Eddie Baby

Chapter 63.

Eddie's P.O.V

That was the first time I ever told anyone about the death of my best friend Bobby Hammond. That was something I never shared with anyone and honestly, I never planned on sharing it with my fiancée but I had to go and open my damn mouth, regretting it instantly but there was no use in not telling her. She had a right to know, and instead of being disgusted by me, or hating me like everyone else she held me in her arms and told me that she loved me more than anything, and thanked me for trusting in her with something so heartbreaking.

I met Bobby when I was ten years old and at that time I didn't have many friends. And I liked it that way, the fewer people in my life the better. My dad was in jail again, and my mom left. I had my uncle and that was it. I was an angry child then, always getting myself into trouble at school, with my uncle, with next-door neighbors, and even the police. Jim Hopper was always on my case making sure I behaved and stopped getting myself into trouble, but that was only the beginning.

When I was ten my uncle would take me out as often as he could, sometimes we would fish, and other times he would take me to eat. There were a few times he'd take me to Benny's Burgers, at the time Benny was still alive, and oftentimes his son Bobby would be there to hang out. At first, I was hesitant about making friends with Bobby, it took a good few months until I realized that he wasn't a bad kid. We had so many things in common, we loved the same shows and we loved playing instruments. He was a drummer and he asked me to come over to play. At the time I wasn't all that great at guitar but the two of us would practice together. We thought about starting a band together, and this was way before Corroded Coffin was a thing.

Bobby and I would spend the next six years together. Playing our instruments together and sometimes we would sneak his dad's alcohol and drink it in his room. There were a few times that we would score some weed from Reefer Rick and we would smoke it outside in the woods, or at his house when his dad would be working at the diner.

One night, we decided to drink. My uncle had a few beers left in the fridge and me and Bobby drank them down, he ended up having more than I did. Our dumbasses thought it would be fun to take my Uncles shotgun and go out, so as we're drinking the beers we go out into the woods and start shooting at things. We shot at the beer bottles that we drank from, shards of glass blasting out into the air. We thought it was freaking hilarious. But then it started getting out of hand, Bobby wanted to shoot at the squirrels and birds, and at first I thought it was funny, but it got to be too much. I realized how late it was getting, the sun was setting and I had a curfew at the time. I freaked out thinking we would get caught so I told Bobby we had to go inside. He started arguing telling me he was having fun and he wanted to keep shooting at things.

I tried taking the gun from him, and somehow it went off into his stomach. I remember him just crumpling down onto the ground, groaning, blood coming out of his mouth and from his abdomen. I never saw that much blood before in all my life. Eventually, the next-door neighbors came rushing into the woods, and I'm not sure what caught their attention exactly, if it was the sound of the gun or my screams. I tried so hard to stop the bleeding, I had my hands over the wound that the blood was gushing out of. At that moment I wanted to run and hide, the neighbors already saw me as a nuisance and this was going to make it even worse for me.

Everyone freaked out and panicked. They saw me there trying to stop the bleeding but the assumptions started that it was all my fault and that I was a murderer. Bobby lived for only five more minutes after getting shot, and I was so out of it, that it was like an out-of-body experience. For some reason, I believed I could've saved his life but it was already too late, my best friend was gone. My uncle came running out and noticed that I was there, my hands all bloody, he looked at me with such hate I thought he would kick me out.