Creepy - Day 13 - The Moon Kids & Goodbye to You

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

The Moon Kids (starts at 1:35)***Written by: JQ Leonard***Goodbye to You (starts at 30:52)***Written by: The Invisible Man on the Bus and Narrated by: Cole Burkhardt***Content warning: childhood bullying, abuse***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm John Grills from Creepy, and I listen to the Be Afraid Podcast Network. Creepy presents the 31 Days of Horror. Day 13. No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous, chilling, and disturbing creepy pastors and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language.

Listener discretion is advised. Happy Halloween, everyone! John, it's still weeks until Halloween. It's always Halloween in here. No, I think that's just your stomach. Exactly. Anyway, I'm just trying to get into character. I'm up. Okay, let's get things kicked off with something from a repeat storyteller. Everyone, welcome up John. Even, everyone? So, how many of you here have heard of? The Moon Kids.

Nobody in my town remembers Sarah Beth Kirkpatrick, but me. Her mother still works the front desk at the Animal Clinic out on Route 5. there's a photo of a beagle taped to the side of her monitor. No photo of her daughter. I've asked her twice. Once when I was 16. Once last spring. Both times she gave me that patient front desk kindness and said she was sorry. She didn't know who I meant.

The second time she asked if I was okay. I never left my hometown. Most of the people I went to school with either moved or got on. at the plant and the stop calling either way. I worked the parts counter at the Napa. I have an apartment over what used to be the Wrexall. The window unit drips onto the sidewalk when it runs hard. It's the 31st tonight.

There's a plastic bowl of titsy rolls on the table by the door. I've put one out every year I've lived here. I've never answered the door. Every year, late. After the sidewalk's empty and the porch lights start going off, somebody knocks. I'm going to tell this story. Then I'm going to open it.

Every town has a story, a legend. Ours was the moon kids. I don't know who started it. It was already old by the time it reached us. Tucker's cousin, Ray, who stocked nights at the Pigley-Wiggly, said his own daddy had heard it in the 60s, only they called them something else done. He could never remember the other name.

That detail always bothered me, a story that changes what it calls itself. It went like this. On Halloween night there are kids out with you who are not from here. They're in your group and you will not remember when they joined. They'll be at the door behind you when your hands are full. They'll be in the picture your mother takes on the steps and she won't ask about them.

Grown people give them candy every year and don't remember doing it. The rules came in pieces on the bus, in somebody's backyard while our mother yelled about the water hose. They come out after the porch lights go off. In this town, that's around 10. By 11, the whole street's dark, and the only people still out are the ones too old to be doing it, which was us. When it's over, they leave the way they came, on foot, up the road, toward the county line. This is the only time you can tell them apart. Don't count your group.

If you count twice and get the same number, you counted wrong. They'll want to trade. They'll ask what you're supposed to be. That one's fine. You can answer it. And the last one, the one that got said flat and a different voice than the rest. Like it was the only serious part of the whole thing. You don't tell them your name.

The theories were the ones you'd expect from 12-year-old. The cult family in the woods, the ghosts of the children from the county home that burned in 1931. Somebody's uncles swore he'd seen them in 1978 crossing the highway, single file at one in the morning, oldest, the youngest, all in costume, and he had to stop the truck and wait. Not one of them looked at him. A woman on Delcambre Road called the sheriff about children standing in her yard after midnight. By the time the deputy arrived, the yard was empty, and the grass was flat in ten places. It sounded like the story kids tell in October.

It's exactly how it sounded to me. Until the 31st of the year I was 12. There were three of us. Tucker Vidrine was small and loud. He had a self-administered haircut and ate ketchup packets out of his pocket. He was the bravest person I've ever known. And I mean that in the... worst way because bravery in a 12-year-old is mostly a failure to see what was in front of him.

