Finding Abby

1

"... and if you've got good friends, love them while they're here."

Eddie Vedder

~2011~

I found the mixtape by accident. It's not as if I'm snooping. I'm not generally a snooper. I mean, if I was, I'm pretty sure I could've found the tape way earlier. I know if Mum finds out she'll go mental. But at this point I don't care what she thinks. I'm done with her.

I was in the garage, trying to find my bike pump but searching through Mum's old boxes of who-knows-what on the shelves at the back instead. I knew my pump wouldn't be there but I had this weird feeling that I had to keep looking. I checked through all the stuff on the higher-up shelves, pretending to myself that this was where I had the pump last.

It was pretty dusty on those shelves. I'd never looked there before. Mum parks her car right up close and it's too hard to squeeze around it.

I shifted aside a pile of old jars with a graveyard of dried flies and spiders at the bottom and right at the back in the darkest corner, were a couple of cardboard boxes I hadn't seen before. A perfect layer of untouched dust had settled across the top. Scrawled in faded black letters down the side of one box were the words: 'Abby '92'.

Of course I was curious.

On the top a piece of flaking, yellowed sticky-tape peeled up, curled towards me like a beckoning finger.

I couldn't help myself.

The sticky-tape sounded as loud as a hurricane as I dragged it back along the top of the box.

That's when I saw the mixtape with Mum's name on it.

Now I'm here looking at it and I don't know why, but something about it speaks to me.

I seize it with shaking fingers and open it up.

Scrawled onto the cardboard sleeve inside the plastic cover is a list of songs. I know some of them—old bands from the Nineties, of course—but some of them I have no clue about.

What gets me though, is inside the sleeve—when I fold it out—there's a note in the same handwriting.

A note written to my mum.