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The Rancho Cucamonga HQ smelled heavily of stale coffee and corrugated cardboard.
It was their last week in the building. The entire Smosh studio was in a state of chaotic purgatory, caught halfway between a bittersweet nostalgia trip and a frantic scramble to get everything boxed up for the move to Los Angeles.
It felt like the walls were buzzing and vibrating with the constant, screeching soundtrack of packing tape. Shayne was somewhere down the hall loudly arguing with Spencer about which ridiculous props were actually worth putting on the moving truck, and the rhythmic shhhh-rrrip of tape dispensers echoed off the half-empty walls.
Despite the surrounding chaos, Amanda had managed to schedule a tiny bit of downtime, slumping deep into the cushions of the ratty breakroom couch, nursing an iced latte that was mostly melted water at this point. And occupying the rest of that couch with her legs slung carelessly over Amanda’s lap was Angela.
Angela was staring intently at the ceiling tiles, vibrating with that specific brand of over-caffeinated exhaustion that somehow just made her more hyper.
"Manda," Angela said suddenly, her voice cutting through the dull roar of the office. She sounded entirely too solemn for someone wearing an oversized hoodie and holding a half-eaten string cheese.
"Hmm?" Amanda didn't even open her eyes, just resting her head back against the cushions.
"Would you love me if I was a rock?"
Amanda stopped. She slowly lowered her plastic cup, opening one eye, and then the other, to look down at her lap. Angela had tilted her head back to look up at her upside down, her wide, earnest eyes blinking expectantly.
Amanda stared at her. She processed the question. She processed the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of it amidst the boxes and the moving stress.
"What the fuck?" Amanda blurted out, her voice pitching up with bewildered laughter.
"It's a valid question!" Angela defended loudly, sitting up so fast she nearly kneed Amanda in the chest. She threw her hands out to emphasize her point. "Like, a nice rock. A smooth one from a river. Or maybe a geode. Would you keep me on your desk at the new LA office? Would you polish me?"
"Angela, I'd skip you across a lake."
"You're a monster!" Angela shrieked, clutching her chest in a deeply theatrical display of betrayal. She let out that bright, loud laugh of hers – the kind that filled the room and made the chaotic office feel a little less stressful. Amanda rolled her eyes, fighting a massive grin, and shoved Angela’s shoulder playfully.
"Get back to packing, you freak," Amanda laughed, shaking her head.
Angela didn't move. Instead, she shifted her weight, wedging herself even further into Amanda’s space until she was leaning comfortably against Amanda’s shoulder, pressing her lips against it. She smelled like cheap hairspray and whatever sugary energy drink she had slammed an hour ago, a combination Amanda had affectionately come to associate with absolute chaos.
"But seriously," Angela mumbled, poking Amanda’s knee. "Not even a geode? With the sparkly purple crystals inside? I’d be an excellent paperweight."
Amanda sighed, a soft, fond sound, and began absentmindedly untangling a knot at the end of Angela’s hair. It was a subconscious habit by now. Whenever Angela spun a little too fast, Amanda was always the one to reach out and anchor her.
"You'd be a terrible paperweight, babe," Amanda pointed out dryly, her fingers carding gently through the dark strands. "You'd somehow find a way to vibrate right off the desk. Or you'd complain it was too quiet."
"I would not! Rocks are famously stoic."
"You yelled at a shadow yesterday because it 'surprised' you."
"It was moving suspiciously!"
Amanda let out another quiet laugh, leaning her head down just enough to rest her cheek against the top of Angela’s hair. The office around them continued to tear itself apart –a distant crash down the hall followed by Ian yelling something about a broken whiteboard– but on the ratty breakroom couch, everything felt perfectly still. They existed in their own specific, unbothered orbit.
"Fine," Amanda conceded softly, her voice dropping into something private, just for the two of them. "If you were a rock, I wouldn't skip you across a lake. I'd put you on my desk. Right next to my monitors, flanked by a glass of wine."
