WE WERE IN DEAN'S bedroom now, all six of us, and a daunting energy settled among the group as I finished my sinister story. Quinn was crying again, in the arms of Lucas, whose eyes were wide in disbelief. Both of them were white as sheets. Gianna was tapping her nails on her chin, shifting her weight as she stared at the floor. Dean had his hands in his pockets, his olive skin and sharp features casting a glance straight out of a mafia movie, and Jack was sitting on the bed, nervously bouncing his leg and holding his face in his hands.
"Wait...so you didn't like, actually murder TJ," Lucas finally spoke. "It was just an accident, right?" I scoffed. "How could you even ask that? Of course I didn't do it on purpose." He shrugged, still holding onto Quinn. "Well, it's just really weird that you didn't call the police, Marley, I mean, your dad's the Sheriff!" I sighed. He just didn't get it. "That's exactly why I can't, Lucas. Look, I was really scared, and I was trying to help him, and then I freaked out and I slipped and I'm terrified and embarrassed and ashamed and I-I just panicked! Okay? I'm sorry!" I couldn't stop the tears. "My life would be over if anybody found out, especially my parents." And then Dean spoke up. "Well, it's definitely too late to call anyone now," He took his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms.
"Why?" Lucas asked. He had a combative tone in his voice, and Dean scoffed, all matter-of-factly. "Because we'll just look ten times more suspicious now." He retorted. "The police will find him. It's the High School, I mean, how long can you really hide in there?" Quinn suddenly shook her head. "I can't believe I'm saying this...but I think I agree with Dean here." I felt a bit relieved to have her backing me up. "Seriously, Quinn?" Lucas peeled his arms off of Quinn and looked disappointingly into her eyes. "I can't believe you." He then turned to face the rest of us. "I can't believe all of you. Especially you, Marley. I mean, you really complicated the situation just to save yourself, huh?" He took out his phone as a pang hit my heart. "Well, I'm gonna fix that right now. It's not 'too late' for anything." My reflexes reacted, and I snatched Lucas's phone out of his hand before he could go any further. "No," I said, sharply. "You guys are all missing the bigger picture here. There's probably a fucking killer on the loose, and we need to get everybody out of here before someone else gets attacked."
"That's an even better reason to call the police!" Lucas cried out, lunging for his phone. "Ugh!" I groaned. "We are not calling the police, Lucas!" I hoped shouting at him would make him just shut up and be reasonable, but the reality is that I was dealing with Lucas, a tenacious, argumentative intellectual who couldn't stop once he started.
He drew in a deep breath and chuckled lowly, shooting me a threatening glance. "Marley, you're either gonna give me my phone or I'll run out there and use the fucking landline. I don't care." His soft, hazel eyes became daggers as he fixed them on Jack, who was sitting quietly on Dean's quilted silk bedding, trying to avoid eye contact. "Jack, back me up here."
I scoffed. No way in hell was Jack gonna get in the middle of this. I turned to face him and saw a distant look in his eyes. He sighed, dragged his hands down his face, and shook his head. "Look, Marley..." No way. Was he gonna take Lucas's side? My heart raced as he continued. "Yeah, shit, I mean," he threw his hand up and looked me in the eye. "Honestly not your best move. I'm just saying—I mean, it's your dad! What's the worst that could happen, you get grounded?" He shrugged innocently. "I get having fuckin' fight-or-flight moments, but you gotta admit, ditching your friend's body and not calling the cops..." He widened his soft eyes at me. "That's kinda fuckin' morbid, Marley!"
I bit my lip as hot tears stung my eyes. He was right, and it hurt. I shouldn't have left TJ in my moment of panic, and I really should've called my dad. "But," Jack wasn't finished, he raised two hands as if he were weighing an item in each one, "there's really nothing we can do about it anymore, so maybe we can all stop fucking yelling," He flicked his eyes up at Lucas, "and focus on how we're going to deal with this in the here and the now."
Lucas surrendered, crossing his arms and leaning back on Dean's dresser as Quinn rested her head on his shoulder. I wiped my wet cheeks with the back of my hand, sniffling as I tried to pull myself back to the present. Across from me, Gianna was nodding slowly. She looked up at me, her long, fake eyelashes batting as she, too, blinked back tears. "Let's just focus on what we know..." She said, folding her hands together. "TJ left during halftime, we don't know where he went, and then we found him in the training room...like that." She grimaced and shivered while she thought of TJ's gory state.