He went as a werewolf that year, a $5 drugstore mask with the fur already going bald at the chin. By 8.30, he'd shoved it up to the top of his head because it was too hot to breathe in. And there was Sarah Beth Kirkpatrick. She was taller than both of us that year. She ran cross-country. She kept a list on the back of a con-com. composition book of things she wanted to see before she died. Number four was a Grand Canyon. Number nine was snow. Number 11 was a whale. Any kind. Close enough that she could hear it breathe.

Her mother made her costume. She went to an astronaut. Coveralls died white in the machine, a patch sewn on the shoulder, a bicycle helmet spray painted and left a dry on the newspaper in the garage for two days. I was in love with her 12-year-old love the kind where you can't act normal in a room with someone and you don't know why she knew

she was kind about it in a way I didn't have the capacity to understand that she'd let me walk on the outside next to the traffic my daddy told me that's what a boy's supposed to do she never once needed it I went as a vampire a twelve dollar cape from the Freds on 84

a set of plastic fangs that cut my gums. I spit them out in a ditch before nine. It's Sarah Beth's idea to go looking. Everybody assumes it was Tucker because of how it went. It wasn't. Tucker wanted to bring his daddy's 22 if we ever went, which is why we didn't tell him the plan until that night. Sarah Beth wanted to see them because she was an adventurer.

She lived to see things. That was who she was. She'd worked out the easy part. You can't find them in a crowd, so you wait until there isn't one. All you have to do is not go home. We let the last little kids get collected off the street. We sat on a curb in front of the Methodist church with our bags between our feet, and we waited. I know exactly what we had with us.

For years afterward, I would lie in bed and inventory it, as if there were some item on the list that could have made a difference. I had my mother's old iPhone with the cracks. screen and no service plan. It worked on the Wi-Fi at the house. Out there it was a flashlight and a clock and nothing else. Tucker had a pillowcase two-thirds full and the buck knife his daddy given him. Sarah Beth had her helmet under her arm because it made her ears hurt after a while. The porch lights went off up to Canberra one at a time, like someone was walking down the street pulling them. Then there were kids coming up to sidewalk on the far side, going the wrong way.

out toward the county line. There were nine of them. They were single file. Tucker let out a small, oh, the sound coming out of him tiny and startled. I've had 11 years to figure out why we did it. And the answer is simple, and that's the truth. They looked like kids trick-or-treating.

That's the entire trick. And it's worked in this town since the truth. before my mother was born. One of them had on a stiff little dress with a sash and hard black shoes that she was carrying instead of wearing. One had a football jersey from a school that closed in 1961. One had a bed sheet with two holes cut in it. One had a t-shirt from a movie that came out when I was seven.

On the 31st of October, every single thing about them has an explanation. Any other night of the year, somebody stops the car. We followed him past the culvert, through the gap in the fence where the county gave up, along the power line cut where the grass is chest high and full of ticks, then into the pines. It's hard to explain that piece of woods at night if you haven't been in it. The trees are in rows because they were farmed. You're walking through a room with a thousand columns, and every direction is identical. The ground is 50 years deep in needles.

You do not make any sound at all. That was the first thing I noticed. How quiet our feet were. The second thing was that at some point the bugs quit. Not all at once. Backed off around us and I couldn't tell you when it finished. Tucker was still talking. He was doing a bit about what he was going to say to him.

Sarah Beth put her hand flat on his chest without looking at him and he stopped. Then we heard the counting. A child's voice, unhurried, climbing upward. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Tucker let out a laugh that came out too high. Sarah Beth quietly remarked that it sounded like hide-and-seek. They were in a clearing where the rose opened up. There was a moon that night, three-quarters,

and it came down through the gap and put everything in that gray you can still see color in if you look hard enough. We got down behind a deadfall. I could feel Tucker's heart against my shoulder. The biggest one was a boy, about 15. He was the one counting. Face against the pine, arm over his eyes, doing it the way you're supposed to.

