My Yearbook

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast one. If you left a review for me and this show with the title please on the Apple Podcasts app and the review itself was a simple phrase, please do a story about a yearbook. This is the first time I try something like this, but thank you for the idea and for the five stars. My name is Edwin, and here this is a scary story my yearbook. I want to tell you the story of my little brother. Well, it's more about his friend. My little brother, Stephen, had a tough time making friends in school. Of course I never told him, but he was a bit strange around people even when he was three and four years old. I think it was because he never got the chance to hang out with other kids as much as I did when I was his age, so I guess I got more practice. Used to worry about him, asking me to please take them with me to my baseball games and take them to the park. After he got out of kindergarten. We lived across the street from the school, so it wasn't that big of a deal. One day I saw him sitting on the curb with his red lunchbox waiting for me to walk up to him while the rest of the class was chasing some kid around, and everyone else was laughing and playing with each other as their parents came by to pluck them out one by one out of the chaos. He looked up at me as he reached for my hand without saying anything. I wasn't about to ask how his day went. He walked as the sounds of the kids faded behind us. We crossed the street and got to our yard, and then I sat on the front porch while he went inside to grab his jello that Mom always left for us in the fringe. In just one year, I would be leaving Manton Elementary and he would be by himself in that school with three hundred other strangers. His first yearbook reflected that when he went through the pictures, I saw that only his teacher had signed the back of it, along with a nice message about friendships and the future. We had gotten out of school for the year finally, and the summer had started. We had gotten all of our summer stuff before school even got out water guns, balloons, and lots of outdoor toys to play in the park. I'm sure we would find a way to use the t ball set that Mom had gotten for us at the yard hille next door. I remember it clearly for Friday afternoon, when I was in the room that we both shared and I was drawing on my sketch book when I heard my little brother's scream. I froze, listening for him again. When I heard him once more, I realized it had been his laughter coming from the outside. I walked out of the room and down to the living room to see Mom standing by the kitchen window looking out to over the street, a huge smile on her face. I walked over the front door and saw Steven tossing a ball to someone across the street and then running after it. I went back to my room, happier this time, knowing that Steven had made a friend. They even stayed out until the lights turned on. That's when I finally heard Mom call out to him to come home. I heard him go straight for the water jug and gulp down a cup of water. Then I waited for him to come into the room. He then ran inside to tell me that he had made a friend. He lived across the street, and he said that he had all of these cool toys and games. I kept the conversation going by asking him about what he was like, what they played, and if they were going to get to play again tomorrow. Stephen told me that his new friend would have to ask for permission, but he was so excited to tell me that he taught him how to play kick and even said that he knew me. He knew me. I don't think I knew any five year olds other than my brother. But I followed along and asked for his name, but he said that he forgot to ask him. Later on that night, when we were eating dinner and waiting for Steven to come out of washing his hands in the bathroom, I casually mentioned to Mom that Stephen had finally made a friend. Really, she asked me, I thought she had seen him from the kitchen, so I thought that maybe Mom was following along just to patronize me and wasn't paying attention to what I was saying. I just let it go. Steven talked and talked all night about the friend he had made, and Mom simply looked at him, not sharing his excitement, which I thought was weird of her to do. Steven didn't care, though. The next morning, Stephen woke up early and stood outside in the front porch with his ball under her arm, looking out into the street that faced the yard of our elementary school. I knew that he was going to be waiting for his new friend. When he came inside and we were eating our cereal, I asked him if he wanted to go outside to play with me, and he agreed, but the whole time he kept looking around for the other kid. The lights turned on outside and the bug started bumping into the huge bulbs that turned from orange to purple to blue and lit up our street. That first night, I remember Stephen looking up to me and asking if friends are supposed to come back to play with us, or if it was supposed to be his turn to go look for him. I told him that whoever wanted to play first would visit the other, that it didn't matter. He looked down at his shoes and then went to our room. At the same lack of events from that Saturday turned into Sunday's Happenings, which turned into every day after that. For the week, Stephen would come outside and look around for his friend, but he never came back. One day, Mom suggested that I take him to the local pool since they were hosting a children's event that following Friday that she would be able to pick us up and stay for a while too. Stephen loved the pool, but I knew something was affecting him. They swear. I thought that Stephen would forget and get distracted, which I managed to do a couple of times that week when we played cards and with some of the toys that Mom had gotten for us, but his eyes would always go back to the curb across the street. Mom had also noticed it, and when she asked me about what else Stephen had said to me, I told her the whole thing about his friend, about how he hadn't made any that whole year, and that he was waiting for him to come back to play with him. She finally told me that she was worrying about Stephen, not because of how he hadn't made any friends, but how she had seen him playing by himself that previous week. There was no kid across the street from him. Stephen was throwing the ball by himself, and she was happy seeing him enjoying his time and keeping an eye on him, since he never really played out on the street by himself. I think that's when I first started learning about imaginary friends. Up until then I didn't know that's how they worked. Curiosity had gotten the best of me, so I asked him if he had really played with the kid the other day, to which he said yes. Suspiciously, I asked him even more questions about the color of his hair, the type of shoes he had on, and where exactly. He said that he had lived, black hair, white shoes, and he lived across the street. But across the street it is the school, Stephen, really, where did he live? Stephen realized that I didn't believe him, and then he ran off to our room. I caught him pulling a book out of the bookcase that we had, and there in one of the shelves that was mine. He flipped through the pages slowly. Black and white pictures of children were on all the pages of the yearbook. At around the fifth or sixth page, he stopped. He pointed to one of the pictures in there. That's him, he said. I looked at the kid, and it took a bit for the blood to rush away from my face. I grabbed the yearbook from him when I noticed that the pages in the back had scribbles and writings from other people. It was signed, But then again the covers were different. This wasn't his yearbook. I flipped it around