, she’s bad! She’s drowning in predatory debt, and she cut a deal with human traffickers! She’s going to drug you at the motel and hand you over to them! You’ll never come home! I won't have a sister anymore!"

Wendy froze for a fraction of a second, and then a soft, breathy chuckle slipped out of her.

She ruffled my hair with warm, tender fingers.

"Abby, honey... did that true-crime documentary we watched on Netflix yesterday mess with your head? Did you have a bad dream?"

She crouched slightly to meet my tear-streaked eyes. "It’s not real. It was just a movie. You don't have to be scared. I’ve known Melanie online for ten years. We grew up posting on the same fan forums. She’s harmless."

Right on cue, her phone buzzed in her pocket, cutting me off.

A sickeningly familiar voice drifted through the speaker, crisp and chirpy:

"Hey, Wendy! Just checked in. When are you getting here?"

I would recognize that voice in hell.

In my past life, the minute Wendy didn’t answer our calls the next morning, Dad called 911. The detectives eventually hauled that girl down to the precinct.

Online, she went by Melon. Wendy went by Peach. In that tight-knit pocket of the music fandom, they were practically soul sisters, sharing late-night playlists and childhood secrets for a whole decade.

Yet inside the interrogation room, she had blinked at the detective with wide, innocent eyes.

"Who’s Peach? Who’s Wendy Prescott? I don't know who you’re talking about. I don't even listen to that band—maybe my little stepsister made an account with my email or something. I’ve never seen that girl in my life."

My skin turned to ice as the voice on the other end of the line purred, "I got a room with just one queen bed so we could split it down the middle and save twenty bucks. Put that toward front-row pit passes for their summer tour, right?"

A fond smile spread across Wendy’s lips.

All I could picture was Melanie sitting in the precinct's plastic chair years ago, picking at her manicured nails while our world burned around her.

"I don't go to arena shows," she had told the cops, utterly bored. "Maybe your daughter hooked up with some cute guy she met at a tailgate and skipped town with him."

"Watch your mouth! My daughter would never do that!" Dad had roared, his knuckles white against the precinct desk.

Seeing our only lead slip away, Mom had dropped to her knees right there on the linoleum, sobbing until she choked.

"Please, please, sweetheart, just think! Wendy is only twenty! She has her whole life ahead of her!"

Melanie had recoiled as if Mom were a leper, hiding behind an officer’s uniform.

"Get this psycho away from me! I told you, I don't know her!"

Now, on the call, Wendy laughed softly into the receiver. "Sorry, Melanie, Abby’s being super clingy today. She’s convinced you're a cartoon villain out to kidnap me."

The girl on the phone gave a playful tsk.

"Oh, little sis! You can’t keep your big sister on a leash, you know. That’s not very sweet."

It was the exact same cadence. The same venomous flippancy masked beneath sugar.

My whole body shook violently. I grabbed Wendy’s wrist, digging my nails in.

"Wendy, you have to believe me! She’s lying to you! Her screen name is Melon, but her real legal name is Kendra! She’s going to destroy you!"

A beat of dead silence hung in the air. Wendy stared down at me, her brow furrowing in confusion.

Then, a peeling burst of laughter erupted from the phone.

"Kiddo, are you for real? Are you paranoid or something? I’ve been talking to your sister since middle school. And for the record, my name is Melanie, not Kendra!"

Wendy let out an exasperated sigh, gently tapping my forehead.

"Hear that, Abby? I’m going to miss my commuter train. If you keep throwing a tantrum, I’m actually going to get mad."

The world tilted under my feet.

"Melanie? Not Kendra?"

When the police had pulled up her record in my past life, the intake form had clearly read "Kendra"!