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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/karenvideoeditor on 2024-04-10 04:37:39.
Whenever I saw those action movies on TV, with cryptic communications between spies and conspiracies that ‘went all the way to the top’, I always thought they were exciting. Who wouldn’t? Our ordinary lives, being Joe Schmoe and having a wife and 2.5 kids, is tedious at best, which I think is one of the reasons so many of us have aimed for different lives. Not just more fulfilling, but more interesting, more engaging. Not all of us achieve that James-Bond life, of course, but we do reach.
Turns out? Being involved in that kind of life isn’t as great as I’d imagined.
“Hey, Ketchup!” came the shout from the living room. “Get in here!”
I barked out a laugh, putting Family Guy on mute and shoving myself up off the couch. “I told you, only my high school buddies ever used to call me that.”
What I used to consider the embarrassing story behind that particular nickname was, at this point, hilarious. In the cafeteria one day, the cap loose on the ketchup bottle, I shook it, and it went directly all of my shirt, making me look like a murder victim. So, in hindsight, I suppose the nickname could’ve been a lot more gruesome. My classmates had instead gone with something simple.
“Yeah, but you got a letter addressed to you,” Connor told me, handing over a few envelopes.
I flipped past two bills, and my gaze turning curious. There was a letter to me here in the home I rented with three roommates, something that never happened aside from birthdays and holidays. Our address was handwritten, but rather than my name, the letter was addressed to ‘Ketchup’. “Huh,” I muttered. Examining the return address, also handwritten, I shook my head. “Dunno who it is. No one’s called me that for…geez, has it been six years already?”
“Maybe your high school realized they messed up giving you that diploma and you need to give it back?” Connor suggested, walking backwards as he spoke.
“Ha ha!” I called after him as he headed up the stairs to his room. Sticking my thumb under the flap and tearing open the envelope, I sat down at the kitchen table, taking out the letter inside. There were two thin pieces of cardboard on either side of it, which had made the envelope hard to bend. A memory card in a plastic case dropped out onto the wooden surface of the table when I opened the piece of paper. I narrowed my eyes at the card and picked it up, examining it briefly before putting it down and turning my attention back to the letter.
Hey Jake,
This is Katie Branch. I know you always hated that nickname, but I needed to make sure this got to you. I can’t tell you what’s going on. And I can’t tell you what’s on that SD card (the password to unencrypt it is with someone else). But I need your help.
At this point my expression had turned serious and my spine straightened.
It’s been six years since graduation, but I know your memory isn’t that terrible, so picture me with contacts now instead of glasses and you’ve pretty much got it. Aside from that, my life has gone a bit crazy recently, and you won’t be familiar with that part of me. I work at a company that I won’t discuss here, for security reasons, and I’m in some trouble. The kind you can’t get away from. The kind you need to make sure the people closest to you don’t know about, or it could put them in danger.
I swallowed hard, my eyes flicking up and around my kitchen, feeling as if there were eyes on me. I’d never gotten a letter like this and I’d sure as hell never expected to. Taking a deep breath, I read on.
You remember that time you punched Andy Shaw in the nose after he wouldn’t stop bullying Charlie? When the school wouldn’t do anything and you couldn’t just stand there and watch? I do. To be honest, that moment is who you are to me. You’re protective, you don’t put up with bullies, and you’ve got a good heart. So, I decided to go to you on this. I decided I could trust you.
I’ll be emailing you every three days from now on. It’ll be something you can recognize from me, but it won’t talk about things that actually happened. As long as those emails keep coming, keep the SD card. You don’t need to buy a safe or anything; just put it somewhere no one will stumble upon it. If that third day ever comes and I don’t email you, I need you to mail this SD card to Saul Mertens at CNN. Address enclosed below.
Picking up the SD card, I stared at it as if doing so would eventually reveal its contents. When that didn’t work, perhaps unsurprisingly, I put it down and continued to read.
I’m sorry to put this on you. If you can’t handle this, stick the letter back in the envelope with the SD card, seal it up, and return to sender. I’ll find someone else. But I think I’m running out of time, so I’m hoping with everything in me that you’re still the guy I remember from high school. If I can count on you to do this, put two blank pieces of paper in this envelope before returning to sender.