"Did you see anyone else?" I focused on Dean, who asked the burning question as a beam of moonlight hit his chiseled face. He stared right into me, one blue eye in the light and one in the dark. "No," I shook my head. "It was just me, Gianna, Quinn, and TJ," suddenly I remembered the odd little piece of masking tape on the main door to the training room. "But, there was tape on the door, like someone was already in there before us."
Lucas suddenly groaned, his head lowering into his palm. "This is like a fucked-up Heathers remake and I hate it," he pulled off his Thief Creek Eagles beanie and Quinn began stroking his messy brown hair. "So, what, we're just gonna go through the rest of the year acting like we don't know anything about what happened to TJ?" he asked, looking up at me again. "What are you gonna tell your dad, Marley? I mean, you live with the Sheriff."
"And he doesn't like to get involved in my life, so I won't get involved in his." I declared, thinking of the way my dad always dismissed his work life and left me out of it. Even my mom wasn't lucky enough to hear the stories of the crimes and pettiness of Thief Creek. "There's nothing we left behind or did that could place us in the training room that night," I continued, remembering my PIN that I didn't have to enter.
"Hmm, I'm not so sure about that," I turned to see Gianna shaking her head at me. Her fingers rested on her chin and she sighed, gesturing towards Quinn and Lucas. "Did you hear her scream?" I shuddered as I remembered Quinn's earsplitting screech in the training room–the first thing she did when she saw TJ. I never thought about it until now, but Gianna was right–someone had to have heard her.
All of a sudden I heard a soft, mewing sound, and my eyes darted to the floor and met the wide, yellow ones of Dean's cat, Churchill. Next to his fluffy black body, the wooden bedroom door was cracked open just a slit from where he must've slid in. "Church!" Dean chirped, bending down and stroking the cat's head. "How did you get in here, you menace," the cat prodded his head into Dean's leg and raised its tail, and I saw a tuft of black fur fly off of his body as Dean continued to pet him.
"Oh God," Lucas said, his voice congested. "Here we go," and then he started sneezing, holding onto Dean's dresser with one hand as his allergies reacted to the furry companion. Dean chuckled and scooped Churchill in his arms. "Come on, gattino, time for you to go," The cat squirmed as Dean placed him outside, mewing as he tightly shut the bedroom door.
It was then that I realized I still had Lucas's phone in my pocket. It buzzed, and I took it out, glancing at a preview of a text from an unknown number. "Hey, Lucas, someone's texting you," I said, carefully handing his phone out to him. He narrowed his eyes at me as he took it with haste. "Who the hell is this?" he asked, tapping away at the screen. "Hey, I got one, too," I saw Quinn on her phone next to him, and I looked at my own cell to see that I, too, had a strange unread message on my screen. I turned to Jack, who affirmatively held up his phone as well, and Gianna, who nodded as she scrolled on hers. "It's some video," she said. "Did we all get the same one?"
"I got it, too," Dean said, his finger hovering over the screen of his cell. "Let's check it out." I joined the rest of the group in tapping on the eerie message, prompting my phone to open up a media player. The footage was dark and crackly, but I could make out the general landmarks of the training room. My heart raced as the video played on, and I was half expecting to see myself on camera. There was a low, raspy breathing sound for a few seconds, and then the camera flash shined directly on TJ's horrified face. "Holy shit, it's TJ!" Lucas exclaimed.
He was still alive in the video, panting and gasping for air like he'd just been beaten up, and he was being held against a locker by a hand in a full black bodysuit. "Why are you...doing this..." were TJ's last raspy words before the camera panned down to his torso and focused on a violent sight–the person in black began stabbing him with a thick, jagged blade.
My hand clapped over my mouth as I heard my friends groaning and gasping around the room. I heard guttural retching and tore myself away from the video for just a second to see that Quinn had thrown up on the floor. "Oh, God, Quinni," Gianna was quick to rush to her side, wrapping her arms around our younger friend as she crumpled to a pile of sobs on the floor. I grimaced, but I couldn't stop watching the sinister video on my phone. I was too fascinated by the horror.
The knife went in and out, over and over and over again, with TJ crying out in agony as every stab hit. "God, is he gonna stop?" I exclaimed aloud, tears flowing down my face as I tried to comprehend what I was watching. Soon, TJ's eyes rolled back in his head and the camera panned out as he slid to the floor. "Oh God," I heard Jack's voice from behind me, and I turned to see him looking awfully pale and sickly, like he might throw up, too. "We're watching him get killed." He declared in a low, trembling voice. His deep eyes had ditched all sense of innocence, replaced by two black voids in his face. "Great observation, genius!" Gianna called from the floor, petting Quinn's hair and wincing as she started to cry. "Why did we just watch that? Why?!"
