Darker Places

Forever Awake (Kendra's Story)

I wish I could undo everything.

I wish I could go back in time and tell Drew Coleman to go fuck himself when he started talking about that video, and when he dared me to watch it and take a screenshot. I wish I never had invited my best friend Mia over for "moral support"- maybe it would have saved our friendship. Why did I watch it, anyways? Because I was stupid and naïve I thought it was fake- like Green Ball, or that live streamed torture ISIS red room a couple years ago, or really everything else Drew told me about.

I need you to trust me when I say that I just wanted to prove myself. As both the only person of color and one of two girls in Advanced Coding IV, I was pretty desperate to impress Drew and his friends, the so-called hacker crew at Sunport High. He'd lied to me before about all the shocking things he had seen on the deep web, and I didn't really believe this site was as horrifyingly real as it turned out to be. Neither Mia nor I expected to see what we did, and if we had known that evil video would stay with us for the rest of our lives, we never would have clicked play.

And I feel so guilty about Mia. Her and I both know she has every right to lie through her teeth like she has been, saying that she left the room once the man came and started to-

I can't talk about the specific acts- I just can't. You're only my therapist. You don't need to know what precisely happened in the video, or the exact age of that little girl, or the make and model of the knife used at the thirty-eight minute mark. What you do need to know is that I've done a lot of thinking lately- I may be a computer kid but psychology is a science too, albeit one that doesn't come nearly as naturally to me.

At first, I tried to pretend I'd never seen it- and Mia's still stuck in that stage. After we finished watching it, she had opened up the window and started drinking in the fresh spring air, as if my bedroom had suddenly became a gas chamber and she was attempting to save herself.

"Is this real?" she had asked, her hands shaking

"Oh my God, Kendra...if this is, like, actually what we think it is...we have to tell someone. This is- this is bad. This is really bad."

I remember not being able to speak. Mia was yelling my name and a thousand questions a minute, but I couldn't answer her as tears spilled out of my dark brown eyes. I couldn't get that girl's pleading face out of my head, and I was struggling to comprehend that someone- two someones actually, a man and a woman- could do something that sick.

Mia grabbed my arm.

"We have to get rid of it so we don't get in trouble. Can you delete Tor? Yeah, do that, and then we'll- how can we ruin the computer so it looks like we weren't doing anything wrong and just happened to crash it?"

I had broken down into sobs by now, and I realize how goddamn defensive I sound by pointing that out, but it's true. I honestly couldn't believe what we had done. You probably want to know why we didn't stop it once it got really bad, and the answer is that we literally couldn't. I was frozen, glued to the bed we were laying on, but I could see Mia; she'd picked up my phone and was recording herself frantically trying to close the tab.

That recording would be a godsend later on with authorities, and the worst part is that I never got a chance to repay her for it. She's burned every bridge she had with me, and I know I deserve it. Ours was an unlikely friendship anyways; she was the tall strawberry-blonde captian of the dance team while I was a 5'1 black computer nerd.

But enough about Mia. You're supposed to be my counselor, after all. I guess you want to know how seeing such a thing has affected me, even though two weeks later I still have trouble figuring out my reactions and identifying my emotions around the whole thing.

For starters, I can't sleep anymore. I keep having nightmares about the girl onscreen, waking up and feeling like I'm drowning in ice water- but my face is burning and I've kicked off the covers. The other day my family and I went to my grandmother's 80th birthday party, but when my little cousin started to cry, the sound reminded me too much of the girl's pleas for help. I ended up having to leave the room. Mia told me she had seen stories on Reddit of people having to be institutionalized in a psych ward after watching it and while I don't think that'll be me, I am sure I'll be scarred forever because of it. I want your help, but no medical degree will ever erase it from my mind.

At least I still have my own laptop, or I will soon: when I told my parents, they took my electronics away until I start college in five months. For now, I have to use the library ones to do my homework. My mom designs websites and does search engine optimization so she had several old computers gathering dust in the basement. I found one that supported Tor, then texted Mia- she was always interested in my digital exploits, they made her feel like she was part of some elite technological society.

Wait- I've decided not to think about Mia. Right. During my therapy sessions, could you remind me of that when I bring her up? Because she's gone, and there's no point in trying to bring her back. I need to focus on forgetting the video, or at least not having it constantly on my mind- and even that's a long shot.

Why am I even going to counseling, when it's my fault that I looked at it? Courts force therapy on people all the time, but I don't think the fact that I looked at a fucked-up video warrants that type of punishment. I'm a seventeen year old kid in the twenty-first century, for God's sake. I have more zombie murders under my belt than I have brain cells, and I've seen the most digustingly shocking parts of the surface web. That kind of thing; your weird fetish porn sites you visit on bets and the darkest corners of 8chan (a site which, in a move that surprised nobody who knew of it's existence, created a deep web version), is almost normal for a high school senior nowadays to look at.

Was it really that different because it's real, and she was so young, and the knife, and her crying, and...I just proved myself wrong. It was different and we both know it.

And even though the girl was found alive, I know I'll never sleep again.