The word that sticks when I try to describe them is clean. Every one of them was barefoot or carrying their shoes. Every one of their feet was clean. No dirt on the ankles. Nothing on the hems. Nobody had a bag. Nine kids out on Halloween night, and not one of them was carrying candy. Their faces wouldn't stay still in my memory.

I don't mean they moved. I mean that when I try to picture a face, my mind hands me a different one. And it's been doing that ever since. They were children They were children And they had been children A very long time The count went past 40

Sarah Beth thought out of breath And said we should go The little one in the sash turned her head and looked directly at us She hadn't been looking a second before She asked in a perfectly friendly kid voice What we were supposed to be Nobody answered

She got up out of the grass and came a little way toward us, not fast, and stopped maybe 20 feet off with their hands behind her back. She asked if we had sweet tarts, and she said she'd trade us for them. I need you to understand how bad that was. It was the most ordinary sentence anybody said the whole night. I traded candy on the curb four hours earlier. There's a whole economy to it. Snickers over Milky Way. Nobody wants the orange peanut butter ones.

You don't give up a full size for anything. She had the cadence exactly right. Tucker's hand went down into his pillowcase. I heard every rapper. I remember thinking very clearly, with no idea where it came from, don't give her anything. Tucker asked what she would give him for it, and she told him,

in that same sweet voice that he could have whatever he wanted, sweetheart. Tucker stood up. I still can't figure out why he did it. I don't think he decided to. I think his body did it for him. Some old piece of him decided being found crouching was worse than being found standing. He came up out of the deadfall with a werewolf mask sitting on top of his. head and his pillowcase and his fist. He announced that he was Tucker Vidran, and he wasn't scared

of them. He told him his name. The counting stopped. Two of them were on him before the pillowcase hit the ground. Not running. I never saw a step. There was a distance, and then there was no distance. The noise was wet, and it went on longer than it should have. Underneath it, there was a sound of enthusiasm, like pigs at a trough at the fair. His legs kept going for a second. That's the part I could never tell the deputies. His legs kept running after there was no reason for them to. Then the smell came across the clearing.

Pennies and warm laundry. Sarah Beth didn't scream. She grabbed the back of my collar and pulled. She was so much stronger than me If she'd let go on me and just run She would have made it I want that clear She was the fastest 12 year old in the county

And she stopped To take hold of my shirt That's why they got her Instead of me They didn't do to her What they did to tuck her The big boy The one who'd been counting

Took her by both arms He did it gently, which was worse. He held her like you hold someone helping them down off a tailgate. He leaned in and asked her something. I could hear the shape of it and not the words. It was short, it went up at the end. Her mouth made a no. Then his head went down against her neck,

and she made the sound of somebody getting the wind knocked out of him. and her heels came up off the ground. She was floating in front of him. I had my face in the dirt behind that deadfall, pine needles in my mouth. When he lifted his head, one of the others came forward, a girl about ten in the bed sheet. She'd opened her own arm at the crook somehow,

and she put it up to Sarah Beth's mouth and held the back of her head with the other hand. She... was patient. Sarah Beth fought her. Then she stopped fighting her. The stopping is what I see. The stopping is what has been playing behind my eyes every day since. Tucker was over in four seconds, and Tucker was only a sound. Sarah Beth was a girl I knew deciding somewhere in there that she was thirsty. Her hands came up and held the other girl's arm in place.

I stood up. I was 12. There was no plan in me. There's nothing in my head but her name. I said it. I said Sarah Beth. Nine faces came around. She looked at me.

She looked right at me, and there was nothing behind her eyes that recognized anything. It broke something open in me. And so I did the stupidest and most human thing I've ever done. I took a step toward her with my hands out, and I said, Sarah Beth, it's me. It's Danny. The clearing went quiet. Then all of them, all nine,

at the same time in that friendly voice in every register at once. Danny. They said my name back. It didn't even sound like a word. It sounded like a receipt. The little one in the sash said, Thank you, sweetheart. I ran.

