Work Text:
It’s an unfortunate characteristic of Flynn’s: when she’s bored, she Googles things.
Now, most of their late-night Wikipedia rabbit holes have proved fruitful, or at the very least, harmless. They’ve led to her sixth grade obsession with the Wonder Years, her rare talent for geocaching, and her propensity for tracking other people’s sugar intakes with color-coded graphs.
Like they said, harmless. A little odd, maybe, but interesting. When she’s bored, she Googles things, and no matter the subject, they always learn something new.
But Googling “Sunset Curve food poisoning 1995” may have been a mistake.
Wikipedia, obviously, tells Flynn things they mostly already knew: that Sunset Curve was an up-and-coming band of L.A. locals set to play The Orpheum on July 22, 1995, until three out of four of the band’s members died from food poisoning (or potentially just plain poisoning) after eating hot dogs cooked in battery acid from a street vendor called Sam ‘N Ella’s.
Flynn stares at that last detail for a good twenty minutes or so, certain it must be someone’s idea of a joke.
They click around, looking for any other information—the one news article on the tragedy, a painfully unfortunate TV interview with Alex’s parents, a string of increasingly aggressive “No comment”s from witness Rose Molina—and finally stumbles upon a more official report, hidden behind an LAPD firewall and a lot of censorship.
These details are less innocuous: they talk of seizures, of young boys vomiting blood. A half-intelligible 9-1-1 call from one Bobby Shaw. Three teenagers dead before the ambulance even made it to the hospital: Reggie, then Alex, then Luke.
Flynn shuts their laptop and breathes heavily into the darkness of her bedroom. She feels nauseous all of a sudden. Sweaty. It’s nothing compared to what those boys must have felt on what should’ve been the best day of their lives.
Flynn doesn’t know how they can joke about it now, how they can play music with Julie and go about each day of their renewed lives like they’re invincible. Sure, they don’t eat hot dogs anymore, but how can they stand to eat anything without being constantly paranoid that it’ll kill them again?
All Flynn knows is that she owes those ghost boys a hug the next time she sees them.
And that she’s gotta stop Googling things.