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Roadrunner Energy Drink Study: Our Bizarre Outlier



Estimated reading time — 7 minutes

I am a researcher for a small team, and now, I’m facing a moral dilemma.

Over the past year, one of our main projects has been the development of a healthier, more energy efficient drink named Roadrunner. Upon completion of Roadrunner’s formula and design, we contacted a local university and requested to use 100 of their freshmen as subjects in a study. The purpose of our study was to compare the alertness of the freshmen and determine if our energy drink positively benefited their college experience. The 100 freshmen were randomly divided into two groups. Group 1 received Roadrunner and were requested to drink one bottle per day. Group 2 was allowed to drink anything except Roadrunner. We specifically selected freshmen due to the stresses involved in the first year of college. To contribute to the subjects’ stress levels, we assigned all of them a journal project about adjusting to college. They were required to write one entry per day for a total of 14 entries. Our study commenced on August 11, 2015, and concluded on August 25, 2015.

I will not delve into the intricacies of our data collection and its analysis. For this explanation, I will be straightforward.

The benefits of Roadrunner were unanimous. Subjects in Group 1 were significantly more attentive in class, and collectively, their journal entries contained a more optimistic tone. The journal entries were one of the many methods of data collection, but I’m emphasizing them for one reason.

We hit a minor roadblock due to a subject in Group 1. Across the board, he was an outlier, and needless to say, he halted our project for several months.

The situation is difficult to describe. For that reason, I want to share some of his journal entries. The content of the entries have not been altered. This how they begin:

I have never seen my roommate’s face, and it makes me believe that he doesn’t have one. Benny, he’s a real sick fuck.

Let me start when I arrived on campus. They were swarming. There were people everywhere. Students, parents, friends, they were rushing all over the place and carrying massive amounts of furniture, suitcases, tacky decorations, you name it! I was standing amid the chaos and struggling to find my residence hall on a school map when a group of guys nearly trampled me. These people were out of their goddamn minds.

It took me three trips to my car and back to gather all of my belongings. Everything had calmed down by then, and when I reached my dorm room, I was ready to pass out. I dropped two backpacks onto my bed and laid down on the mattress. My gaze drifted to the vacant bed on the opposite side of the room. Benny still hadn’t arrived. Maybe, he was late.

I tried staying awake for him, but I fell asleep. I woke from the nap a few hours later and glanced over to the empty side of the room. Still not here? The sun was beginning to set. That’s really weird that he wouldn’t arrive sooner.

I spent the evening putting my room together. I hung my clothes in the bureau and claimed two drawers from the dresser. I decorated my half of the room with posters. I left my textbooks and student paperwork on the desk. Lastly, I hung a calendar above my bed and turned around, expecting my roommate to have arrived. It was dark outside now. Where the hell was he?

I booted up my laptop and connected it with the school wifi. Before I could do anything else, I had to leave for my first hall meeting. We were lectured about rules for half an hour. When the meeting finished, all of the guys left in pairs. I supposed that Benny would be arriving later. I just hated for him to be moving in on the first day.

I returned to my room and got ready for bed. I was anxious, beyond anxious for my first day of college. It felt like Christmas Eve. I couldn’t sleep if I tried. When the hallway grew quiet, I finally began to doze off. Half-asleep, I felt a light tap against the back of my head, and I jerked up so suddenly that I smacked my forehead against the headboard. I cursed and felt my head beginning to throb. I slid out of bed and shoved the mattress closer to the top of the bed frame. My head must have dipped past the pillow and tapped against the wood. When I felt it, it was one of those knee jerk reactions. My head ached all night long.

By morning, Benny still wasn’t there. I didn’t have time to worry about him though.

I was rushing around and getting ready for class. I slept a little late and didn’t have time to grab breakfast. I just took a Roadrunner drink instead. It was a weird surprise that I had been selected to participate in this study. I mean, I didn’t mind. It was free smoothies and a cash supplement to my college fund. Who wouldn’t love that?

I was so busy my first day that I returned to my dorm after dinner. I set down my backpack, shrugged off my shoes, and realized something odd. I was still alone. Benny was nowhere to be found. His side of the room was as empty as before.

What was this guy’s deal?

I ignored the situation, did my homework, and went straight to bed.

As soon as started falling asleep, I felt a sharp pat on the top of my head, followed by the shifting of my pillow. I sat upright immediately. Something had touched me. I yanked the pillows back and noticed a dark gap between the mattress and the headboard, the same gap that I had closed last night. I stared into the gap but could see nothing. It was as dark as pitch in my room. My eyes weren’t adjusting to the darkness. I was too tired for this. I shifted my pillows further down the bed and went back to sleep.

By the next morning, I was met with a disturbing surprise. Like yesterday, Benny’s side of the room was still empty. However, one of my notebooks was shredded as if a rabid animal had torn it apart. The pages were scattered everywhere. There were only a few pages intact, and they had a message scrawled across them.

