I pretended that my nonexistent female friend was raped by my nonexistent best friend

Burner account. This might be a little incoherent so bear with me.

One random day I had the fucking bright idea to do all this.

Annika was a year older than me, brown hair, blue eyes, reasonably attractive. She lived with her aunt and aunt’s boyfriend. Her parents had died four years ago at that point.

Ben was my age, brown hair, brown eyes, average looking, tall, athletic. Stable home life, youngest of four kids.

Neither of these people were real.

She texted me on a random Tuesday during lunch. “I was raped by Ben” was all she said.

How it happened: she was at a party, got blackout drunk, he took her upstairs and raped her while she protested, left, came back and apologized, brought her a glass of water and left. By the time she told me about it, it had been a month and a half since then, she had gotten a pregnancy test, and it had come back positive.

I left all my friends, paced around the school building, and sat back down, then left shortly after. That was the first time I had ever skipped school.

I had the cadence down and everything. She typed differently from how I typed. She acted differently from how I acted. Annika was so separate from me that even as I sit here and read the texts today, it feels like a real person I was texting.

I had three friends that I would keep up to date with the latest info.

Strategically, I planted clues so my parents would figure it out. I actually got in trouble for sneaking out (I wasn’t) to go to her house on Sundays (doesn’t exist) and got mad at me, the whole time knowing all the context. Long story short, I got mad at my mom, she yelled at me, I yelled back for the first time in my life, and my mom cried.

As the story goes, I eventually get her to go to a school counselor. She wouldn’t name-drop Ben, which was really what I wanted her to do, so I felt that I had to deal with him. I beat him up until he looked somewhat like Jared Leto in Fight Club. Then I forced him never to tell anybody under threat of exposing him. I only did so because Annika made me promise to. Her aunt found out and made her leave as soon as she graduated. In the current timeline, as of today, she lives in Reno with her toddler.

I’m too deep into the lie. I can’t turn back.

This was the single most formative thing I ever did in high school. It felt nice to be important to anyone in any way at all.

Why the fuck did I do this?