Angela beamed, a bright, triumphant smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. "I knew it."
It was a stupid, meaningless conversation. Just another weird bit in a day full of them.
With a sudden burst of momentum, Angela finally rolled off the couch, dramatically groaning about having to go carry heavy things, leaving Amanda to finish her watered-down coffee with a lingering smile before getting back to work.
—
They had made it to the LA office. They had unpacked the boxes, set up the new desks, and filmed a hundred new bits.
Angela did get to be loud and chaotic in the new space.
For exactly seven months.
It was a Tuesday. Another entirely unremarkable Tuesday. A completely normal Tuesday, shattered by a phone call that tore Amanda's world cleanly in two.
It was a sudden, senseless accident.
No grand finale, no dramatic goodbye.
Just a violently abrupt end to the brightest light Amanda had ever known.
It was a patch of slick road. A blown tire. Physics and bad timing. That was the worst part of it all.
Amanda wanted to be angry. She needed to be angry. She wanted a villain to scream at, a face to punch, a tangible, breathing target to blame for this world-ending agony that was constantly clawing at her ribs. She wanted to set fire to whatever had stolen Angela away.
But there was no one.
Just the universe, cold and indifferent, spinning on as if it hadn't just snuffed out the only thing that made Amanda's life worth living.
The office had shattered. The Smosh cast didn't just lose a coworker; they lost their heartbeat.
At the funeral, the sheer volume of people who loved Angela was overwhelming. Her family and theater friends, the loud and fiercely loyal improv and musical crowds from her life, were huddled in clumps, looking as though all the vibrant color had been drained right out of them.
Ian and Anthony were hollowed out and silent. Courtney had cried until her eyes were swollen shut. Chanse was clinging to Arasha's hand in the back pew, both of them staring blankly ahead, looking entirely lost in a world that suddenly made no sense. Damien was trying so hard to be the steady pillar for everyone else, but his voice fractured into a jagged whisper every time he tried to speak.
And Amanda stood at the center of it all, feeling like she had been scooped out – just an empty husk wearing a black dress and an engagement ring that was starting to feel colder by the minute.
Later that night, long after the cemetery groundskeepers had gone home, the cast and Angela's closest friends crammed into the back room of a dim, quiet bar. No cameras. No props. Just them.
It was Arasha who suggested it.
"Angela would haunt us for the rest of our lives if we just sat around crying," she had said, swiping a napkin under her eyes. "We have to roast her in an actual funeral roast. She'd be furious if we didn't."
So they tried.
Through watery eyes and alcohol-numbed nerves, they tried to give Angela the send-off she would have wanted. Chanse stood up and delivered a scathingly funny monologue about Angela's sheer, unbridled inability to understand basic pop culture, his voice only wobbling a little at the end. Damien roasted her gremlin posture and the way she screamed at video games she didn't understand. The room echoed with wet, broken laughter. It felt good, for a fleeting second, to pretend this was just another video shoot.
Then it was Amanda's turn.
She stood up at the head of the long table, a half-empty glass in her hand. She looked around at the tear-stained, familiar faces. She had a bit planned. She really did.
"I just think it's incredibly selfish," Amanda started, her voice raspy but projecting the way it always did when they bantered. "She realized how many ad reads we had lined up this month, and she took the most extreme way out."
A ripple of bruised laughter moved through the room. Amanda smiled, leaning into the bit.
"And the mess she left behind. Honestly, I'm billing her ghost for the cleaning fee. You guys know how she is, she's a menace. She..."
Amanda stopped.
She waited for the interruption. She waited for her Angela to shriek indignantly from the other end of the table, to throw a coaster at her, to launch into a passionate, breathless defense of her organized chaos.
But there was nothing.
Just the heavy, suffocating silence of a room full of grieving people.
The mask shattered. The bit died in her throat. The crushing, insurmountable reality that Angela was never going to interrupt her again slammed into Amanda with the force of a freight train.