They let me. I understand that now. At the time, I thought I'd outrun him, and I was proud of it. for about a year. That pride is one of the things I'd like to go back and take off myself. They let me go because we were done. Something had been handed over and something had been handed back.

It took me until I was about 19 to work out what I got. I got to be the only one who remembers her. That is not a mercy. That's what you're left holding after a bad trade. I don't remember choosing a direction. I know I went through the power line cut because I came out of it with both shins cut up, and I didn't feel either one until the next day. I know I lost the cape somewhere.

I know I fell hard enough at some point to bite through the inside of my cheek, and I got up still running with my mouth full of blood, and for about 100 yards, I thought it was tuckers. That's the closest thing I've ever come in my life to just lying down in the dirt and quitting. Planted pine doesn't get lighter. You can run for a long time and every row looks like the row you just left. I came out on Belcambra. It was dark, the whole length of it.

Every porch light off, every window. Halloween was over and everybody had gone to bed. and the street looked like it looks any other night of the year. There was a wheelbarrow in the Watson's yard with the jack-lantern sitting at it that had already gone soft on one side. I found the first house with a car in the drive, and I hit the door with both hands. It was Mr. Fontenow. He came to it in a t-shirt with his glasses off, saying something like, What in the world?

Then he got a good look at me. And he stopped saying anything. Tried. ever since to remember what I told him. His wife told my mother later that I didn't say a word, that I stood on their steps for a while and that I sat down on them. When they asked me my name, I couldn't tell them. I've thought about that a lot.

That was the first time. Tucker Vidran was real. There were dogs. There were helicopters out of the parish for two days. His picture was on the news. in a school photo where his hair was doing that thing it did. There's still a faded ribbon on the fence that the power line cut, and every year around this time, somebody ties a new one.

They found enough of him to bury. They ruled it in animal attack. They were telling meetings about feral hogs. For two years after that, nobody in this town let their kid out on Halloween at all. I was on the tailgate of a deputy's truck at four in the morning with somebody's jacket around me and Tucker's blood dried into the knee of my jeans

and I said You have to find Sarah Beth The deputy asked who that was I said Sarah Beth Kirkpatrick She was with us, she lives on the camera He wrote it down I watched him write it down

That's what I hold on to When I start to think I made all this up I watched a grown man Put her name on a path in his handwriting, and then I watched him look at it, and I watched his face do something I didn't have a word for at 12. He asked again who that was. They kept me in Alexandria for nine days. I want to be fair. A 12-year-old had watched his friend get killed on Halloween night and was insisting on a second missing child. There was no such child. To Kirkpatrick's undel

Camber were a couple in their 40s with one son, Nathan, who was in the Air Force. They were very kind about it when my mother called. They were also confused, and the confusion was real. So they gave me things to take, and I stopped saying her name, because I figured out fast at saying it was what kept me in there. Here's what I found in years after. Her house has the same couch, the same everything. The room that was her bedroom is where her mother keeps a sewing machine and a treadmill. There's a plastic bin in the Kirkpatrick's garage with a bicycle helmet sitting on top of it, spray-painted white, tape lines still on it where somebody masked off the visor.

It's been out there since before I was old enough to drive. Mrs. Kirkpatrick caught me looking at it once and said they must have used that for something. She posts a picture on Facebook every Halloween, a throwback, the kids on her front steps and their costumes. She's been doing it since before I had an account, and she's still doing it. I look at every one of them. There's one from the year we were nine. Tucker's a ninja, and I'm a skeleton, and there's a foot and a half a daylight between us on that step, and both of us are turned slightly inward toward it.

The middle school yearbook that year has 22 kids in her homeroom photo instead of 23. The rows are even. Nobody's standing weird. It's a good photograph. There was a website for the parish cross-country meets. It's still up. There's a picture of the finish at the October Invitational, and there's a girl breaking the tape three strides ahead of everybody.