to the front and that was right, Manton Elementary two thousand and four yearbook. I flipped back to the kid's picture and scanned around his classroom photo. My kindergarten teacher was there, my friends were there, and I was in there too. Back in kindergarten, Timothy Tyler was his name. The kid we had a conference about in the cafeteria near the end of the year when I was five, His crying parents, thanking my teacher when I learned that Timothy Tyler would not be joining us in the first grade. Emails of a Stranger it's a second story in this episode, and it is coming up right into this. Hey, I'm sorry, but my dad found out about how AIM works and he's making me delete my sn but I still have email here. It is Hershey Kisses ninety one was a girl that had gotten to know online through a chat room on the al Instant Messenger catalog of rooms. It is strange to talk about it now since it was such a long time ago. The Internet was a very different thing back then, so log into the Internet you would have to connect your computer via a telephone cable, and once you were connected you could visit websites and stuff. The most fun thing to do was to log into your screen name, which I guess it's called the user name today and be able to chat with your friends, kind of like how people use discord, but much simpler and more complicated at the same time. But man, things were like the Wild West spammers, people blocking each other and nobody knew who was who or where they were from in those chat rooms. And it was one of those that some random user had created that I met Hershey Kisses ninety one, a girl named Amanda from Michigan. We were both fourteen years old, and we liked learning about each other's lives and how different they were. My school didn't have a rowing team, hers did. My school was an exterior one with lockers outside, while hers was like how they show up in the movies with indoor hallways and lockers lining them up. I guess because of the snow and rain that they got. And we talked for over a year. I told each other our problems, and we even added our own friends to the chats that we made. Sometimes it was simple and strange. I loved every second of it. So when I locked in after school one night and saw her message, I was genuinely upset all of our conversations would suddenly stop, just like that. I saved her email and downloaded every message we had ever sent, though I'm not sure why. I guess I thought that maybe everything would disappear, but really everything was there. It just looked as if she was locked out. Her screen name was now grayed out on my list of friends. I stared at her email address I had written down on my notebook. I knew I had an account, but I had never sent any emails or gotten any emails from anybody, except for that one time when the librarian at her school helped me send a file to myself because I had forgotten my thumb drive to print something out. It took about three weeks for me to finally muster up the courage to send the email, even though all I wanted was to say hi. I ended up typing an entire essay about what I had done the previous week and updating her on everything that she had probably missed mail. To my surprise, she emailed me back within an hour. I was so excited to connect with her again, so I sent her another message that turned into half an essay, and then she responded again, and it just kept going until it was getting late for her, so she said she needed to go, and I stopped waiting around for emails. I sent her another one the following day, to which she replied with the link to an image. I clicked it and saw a scene of what looked like an old gas station during the daytime, a mountain range in the background, and a can of Coca Cola on the roof of the car in front of the camera. I quickly replied with a question mark forgetting that this was email and not the instant messenger thing, and there was no reply. Of course, I thought it was weird, but by that time my classes had picked up and I got busier with things. Plus sending emails was not as cool as the instant messages we would send. About two days after that, I saw another notification to my imbos. Amanda had sent another link to an image from a website called photobucket. I clicked it and saw a sign and said welcome to California, a bit blurry, as if taken from a car. Hey cool, I replied, that's my state, and I felt my stomach draw as soon as I sent it, thinking that it was so weird that I was getting images with no messages from her, and I was over here thinking that everything was somewhat normal with my friend. Plus she didn't drive, and the image was definitely coming from the driver's side of a car, the side view mirror only looking toward a near empty road in the desert. Later on that same night, I saw a different message. The image was attached to an email this time, and it had the reflective sign of a very familiar city, my city, Hayward, California. My parents didn't understand how emails worked, so I don't think they would have been able to help. But I was freaking out over what I had just seen. Someone was trying to scare me and it was working. I could see the image being taken through the windshield, the dark hill on the left side of it. I knew where that spot was my dad. He so drives me through there whenever we would go pick up something from his job, or whenever we would go to his favorite pizza place. I received another notification. I try to ignore it and disconnect from the internet for the night. There was no way that I could I walked down to the kitchen to find both of my parents watching TV. When they saw me, they asked me if I was going to go to bed already. I should have told him that something was wrong, that was my chance. Instead, I looked at them and said yes, good night, Mom and Dad. I walked back to my room with my mom echoing the same thing. Brush your teeth, get your things ready for tomorrow. I love you, good night. I rushed up to the computer and clicked on the attachment before I changed my mind. Right when I clicked it mail another email came in the large image of the cross street with the name of my street in the mailbox, right on the corner of Hands and Road one, only four houses away. I tried to log out of the internet service and shut down the computer as fast as I could, but I think I only managed to turn off the screen. I flicked off the light, jumped into bed, same clothes and everything. My heart was beating so hard, and I tried to hide under the covers, trying hard not to peek out to the window next to me. I shut my eyes tightly and waited, imagining another notification coming into my email account. What had been inside that last email. I don't know how, but I finally managed to fall asleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night to a bright flashing light coming through my window. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Komarrubiaz. I also make a podcast called a Dark Memory and a super creepy one called True Scary Story. Once again, thank you to the listener who left the five stars along with an idea for that first story, Yes you with the username I Love Olivia Rodrigo, followed by a bunch of numbers. Scary Plus members will be getting the hidden stories in the coming weeks, which are stories that never quite made it to the podcast, whether because they were too dark for the general public or were simy too short. Try Scary Plus completely free for a week to see how it works. It should work on Spotify and all podcast apps when you go to scaryplus dot com, but if you're listening on the Apple podcast app, you should be seeing a small banner with a Scary Plus logo. Write in that same page where this episode is I really hope to connect with you there. Thank you very much for listening. See you soon.