"She… she…"
Amanda tried again, but her voice was just a breathless, panicked wheeze. The glass slipped from her fingers, shattering on the hardwood floor, but she didn't even look down. She clutched her chest, her knees buckling as a ragged, agonizing sob tore out of her.
"I can't," Amanda gasped, dropping to the floor as Courtney and Arasha scrambled out of their chairs to catch her. "I can't do this. I don't know how to do this without her."
The roast ended there, swallowed by the collective, messy heartbreak of a room that didn't know how to function with its brightest light extinguished.
A week after the funeral, Amanda found herself sitting on the floor of their apartment, surrounded by the deafening quiet. The blinds were drawn, the air was stale, and she hadn't showered in days.
Her grief wasn't cinematic, and it wasn't beautiful. It was messy, ugly, and suffocating. It was Amanda forgetting how to breathe in the middle of a grocery store aisle. It was waking up and reaching for a warm body that wasn't there, the reality hitting her like a baseball bat to the stomach every single morning.
On this Tuesday morning, Amanda was supposed to be sorting through Angela's things, but the sheer physical presence of Angela's clutter –her shoes by the door, her jacket still slung over a dining chair, her unfinished book open on the coffee table– was paralyzing.
A soft knock broke the silence, followed by the click of the front door unlocking.
Shayne had a spare key. He stepped into the dim apartment, his usually broad, energetic posture completely folded in on itself. His eyes were red-rimmed and exhausted, and tucked under his arm was a small cardboard box.
He didn't offer empty platitudes or ask how she was doing. He just crossed the room and sat down heavily on the floor beside her.
"I grabbed this from the office," Shayne said, his voice gravelly and quiet. He nudged the box toward her. It was one that had never been fully unpacked from the office move. The sharpie on the side read ANGELA'S DESK CRAP in Amanda's own handwriting.
Amanda stared at it, her hands trembling as she reached out and pulled back the flaps. Inside was a tangle of charging cables, a dried-out multicolor pen with a dog topper, and a few crumpled sticky notes with unhinged doodle ideas.
At the bottom, wrapped haphazardly in a piece of bubble wrap, was a heavy, solid object.
Before Amanda could reach for it, Shayne gently put his hand into the box. He pulled the object out, peeling the plastic away, and held it out to her.
"She wouldn't want to see you like this, Mandy," Shayne whispered, his voice breaking on her name as he pressed the object into her palms.
It was a rock.
A perfectly smooth, dark gray river stone. The kind you might pick up on a hike just because it felt nice in your palm.
Amanda stared at it. The weight of it settled into her hands, cool and grounding against her feverish skin. The memory from the breakroom couch in Rancho Cucamonga hit her with the force of a physical blow.
Would you keep me on your desk at the new LA office? Would you polish me?
The air rushed out of her lungs in a ragged, breathless gasp. The dam broke again, worse than at the wake. A guttural, agonized wail ripped its way out of Amanda's throat, a sound so broken it didn't even sound human.
She curled completely inward, pressing the cold stone against her sternum as if it could plug the gaping, bleeding hole in her chest, and finally, entirely, fell apart.
Beside her, Shayne wrapped his arms tightly around her shaking shoulders, burying his face in her hair and crying right alongside her.
—
The next day, Amanda walked into the cemetery.
She didn't bring generic white lilies or muted, tasteful bouquets. Hauled over her shoulder was a heavy canvas tote bag filled with trowels and potting soil, and carefully balanced in her arms was a flat of vibrant, blood-red carnations.
She found the fresh plot, the earth still slightly unsettled around the temporary marker that would soon be replaced by stone. Amanda dropped to her knees. She reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out the smooth river stone, and set it gently at the head of the grave.
"I brought your rock," Amanda whispered, her voice rough and hollowed out. "I’m so, so sorry. I couldn't put it on my desk. I think you'd rather be out here."
She wiped a tear away with the back of her wrist, leaving a smudge of dirt across her cheek, and reached for the flat of flowers.