Don’t look.

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I almost sprinted out of my room in only my underwear. I glanced back to my bed, and within a few moments, I brushed the whole thing off. This had to be hazing. There were upperclassmen living in my hall. That’s what it was. I collected the ruined notebook and dumped it into the trash. Then, I went about my day without anymore surprises.

When I returned that evening, I had seemingly forgotten about the incident. My mind was too preoccupied with schoolwork. I sat on my bed, did my homework, and crawled under the covers. Just before I fell asleep, I felt the pat again. This pat was longer though. This one lingered. It was a hand.

I shot away from my pillows and scooted to the other side of the bed breathing heavily. I was petrified.

There was something under my fucking bed! A part of me wanted to check while the other wanted to dash out the door. Neither of those sides won. I passed out.

The next night, I convinced myself that it had been a nightmare. Even with that sentiment in mind, I placed my pillows at the foot of the bed. I fell asleep without the pat, but I was awoken by a massive, painful jerk. It was a sharp tug, grasping my hair and pulling me downward.

I woke up in the hallway. I don’t remember moving there.

I skipped class, went straight to housing, and demanded a room change. I hadn’t been sleeping well at all, so I was a bit unreasonable. The woman tried explaining to me multiple times that all the rooms were filled. There was nowhere for me to go. After that, I demanded to know where Benny was.

She insisted that we were roommates. That really pissed me off. It got to the point where she had Benny pulled out of class. Benny was on campus. He had been here the whole fucking time.

There had been a discrepancy. Benny’s actual roommate had my first name too, so Benny accidentally got assigned to both of us. Technically, I had no roommate.

I returned to my room and sat on the bed, the bed that should have been Benny’s bed. I laid there all day, staring at the gap between the tiled floor and the bed frame. I could only remember the note now – don’t look. My door has been locked every night. Nobody else had the key but me.

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I slept on “Benny’s” bed that night without blankets or pillows. I closed my eyes and started to doze off. Before I could though, I felt the pat on the back of my head. It was sharp but not as angry as the night before. I cried silently. I didn’t remember falling asleep.

It took me a few nights, but I’ve learned Benny’s rules. He liked my bed, so that’s where I slept. It was a routine, and I kept breaking it. Just before I fell asleep, I’d feel him reach up and tap my head to make sure I was there. Benny never made any noise. By following his rules, keeping a gap between the bed frame and the mattress, he was silent. It was just me and Benny.

When I behaved, he was very gentle. He had to wish me goodnight before I could fall asleep. Sometimes, Benny would take his time, but that was okay with me. I’d wait all night if I had to.

This is where I’m ending the subject’s journal. The last few entries are completely incoherent, and I think I should mention that these were typed entries. In particular, the 13th and 14th entries are complete gibberish as if he violently slapped the keyboard over and over.

To some degree, we thought that we were being pranked, but this was no prank.

Due to the nature of the entries, we wanted to immediately do a follow-up study. This might sound unprofessional, but the subject resembled the before and after pictures of meth addiction. His skin was sallow. He was sickly, bony even. He lost an exceptional amount of weight as if he stopped eating. His face was gaunt with pronounced cheekbones, skin clinging to his skull. There were dark rings around his eyes. He was dazed, staring off into space. Somehow, he still functioned, but he was only going through the motions.

He didn’t respond well when we asked if he was sleeping alright. It alarmed him, distressed him, and nearly sent him into a panic attack. We hardly needed to ask. He hadn’t been sleeping. Anyone with eyes could tell you that.

Not even a week later, he completely snapped and threw himself from the roof. Nobody knew how he got up there or what was going through his mind. A professor found his crumpled body that morning, and then, the authorities were all over the case. It was a mess. We were able to see his dorm room before our team was shut out of the investigation. Our subject didn’t leave a suicide note. No, he left an entire wall filled with frenzied messages. The predominant message was he’s always watching, all of the messages overlapping each other, all disjointed thoughts.

After nearly being sued, my team is fed up with the matter. They threw out the subject’s data and blamed confounding variables for the extreme response. Regardless, he was an outlier. In the grand scheme of things, an outlier is not representative of the whole. For that reason, Roadrunner is preceding with its production and will be released for public consumption within the month.

Credit: Ariel Lowe

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15 thoughts on “Roadrunner Energy Drink Study: Our Bizarre Outlier”

  1. This story had a lot of potential. It really did. But, well, it could have been writen better. I liked it, don’t take me wrong, but it just could be better. For example: the moral dilemma. It was mentioned but then it was forgotten. Another thing: I get that you were trying to imply that the energy drink is dangerous and makes people see things but it wasn’t really visible. You know, the story now looks like there was one of these two things happening: 1) some paranormal things
    2) the drink caused weird hallucinations

    The story should have been longer, because then it would be more clear for which course of the story you were going. Oh, I would almost forgot: The fear of people here. Our test subject here clearly doesn’t like people, kay. But why, if he doesn’t like people, does he even worry about Benny? It’s not like he knows him. I would get it if Benny was his friend or something, but it looks like he was just a roommate. Lastly: Why does the protagonist call the things under his bed Benny? He knows that Benny is in another dorm, so why call this things Benny too?