And she's looking off to the left of the camera at somebody, and the caption underneath names every other runner in the frame. Every year, on the 9th of February, I sit in my truck in that clinic parking lot because that was a birthday, and I watch a woman have a completely ordinary day. Nobody says my name. It started slow enough that it took me until high school to notice.

Once I noticed, I couldn't stop. Now it's the loudest thing in my life. My boss calls me, Hey Man and Bud and Chief. The girl I dated for eight months called me Babe and Hun and you. When I asked her to say my name, just say it. She laughed and asked what I meant. I told her, please.

She told me not to be weird and then change the subject. I sat there and watched her change the subject like water going around a rock. My own mother calls me honey and son and baby. The mail says my name. My paycheck says my name. It exists on paper. It doesn't exist in anybody's mouth. I'm not lonely in the normal way.

I've had the normal kind too, and they're different animals. This is more like being a piece of furniture that people are polite to. There's exactly one place my name still lives. Somebody carried it out to the pines all those years ago, and it's been out there ever since. About four years ago, it started calling back. At first, it was only in dreams, faint. Then it was in the window unit, in the hour when it cycles.

Then it was in the pipes, which is the thing houses do. Then it was in a lot behind the store when I was locking up at 11 at night, from the tree line across the ditch. And it was not the pipes. It was not a dream. It was a girl's voice saying Danny with the exact upward hook she used to put on it when she thought I was being slow. It comes most nights now.

Not all. Never when it's raining. I have no theory about that. There's the thing I have to say, because if I leave it out, this is a love story. And it is not a love story. I saw her. 14 months ago, in the lot at the Dollar General on 84, past midnight, at the far edge where the light quits, she's still 12.

She hasn't been anywhere. She hasn't seen the Grand Canyon. She hasn't seen snow. She's never once heard a whale breathe. She isn't going to. She's not a woman who grew up. She's a child who's been standing in the dark for years with my name in her mouth. Whatever's calling me is not the girl I was in love with.

That girl died on her feet in a clearing while another child held her head. What's left has her voice in my name and it's hunger, and it's been hungry of very long time. And it is patient. I know all of that. I'm going anywhere. It isn't bravery. Tucker had that and look what happened.

Part of it is that I'm tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. Part of it is that she stopped and took hold of my collar and I've never been able to put that down. And most of it is this. They asked her name, and she wouldn't give it, and they took it anyway. Then I handed them mine out loud, in front of all of them, because I couldn't stand for her not to know me for four more seconds. She's out there because I said her name.

I'm here because I said mine. It's 1220. The street's been dark for ten. two hours. There's a bowl of tutsi rolls on the table by my door that nobody's touched. Because the last kids came at eight and they were four years old and dressed as construction equipment and their daddy waited on the sidewalk with flashlight. Somebody just knocked. I'm going to open my door. I'm going to stand in my own porch light and look at whatever's on my steps. Twelve years old. In white coveralls, her mother died in the machine.

and I'm going to say the thing you say to a child on your steps on Halloween night. The thing every grown person in this town is said to them for 80 years without once hearing the answer. And what's your name, sweetheart? I don't know what that does. Maybe it gives her back. Maybe it's just the second half of a sentence I started when I was 12. But somebody has to ask her. Nobody asked her all those years ago.

Nobody's asked her in so many years, Sarah Beth. In next up, let's keep things going with Cole. Hi, I'm Cole, and this is goodbye to you. Do you remember Rick Jackson? I know you still do. I think he was the one kid in your grade with a dad even meaner than yours. But he was a big kid, not like you. Well, you had to point to all of that,

fear, shame, and rage inward, and shove it down, he could redirect it outward onto kids like you. It must have been tough for you. Too much for an eight-year-old to handle, having to take all of that at home, only to turn around and take some more at school, never having anywhere to go to escape it. No wonder you were the way you were. Pitifully nervous, stuttering, painfully, shuner. A lot of people felt bad for you. I remember that. They all said so, behind Rick's back, after the fact. But then there they were, laughing, egging Rick on rewarding him. Wasn't I the only person who did something about it?