Either way, thank you. I feel lucky to have people I know that I can turn to when my ship gets caught up in a storm. Hopefully, you’ll never have to do anything, and this’ll just be some weird story you get to tell down the line.
Sincerely,
Katie
I did it. Of course I did it. I wouldn’t have left a friend hanging, no matter how long it had been since we’d last spoken. With no clue what the hell was going on, I mailed the envelope back with the blank sheets of paper and put the SD card in an old piggie bank on my shelf that I occasionally chucked change into. And I waited.
The emails arrived like clockwork for months. Every three days, I’d wake up and there would be some nonsensical email from some lady calling herself Martha Kent, talking about things going on in her imaginary life. Until one morning, I booted up my laptop, checked my email, and it wasn’t there. It never arrived.
I skipped work that day, unable to leave my computer’s side. Genuinely concerned, I found myself pacing, unable to even concentrate on anything on Netflix to pass the time. I even opened every email in my spam folder in the hopes that something had gotten jumbled when it sent, but nothing. That night, I slept restlessly. How long was I supposed to wait until I took action? What if it was a fluke? I could get an email the next morning.
Despite my agitated mind, I fell asleep. And upon checking my email again that next morning, nothing.
I didn’t wait any longer than a few hours. That afternoon, I wrote the address of the guy at CNN, Saul Mertens, on an envelope and put five pieces of paper folded in it to make it difficult to bend, enclosed the SD card, and sent it off.
The next two days were agonizing. I stalked the reporter online furiously, finding everywhere he had an online presence and obsessively checking each of them. It wasn’t long before I spotted what it was that I’d sent out to him. Because the story took off, and the narrative they reported about the corruption and embezzling was on every news channel. Strangely, it was scary, and it was sad, and it was despicable, but it was anticlimactic.
Until the next day, when they found her body.
I kept an eagle eye on the news following the story as it continued to develop, and I probably knew her identity even before the police figured it out. Before they’d even connected it to the breaking news story dominating the airwaves. Her body had been pulled from the Hudson, they released a description and said they were going to check missing persons, and the police said her identity would not be confirmed until next of kin could be contacted.
Sitting there sunk deep into the couch cushions, tears in my eyes, I felt helpless. Katie clearly had taken on something too big for her to handle and what had I done? I’d sat on an SD card for a few months. Could I have reached out and encouraged her to seek out different, safer avenues of dealing with the situation she’d found herself in? I hadn’t even tried to contact her.
The next day, begrudgingly dragging myself out of bed to go into a job that I couldn’t quite convince myself mattered right now, my cell phone rang as I pulled out clothes from my closet. It wasn’t even yet 9 a.m., making it unlikely it was a spam call, so I picked up. “Yeah?” I asked tiredly.
“Ketchup?”
My heart stuttered in my chest. “Wh-What?”
“You heard me.”
I swallowed hard, taking a few unsteady steps and sitting down heavily on my bed. “Who is this?”
“Saul Mertens,” he spoke. My eyes widened in shock. “They identified the body.”
“I know,” I muttered. “Tell me they’re going to answer for this. That someone will go down for her murder.”
“That’s not why I’m calling,” he said, his voice soft. “She sent me a letter with the SD card’s password. She wanted me to make sure that everyone who helped her, the ones like you, know what you did.”
“I didn’t do enough, I should’ve-”
“That is exactly what I meant,” Saul interrupted. “She was a smart woman, and extremely careful. What happened her is terrible and tragic, but it was not your fault. You did exactly what you needed to here. You brought justice down on the people who tried to silence her. And what happened to her is not on you. It’s on them. All right?”
I let the words soak in for a long moment before I nodded. “All right.” I swallowed hard. “And Saul?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you. For making sure they didn’t get away with what they were doing.”
“Just doing my job, kid,” he said softly. “So was she. So were you. Sometimes, life sucks. Sometimes things aren’t right, they aren’t fair, and they hit us hard. All we can …
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