    Despite these flaws, I liked it. I know that it’s hard to write a horror story, so don’t stress too much. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good.

  2. La Chica Incognita

    Stopped reading it after a few paragraphs just to suggest one thing that is annoying the hell outta me; add in a third focus group that doesn’t drink any energy drinks as a control group to the story and make group 2 drink “any energy drink except roadrunner”. You literally don’t have to mention the control group for the entire rest of the story, but it feels like such a glaring omission for anyone who knows of focus groups or even lazy scientific testing works.

  3. I dont get it. Such good potentional but there wasnt enough detail and who was benny? He liked to sleep on this vuys bed so he slept there as well? And behaved? We needed mlre explenatiom for it to be e en better. Ugh thanks for leaving me hanging dood

  4. Virgil Collins II

    Very cool idea, but I didn’t get it. Benny was there, then he’s not, he’s in another room, but you used his name as the “roommate”, he’s bothered bed choice, only 1 guy has problems with the drink from the whole test??? So was this a ghost, a crazy kid, a bad drink, an allergic reaction????

  5. It’s good, author’s got writing talent… but this story could’ve expanded and used some more details, really enjoy how the scientist guy explained his “preceding” on with Roadrunner’s production.. but yeah the story feels like it needs more details.. more plot but it
    is enjoyable as it already is

  6. I was really interested in the subjects story, and Benny. Honestly, I could do without the “roadrunner” plot line all together. It didn’t do Anything for me, or the story. However, I’d really like to know what was actually going on in “Benny’s” room! One weird thing is, the journal started with the subject saying he never saw Benny’s face, but from the journal, it seems like he never saw Benny at all, only felt his presence.

  7. First, this is good writing. Second, this is a good concept.

    The problem is I can’t see the connection between the story’s elements. I can’t tell if the Roadrunner drink is to blame for the events, or if it is a just a method to generate a journal that records a decent into madness. I don’t know what the entity (Benny?) is or what it is doing. I’m not sure if there is a connection between Benny the entity and Benny the missing roommate. All these questions make the story read more like a record of disjointed events and less like a story.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is good. But I think it needs more work.

  8. I’m having the same problems with this that other comments are mentioning. There’s the formatting issue (separation between the researcher and the student’s journal entries as well as some sort of headers on the entries themselves), the length of the journal entries, the sudden transition to calling the entity “Benny,” and the fact that the drink doesn’t seem to have caused the problem. I also agree with other comments that the writer has talent and, with just a little tweaking, could craft a very enjoyable tale.

    If you want the drink to be the cause of the student’s distress (as it seems you do), consider making the journal entries longer and mention more than once that the nameless student consumed the drink regularly. As it is written, it seems more like one of the students included in the study happened to be assigned to a haunted room and the journal entries the company received for the study just happened to be colored by his experience, making them witness to an otherwise private hell.

    It’s a good pasta. It doesn’t deserve to be ripped to shreds. With just a little more work, it could be a GREAT pasta.

  9. I didn’t really get a sense of “crazy” or mentally unstable from the journal entries, they just came across as confusing and poorly written more than anything else.

    Might want to stick with the same concept but try rewriting it from a different perspective which directly relates to the story.

  10. If you’re trying to imply that the Roadrunner drink did this to the kid, you have a lot of work ahead of you. One kid out of a hundred went psycho, but there are no signs pointing to the drink being at fault.

    Why was the kid so worried that Benny didn’t show up originally? I’d have been overjoyed to have a room to myself as a college student, and since this guy was obviously stressed from so many people, you’d think he’d relish the solitude and not worry when Benny arrived.

    Concerning the tapping on his head, I can believe him shrugging it off a couple times, but I think he would have been upset over the shredded notebook. And if he truly explained everything that was happening, you’d think someone would be concerned enough to do something.

    With the journal entries, I think they should have been dated. Specific dates for the study were given and you’d think the researchers would want the journal entries dated.

    The descent into madness is really what makes a story creepy, but that part was denied the readers. We were told that his journal entries were gibberish and his walls were covered in messages declaring that he was being watched. We want to see that!

    And then you just hopped back to the scientist reading the entries. This story was very well written and has SO MUCH potential. It needs extensive rewriting. Please try again because you obviously have talent.

    5/10

  11. That was a damn good read. I like that it was a quick read. You should make more short stories.

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