It Sounds Like Fiction

Wren narrows her eyes at the strange man. Jimmy wasn’t much to go on but Wren had read a little about ghosts. She knew most ghosts that haunted a house were tied to it somehow. “Were you murdered here?” She asks. She knew it was a personal question but to be fair, he was haunting her bedroom.

“No,” Jimmy laughs.

Wren suddenly felt foolish. “Well, what are you doing here then?”

“Can we stop walking in circles? I’m getting dizzy.” Wren stopped moving and Jimmy did the same. “Thank you,” he smiles.

Wren crosses her arms across her chest. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Jimmy heaves a sigh, or…it looked like he was attempting to heave a sigh, but considering ghosts didn’t breathe Wren thought it must’ve just been done out of habit. “I used to live here.”

“Like…recently? Wren asked curiously, after all, she didn’t know anything about the previous owners.

Jimmy shakes his head. “No. I hadn’t lived here for a while before I died. Hey, what year is it?”
Wren cocks her head to the side. “Um, 2017.”

“Wow,” Jimmy says, taking a seat on the bed. Wren was surprised to see the bed bend under Jimmy’s…weight? Did ghosts weigh anything? “Eight years? Eight fucking years?”

“You’ve been like this for eight years?” Wren asks surprised.

“I guess so,” Jimmy shrugs. “Doesn’t feel like it, though. I guess time moves differently when you’re dead.”

Wren nods but doesn’t reply. She was still trying to process the fact that she was having a casual conversation with a dead person. She watches Jimmy as he begins to make a series of odd expressions.

Suddenly, he looks excited. “How is the band doing?” And then worried, “Shit, they didn’t stop, did they?”

“I’m sorry, who?” Wren asks.

“My band, Avenged Sevenfold,” Jimmy informs her.

Wren shakes her head. “Avenged what? I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of them.” Worry coats Jimmy’s face again and he starts to look grief-stricken. “But I don’t listen to much music,” Wren tells him quickly. “Look, we can google them and see what pops up.”

Jimmy halfheartedly nods and Wren knew that he was fearing the worst. Wren didn’t know who this band was but apparently, it meant the absolute world to him. She grabbed her laptop and booted it up. As soon as her home screen popped up she clicked on the Google Chrome icon.

“What did you say the name was?” Wren asks.

“Avenged Sevenfold,” Jimmy told her, traces of hope laced in his voice.

Wren nods as her fingers glide across her keyboard. The first website looked like their official website. The second was their official twitter account.

“Look, it was last updated six hours ago,” Jimmy exclaims. Wren didn’t even have to look at him to know he was grinning ear to ear. Smiling herself, she clicked on the link.

“We hope you all enjoy every minute of The aStage. Get it here,” Jimmy read the pinned tweet out loud. “Is that their new album?” Wren shrugged and moved the cursor to the search bar.

“Wait!” Jimmy exclaims as the page changes. “What are you doing? I wasn’t done reading!”

“Getting your answer,” Wren told him. “Look, it looks like it’s a song and an album.”

“Click on that,” Jimmy says pointing to a link. Wren does as she told and when the video pops up she turns the volume up.

Jimmy begins to smile as soon as the song starts and instead of watching the music video, he closes his eyes. Wren watched the video and listened to the song but mostly enjoyed watching Jimmy as he tapped his foot to the beat.

“Holy shit, Gates!” he whispers enthusiastically as what sounded like a guitar solo started.

Wren made a mental note to ask Jimmy about what he meant by that and who “Gates” was when the song ended. She, too, found herself nodding her head to the beat as the song progressed. When the song ended, Jimmy and Wren sat there in silence for a few moments before Jimmy spoke up.

“Wow. That was fucking genius. Is there any more? When did that come out? Who is their new drummer?”

Wren laughs and types a bit more into the search bar. “Uh, according to this, in October 2016 they surprise released the album and I guess the music video came out a couple of weeks before that.”

“Surprise released?” Jimmy laughs. “Those assholes are always up to something!”

“And it looks like their new drummer is…” Wren pauses as her eyes skim over the words, searching for a name. “Brooks Wackerman. It says he was formally the drummer of –”

“Bad Religion,” they both say in unison.

“Good choice, boys. He’s bad ass!” Jimmy smiles.

“So, you were the drummer? And Gates? He is…the guitar player?”

Jimmy opened his mouth to reply but before the words could escape, Wrens bedroom door flew open.

“Mom!” Wren shrieked. She quickly looked on the bed beside her where Jimmy sat, but he was already gone. “Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?”

