Series By: deathfox919
So life is a bitch. Most of you know that, but I'll reiterate it. I have had to move out Tacoma, Washington and get a job, which was a major pain in my ass. But, I wanted to begin sharing more stories with all of you lovely people now that I'm beginning to have a stable life again. I hope some of you guys remember me, as it's been a very long time since I posted. Regardless, here we go.
Let me tell you a story from my childhood.
Even with a strange town like mine, I have many moments of nostalgia from my earlier years. I often fondly look back on my elementary and middle school years. Hell, anything before I was due to go off to college was a very fond memory. All you adults out there can probably testify. God how I wish I could go back to those simpler days.
This is one of the few stories from my childhood that I do not recollect all that often. When I do, it sure as hell isn’t out of fondness. Let me tell you about Sunny Friends Daycare.
My father didn’t retire until two years ago, and he worked many years at an architecture firm in the nearby city. His days were long and mostly uneventful, but he made some insane money off of his job. My mother was a special education teacher at the local middle school until she got a much better job offer to work in the financial aid office at a large university about an hour or so away. The only catch was that she’d be working basically all year round, and she’d have to go to the office on campus.
This was back in the summer between fifth and sixth grade, so I wasn’t really old enough to be taking care of myself home alone for about nine hours a day. Both of my parents realized this, and that’s when they reached out to Sunny Friends Daycare.
One of the moms my mom hung out with all the time sent her kids, Riley and Carrie (whom I talked to somewhat regularly for a long time), over to the daycare and they loved it. My mom probably looked into it for two full minutes then just signed me up. To be fair to my mother, she didn’t normally do this. She pulled an all-nighter once making sure the summer camp I went to after completing sixth grade would be safe and enjoyable. It wasn’t even out of fear that Jason Voorhees haunted that camp or anything like that, she was just being motherly.
My mom sat me down one Saturday and explained that she was starting a new job and that I would be going to Sunny Friends Daycare during the week for most of the summer.
I put up a bit of a fuss, but then accepted it.
That Monday, we arrived at the daycare and my mom kissed me before she ushered me out of the car. Upon stepping out of her Saab, I saw that there were some kids that I recognized there. Kadyn Nowitzki and Rachel Dunn and of course Riley and Carrie were all there. Riley spotted me and asked me if I wanted to come to play with the action figures in the big playroom. I quickly felt myself liking the daycare and soaking up the experience like nobody’s business.
After the first week, we had managed to make a friend circle. It was comprised of Riley and Carrie, Rachel, Kadyn, Ivan Byrde, and Eden Duquette. We invented a secret language and secret hand symbols and did everything that ten-year-olds would do together.
For the most part, we were the oldest kids there, so not many of the others wanted to be friends with us. Connie Winston was almost twelve but she liked to pretend like she was an adult and basically ignored all of us children. She’s a prostitute in New Orleans now and makes about twice my annual salary in a month.
Either way, I was quickly looking forward to daycare every day and always wanted to bring whatever toys I could. I brought my Nintendo DS and we would all play Mario Kart together in the corner. Rachel usually screamed like a banshee when she lost (having heard a banshee twice in my life, I can say that Rachel had an obnoxiously loud scream) and got us into trouble. Other than that, we were usually the saints of daycare.
We took care of ourselves, cleaned up after ourselves, didn’t go out of our way to destroy the place, and we knew how to use the bathroom. We became employee favorites and Becca Thompson would always bring us Snickers bars on Fridays to show her appreciation for being (mostly) in control of ourselves and potty-trained.
Miles Vandermeer was seven years old and was still wearing diapers because he was too afraid to shit on an actual toilet. If I remember correctly, it remained that way until eighth grade for him.
Again, we were the saints of daycare.
I remember the day Rachel beat me in a race on Rainbow Road and I knocked over this massive box of miscellaneous crayons out of pure childish anger. That was the only time I remember Becca, or anyone at the daycare for that matter, being angry with me. I don’t even remember getting a bad placement, I think I finished third and I was just pissed Rachel had managed to beat me.
Now I’ll get to the strange and horrific nature of this story. Otherwise, why would I be telling you about this daycare? No one wants to listen to something like that, not here at least.
In the summer of 2008, our town was seeing more tourism than usual, if you can even call people passing through to get to the state park tourism. We also had about ten different families move into a new suburban sprawl by my apartment building. Compared to 2006 or 2007, we were flush with money and we had no idea what to do with it. The board considered putting it into a YMCA center on the north end of town, but that fell through. I’m not positive this is why that happened, but I feel like it certainly has something to do with it.
On August 7th, my mom dropped me off at daycare as per usual. I ran inside and cheerfully greeted Riley and Carrie who were sitting in our little corner of the room ready to play some more Mario Kart (we’d played a bunch of games that summer, but always kept coming back to Mario Kart). Rachel and Eden showed up a few minutes later and I insisted on playing some races from the Lightning Cup, as I could never unlock it. The day flew by and before I knew it, I went home. I had also had Ivan help me unlock the Lightning Cup, and played Banshee Boardwalk until the music drove me to near insanity.
On Friday, August 8th, my mom pulled up to daycare, and I was thrilled to see Becca and get to choose which candy bar I got (since we had been extra good that week). However, she turned the car back around and drove me home when she saw three police cars in front of the building and two men in biohazard suits walk around the back of the bright blue structure.
I never saw the biohazard suits, I just saw the police cars with their blue lights flashing like crazy and my mother’s petrified face before pulling a U-Turn in the middle of Harper Road, which is one of the more traveled roads in town, and flooring it back home.
When we got home, she told me to go to my room and to wait there for her. I protested a bit and asked if I was in trouble. She assuaged me and said that I wasn’t as long as I went up there now, shut the door, and let her make a few private phone calls.
I did that while she called Riley and Carrie’s mom, who had just gotten off the phone with Eden’s mom while trying to get the number for Kadyn’s mom.
Five corpses had been found in the woods just behind Sunny Friends Daycare. All of them were of children who attended the daycare. One of them was Ivan. It didn’t seem like some monster in the woods killed them or a cult sacrificed them or anything like that. It just seemed like five random children were lured into the woods by some psychopath and bludgeoned to death with an object like a hammer.
Sunny Friends was obviously shut down and left for dead. Every single employee was put under a strong microscope by the police to see if any of them could’ve done it. None of them were deemed the killer.
My mom was able to get a week off, mostly because the financial aid office wasn’t too overwhelmed at the moment so that she could find me another place to go during the week.
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