I was the only one who got that whole group together to confront Rick, to teach him what would happen if he messed with him. you again. I was the guy then, wasn't I? The only one who could have organized a group like that. I was it, the guy everyone wanted to be. You know, sometimes I looked at pictures of me from then, and I can't believe that I'm him. After that, you were always there, right under my wing. I brought you over to our table with Pete, Doug, Chris, and all those guys. It just sounds so insane now. I took you to birthday parties, sleepovers, and my dad even got you onto all of my teams. Remember when my dad was something?

Remember when we were ten and you got beamed by that pitch and couldn't stop crying in the dugout? Remember how no one laughed at you? Those few years, you were at my house so much. My mom used to jote that you were her third son. and you were my brother, more of a brother than Will ever was. I remember how you were that first time I brought you to my house, how you'd said you'd never been inside one so big and so clean. You kept talking about how clean it was.

I think that impressed you more. Then there was that first time you slept over, you quietly sobbing in your sleeping bag because you couldn't believe a family that didn't scream at each other could exist. Oh, and don't forget about Erica. I saw how you looked at her towards the end. We never talked about it. Obviously not, because she's my sister, but I knew.

I let you have it, your little crush. I never gave you a hard time. Back then, I had a lot of friends. A lot, but it was always you and me. wasn't it? All that one-on-one time we had? I didn't have anywhere near as much of that with anyone else. That means we're best friends, doesn't it? I mean, I thought so, and I don't think I've ever been happier than I was back then when I was helping you, protecting you, dreaming up ways to get you out of your house. And then, when we were 11, after end game, you were so obsessed with the idea

of the multiverse. You read everything you could about it online, went down every rabbit hole. All that time spent inside made you even paler. You didn't use these words exactly, but I know you liked the idea that there were universes out there where you were less you and more me. That was the time when things were getting really bad with your dad. You were sure that something was coming that he was really going to do something. Hades Boson and the Mandala effect. You were convinced that all of us, at one point or another, had passed from one universe and into another. Universes that were only minorly different, like the thing with Pitchie's tale or the Monopoly Guy's Monocle, but you needed to be more intentional than that. You needed to travel

further. To a universe with bigger differences to your personal circumstances, and some corner of the internet had convinced you that people existed who could send themselves or someone else to another universe at will. So you had us meditate and do all those mental expansive exercises and hopes that one of us would have that power. I went along with it because I cared about you. You know, I really have to hand it to you. You never gave up and you were right. Me, being me, of course, I was the one with a super rare power, but I don't think you've ever appreciated how traumatizing that day was for me. There we were, sitting by my pool, because you said the sound of running water would help, expanding our minds and visualizing where we'd like to send you.

And then I felt it, me pulling the door open, a door I've never been able to step through myself. In my head, I could see your essence hovering right in front of it. I knew what it all was, what it meant on some fundamental level. I was just so excited that I'd done it, that I could do it. I sent you on through without even considering what I was doing, and then you were just gone. I felt your presence leave. When I opened my eyes, I was sitting alone by the pool.

I never thought it would actually work, even if I'd hoped it would in a kid sort of, way. I don't know how to feel. It was just all so big and scary. You were really gone. No one had ever heard of you. Not my parents, siblings, teachers, kids at school. Your parents weren't even around anymore, and as far as I've been able to tell, over the years, they've never even met. I ended up turning the whole thing into a joke because even though I was 11, I knew people will try to send me somewhere if I didn't. I tried to convince myself, too, that it had all been a joke, that you never actually did exist.