Wrens mother narrowed her eyes and instantly began to glance around the room. “I heard voices. You don’t have a boy up here, do you?”

“No,” Wren said a little too quickly.

Her mother shoves her hands on her hips. “Wren Eliza Montgomery! You better not be lying to me.”

“Go ahead and take a look around if you don’t believe me,” Wren told her, though her mother already began searching. “I was just on the internet so you probably just heard this guy from this band talking in a video.”

“A band?” Wrens mother stopped searching and gave her daughter a disapproving look.

“They’re a famous metal band. Apparently, they’re from here, and their drummer used to live in this house. Pretty cool, huh?” Wren asked but she knew better. She knew her mother was probably thinking a lot of things a metal band from Huntington Beach, but it being pretty cool wasn’t one of them.

Instead of answering Wren, her mother began to walk out of her room. “Just don’t stay up too late,” she told her, closing the door. Wren was in the middle of allowing a sigh of relief escape her when her mother popped her head back in the door. “Oh, and Wren?”

“Yeah?”

“No more famous metal band shenanigans, okay? You have more important things to worry about like your academics, college…your future.”

Wren nodded. “Okay.”

As soon as Wren heard her mother's footsteps disappearing down the stairs, she glanced next to her, expecting to see Jimmy occupying the space next to her again. She frowns upon seeing the empty space. “Jimmy?” She whispers quietly. Nothing. She waits a couple of seconds before calling his name out again, this time a little bit louder. Still, nothing.

Wren chews on her lip for a moment before getting up from the bed and making her way out into the hallway and then the bathroom. She begins to get ready for bed by washing her face and brushing her hair and teeth. She pulls her hair up into a messy bun before exiting the bathroom. “I’m going to bed,” she calls downstairs. When no on replies to her, she walks back to her bedroom.

Frowning again when she notices Jimmy is still absent, she grabs her earphones from the top of her dresser before turning off her light and crawling into bed. She plugs her earphones into its respective port of her laptop and gets comfortable.

Wren kind of felt bad for what she was about to do but the curiosity was nearly suffocating her. She searched for Avenged Sevenfold again but instead of focusing on their latest single, she searched for the members of the band.

M. Shadows, Synyster Gates, Zacky Vengeance, Johnny Christ. “Why does everyone except Brooks have funny names?” She wonders quietly out loud, half-expecting an answer from Jimmy but it never comes.

She continues down the page until the “Current Members” turns into the “Former Members.” She clicks on the first funny name, The Rev. A familiar, brighter face pops up on the next screen followed by James Owen “Jimmy” Sullivan and February 9th, 1981 – December 28th, 2009. Wow, so it really had been almost eight years.

Wren continued reading the biography of her new ghost friend. From the sound of the article, Jimmy was not only very talented but also extraordinarily loved. Wren caught a lump in her throat when her eyes fell upon the big, black bolded word.

Death. Two small paragraphs and a quote followed it.

Suddenly, Wren didn’t want to know. It was like she was only just now realizing that Jimmy was a real person. He was a real person that lived and breathed; that loved and lost; that laughed and cried; he was a real person that died. But it was like a bad car wreck, you know, when deep down you know you should stop looking but you can’t tear your eyes away from the accident. Wren couldn’t help herself, her eyes continued past the bolded letters even though she didn’t want them to.

Jimmy died of an overdose of a mix of pills and alcohol. Was it on purpose? Was that why he was still here? Because he killed himself and wasn’t allowed through the pearly white gates of Heaven or whatever happened after death?

The quote was from one of his bandmates. It mentioned a song called Fiction which apparently, Jimmy wrote three days before his death. Wren immediately logged into the YouTube website and searched for the song. She clicked on the first video that popped up and stuck her earphones in her ears.

Wren scrolled through the comments as she listened, learning that the voices she was hearing were a mix of M. Shadows and Jimmy. She stopped reading, however, when she read a comment claiming the song was a suicide note. She would let Jimmy tell her that if he wanted her to know. For now, she would just enjoy the last song he wrote.

After Fiction ended, another song by Jimmy and his friends played, and then another after that. Wren allowed the music to play in the background as she googled more about the band.

After a couple of hours of reading and no sign of Jimmy, Wren closed her laptop and snuggled down in her bed. She decided tomorrow, or whenever she saw Jimmy again, she would tell him about the foREVer tagline and show him the video for “So Far Away.”

“He would like that,” she thought before sleep claimed her.

Notes