Candi

I was talking to my parents recently about scary interactions I had growing up and they reminded me of one that I completely forgot.

I was 7 or 8 years old, verrrryy naive and I believed whatever was said to me. I got bullied quite a lot in school, therefore leaving me with little friends. I decided to join an online game,(Moshi monsters) if anyone remembers it. Basically from what I remember of this website, you could make other friends and talk with them quite easily.

My family only had one main computer at that point and so after school I would often have to wait until my mom,dad, or brother were finished using it so I could play. I met a lot of people on there that I became friends with and eventually I met Candi.

Candi told me that she was an 8 year old girl, we would spend hours talking almost every single day. It was a harmless online friendship, or so I thought because again, I was young and naive.

One day, Candi asked where I lived, I told her Canada. She then asked what country & city, so I told her. I thought she was just curious(yikes). Thankfully, she never asked my address and I didn't give it to her. A couple of weeks later, Candi told me that she was travelling to my city and wanted to hangout! So I asked my parents and they were obviously very weirded out and concerned by this, so they decided to start reading our conversations. I never understood why, I just chalked it up to them being over protective parents.

Candi eventually told me she was in my city and asked if she could meet me at the park by my house. First of all, since I never told her the area I lived in, I wasn't sure how she knew I had a big park by my house. But I also thought that maybe she just assumed there were parks in every neighborhood.

She then said that we could meet by the ice skating rink. But she wanted me to walk there alone.My parents read this and flipped out. Our neighborhood is the only one with an ice rink in my town. My parents freaked out at me and thought I told this stranger my address, but I promised that I had not and eventually they were able to read all of our messages and could see that I didn't.

Nonetheless, my parents were freaked. They had no idea who this person was, or how they figured this out, so they banned me from talking to her. I was upset, but I obliged...

About a year later, I had outgrown the website and was on to new things. My family had planned a trip to Las Vegas and we went. While we were staying there, I was really bored in my hotel room and decided to check how my monster was doing. I logged in to the website and I saw hundreds of messages from Candi.

"Why don't you want to see me?"

"How could you ignore me like this? I thought we were friends!"

Mainly things along the line of that, until one message stood out. It was from a couple of days earlier and it read-

"I know you're in Vegas, I live here, let's hangout, just get away from your parents."

I was shocked. How could she know? I hadn't logged in to the website in a year, I was just a kid so I had zero social media, it just didn't make sense. Again, I showed my parents and they were freaked out and basically just banned me from the website in general.

I never logged on again and I never spoke to "Candi" again either.