Angela had been a theater kid down to her very marrow. Amanda could still remember her sitting in the passenger seat of her car, singing the Hadestown soundtrack at the top of her lungs, passionately explaining the symbolism of Orpheus handing Eurydice that single, defiant red carnation in the grim, gray machinery of the Underworld.
A tiny, fragile promise that even in the darkest place imaginable, love persists.
"I'm no Orpheus, Ange," Amanda said, her hands shaking slightly as she dug her trowel into the pristine grass, carving out a space in the dark earth. "I couldn't bring you back. I didn't even get to look behind me to see if you were following."
She gently lifted the first carnation from its plastic shell and buried its roots into the soil.
"But I can grow a garden here for you," Amanda continued, her voice hardening with a quiet, desperate resolve as she packed the dirt down around the crimson petals. "So that you're never alone. You hated being alone."
The groundskeeper tried to stop her once, citing the cemetery's strict regulations regarding plot decorations. Amanda had stood up, trowel in hand, and leveled a glare at him so utterly terrifying, so deeply rooted in grief, that the man simply cleared his throat, turned around, and never brought it up again.
As the months bled into years, Amanda's visits became a fixture of the cemetery.
While the rest of the world moved forward, while the Smosh studio hired new people, while trends changed, while Amanda herself slowly learned how to smile again without it feeling like a betrayal, the garden remained her anchor.
It became a vibrant, chaotic explosion of life. The red carnations were the bleeding heart of the plot, sprawling outward like a beautiful crimson spill across the manicured lawn. Amanda eventually added creeping thyme and tall, yellow snapdragons that attracted hummingbirds, turning the quiet plot into a riot of color and movement.
It was messy. It was loud. It was exactly like Angela.
But it didn't become some grand spectacle. Beneath the frantic, human-hurricane exterior she showed the internet, Angela had been a surprisingly private person, and Amanda fiercely guarded that peace. To the rest of the cemetery, it was just a wildly overgrown, beautiful grave.
To their small, fractured family, it was a sanctuary.
It started as a desperate need for connection and eventually settled into a sacred, unbroken routine.
Every other Sunday, Amanda would spread a large, familiar picnic blanket right over the creeping thyme. A few of the cast –usually Shayne, Courtney, Damien, Arasha, or Chanse– would arrive carrying an absurd spread of charcuterie, because Angela had always treated a meat and cheese board as a primary food group.
They’d bring a bottle of the obnoxiously sweet wine she used to love, pouring an extra plastic cup and setting it carefully next to the gray river stone at the head of the grave.
And they would just …talk.
They’d sit around the red carnations, eating prosciutto and laughing until their chests ached. They’d tell her about the disastrous new office bits, complain about the LA traffic, or just bicker the way they always had. Sometimes, if the wind rustled the snapdragons just right, Amanda could almost pretend Angela was just sitting off-camera, waiting for her cue to jump in and say something ridiculous.
Years slipped by, measured in seasons of bloom and dormancy, but that Sunday routine remained.
Amanda was older now.
There were deep lines framing her mouth, and her dark hair had turned a striking silver. Her joints ached when she knelt on the blanket, so she brought a small folding stool with her now.
It was a crisp autumn afternoon. The wind was howling, stripping the nearby trees bare, but the red carnations were still stubbornly holding on to their blooms, a fierce slash of color against the encroaching chill.
The others had packed up the leftover cheese and wine glasses an hour ago, leaving Amanda alone as the sun began to dip. She reached out, picking up the dark river stone that still sat faithfully at the base of the headstone. She rubbed her thumb over its smooth surface, warmed by the lingering afternoon sun, before setting it back down amongst the red petals.
Orpheus had lost his Eurydice to the dark, but Amanda had brought the light down to hers.
She rested her cheek against the cold granite of the headstone, closing her eyes as the wind whipped around her.
‘Manda, would you love me if I was a rock?
"Yeah, Ange," Amanda whispered into the quiet, answering a question from a lifetime ago. "Yeah, I would."