I mean, it seemed possible since as the days went on, I kept on getting flooded with memories of experiences that I'd never had. memories that eventually became more real to me than my true ones. Memories of all the things I would have done had you not existed. Steadily, you faded, until I almost forgot about you completely. Until that next Halloween. You did that. Found a way to cross between universes on the day when the boundaries between them,

are thinnest. I think I do believe your theory now that monsters were just ancient interdimensional travelers from more divergent and crueler universes. It had only been a few months, but you already looked so much better, calmer, happier, and well on your way to being well-adjusted. You'd even gotten taller, just not as tall as me. You had been flooded with memories of your own, but you said you hadn't let yourself forget about me. You said you forgave me for forgetting about you, but I knew right away who you were. Even though I didn't want to, even though I didn't want any of it to be true. I skipped school that day, so I could spend it with you.

You taught me up on everything, how wonderful your parents were in your new universe, how you had a little sister there, how you had friends now, how you'd always had friends there. How you lived in our town. How it was the exact same except the kids were different. How the parents were mostly the same, but they just had different kids. How the kids may have been different, but they were really just pretty much the same. How even my parents had different kids, four instead of three, and all yonder than Will, Erica, and I, had been. We had a great day, and then a great night trick-or-treating. Just before midnight, you had to cross back over, and I really did miss you. I could never send myself to another

universe or cross over to one like you do every Halloween. I've practiced, and I've practiced, researched everything that I could just like you used to do, but it's just never been there for me. Not like sending others through that power is always there whenever I get into the right headspace, and after I've rested for long enough. I've had reason to use my power since you've been gone. I guess 13 really was my unlucky year, because that's when my life started coming undone, and not at all gradually. That was the year my dad's business failed, and my parents started fighting. The year I developed the acne that still no dermatologist has ever been able to treat. The year my growth started tapering off.

The year I started getting surpassed athletically. The year Rick Jackson humiliated me at Callie Ryan's pool party and I lost all my friends. It was the year I stopped being me. Nothing I tried mattered. I wasn't the alpha. anymore and no one took me seriously. Honestly, it was like everyone was happy I'd become a pariah, a laughing stock. It's like how people love it when a celebrity falls. They wait for it, anticipate it. I sent Rick away, but it didn't matter. There was always someone else to

humiliate me in some other way. It's like that's what this universe's plan was for me, and I was trapped in it. And then there was you, popping by once a year ever ascending and I declined. We were 14 when you were finally taller, and 16 when you towered over me. You had pimples, never acne, nothing at all. You had friends, and more importantly, girlfriends. You went to parties, made teams, got straight A's, and had plans for the future. Your parents were proud. Your sister loved you, and you couldn't have had a more stable home. You freaking went steady with Callie Ryan. Of all our peers who didn't exist in your universe, of course, she, she, had to. I loved her when we were 11. You knew that. It was my destiny to be with her because she was my

equal until she wasn't, until she was so much more. I can still remember her face how much she laughed that day at the pool, a day that now technically never happened, but one that I will never forget. You told me your Callie. would never do something like that. But she would, under the right circumstances, because you and I know better than anyone else that we are all only what our circumstances allow us to be. She's not here anymore in my universe, but it doesn't matter.

There will always be a Talley Ryan and a Rick Jackson. We're all just filling the roles. And how good does your new role feel? Year after year, you now get to be the one being kind to your pathetic friend. You get to be the one who has it all and gets to feel so good about giving a little bit back to the one who has nothing. Don't think I haven't felt that. Don't think I haven't realized you see me as your charity case. Don't think I don't know how annoyed you feel coming to see me every Halloween, how obligated.

How this year you'd just like to go to your awesome Halloween party on your awesome new campus, how you'd much rather not spend the night with a loser whose life peaked as a preteen. You know, I haven't used my power in a long time, and I think I feel very well rested. You're always telling me about the power of positive thinking, and that I have the ability to thrive if I would just get out of my own way. Well, I have a universe picked out for you, and I would love to see just how well you can thrive. there through the power of your will. I mean, it's far. I'm not sure you're going to be able to cross back over,

so I guess goodbye to you. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us at creepypod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through creative

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