"It's not over yet, Gianna," I snapped back to the last few seconds of the video, which were the most chilling of all. Blood was spilling out of TJ's mouth as he choked and desperately tried to breathe, and the killer cameraman stepped back to film it all. Then, the lens turned around, showing a silhouette of a face covered in skin-tight black fabric and a large hoodie, and I felt like I was looking into the eyes of a monster. Nothing as morbid as this had ever happened in Thief Creek, and there was something about the masked killer that sent a chill writhing up my spine. The anonymous attacker breathed heavily into the camera before the terrifying reel finally ended.
I was sweating as I lowered my phone to my side, slowly raising my eyes to my five friends. Gianna and Lucas were working on wiping up the pile of vomit next to Quinn, using fancy towels from Dean's bathroom. Jack was lying facedown on the bed, and he forcefully tossed his phone to a random spot on the floor. Dean had slid to a seat on the carpet, his head tucked in between his knees, and Quinn was still sobbing quietly by the dresser. I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know what to say. There was nothing to say except...
"What...the actual...fuck," muttered Lucas, breathing heavily in between each word. He glanced up at me, sniffling. "I hate to break it to you, Marley, but I don't think you could've saved him." As much as it pinched my nerves to agree, Lucas was right, and I think I had known from the start that trying to save TJ was selfish and impossible. "I'm so sorry I got you guys into this shit," I breathed, collapsing onto a decorative bench at the end of Dean's bed. My throat ached as I finally let out a sob, slapping my hand to my forehead. "And now strange people are texting us...fuck!"
For a second, the only sound in the room was my crying, but then I felt Jack shift behind me. "Do you think that...whoever sent us those messages..." his voice was groggy and Lucas finished the sentence for him. "...Was the killer? Uh, probably!" He scanned around the room. "Were we the only people who got those messages?" Suddenly, Gianna stood up, dragging Quinn with her and carefully stepping over the towel on the floor. "There's no time to find out. I've gotta get Quinni home, you guys." My eyebrows furrowed as I glanced at Quinn. She did look pretty bad. "Let's shut down this party and go home. We can regroup tomorrow and talk everything out."
She escorted Quinn out of the room without another word. "I'll see you guys later, I guess," Lucas weakly called to us as he followed. I glanced at Dean across the room as he, too, stood up. I shot him a look, trying to beg him with my eyes to stay with me and Jack, but he just frowned at me and shrugged. "It's my party..." he said before slipping out the door.
I heaved a deep sigh, placing my head in my hands again. "Fuck..." I muttered to myself, feeling Jack's hand gingerly slide onto my shoulder. I looked to the side and saw he was readjusting himself to sit next to me on the bench. "Please tell me this is all some kind of fucked-up fever dream!" I cried to him as he softened his gaze. He was trying to stay calm, I could tell, but I couldn't ignore the anxious tapping of his foot on the floor. He sighed, morphing into a range of different puzzled faces before he finally slapped his hands down on his thighs. "Fuck!!" He stood up, pacing around the room with his hands over his nose and mouth. "I don't even know what to say, Marley," He leaned on Dean's maroon-colored wall and lightly pounded it with his fist, causing a few of the novelty paintings on the perimeter to tremble.
I stood up, realizing that, even though I had touched the body and been in the room, Jack probably needed me right now more than I needed him. He never had an easy time dealing with stress, partially due to his neurodivergence that's been challenging him his whole life. To me, he was always just a little spicy at times, and usually, I could handle it pretty well.
I didn't say anything as I reached out and gently grazed his back with my hand. Slowly, he peeled away from the wall and I let myself collapse into his arms. He wasn't my lover right now–no, in this moment he was my best friend, and I knew my trembling wouldn't stop until I soaked up this moment with him.
"I didn't think we'd ever go through something like this," Jack's voice cracked as he spoke. He squeezed me tighter and I shut my eyes, wetting his tee shirt with my tears. "I'm so sorry, Jack, I can't believe I did this." One of his hands moved up to my head and he buried his fingers in my hair, resting his face on my forehead. "We'll figure it out...we always do." He sniffled, and I wasn't convinced that he believed what he was saying, but it made me feel a little better anyway.
Suddenly, a piercing scream split us right out of our embrace. I gasped and jumped backward as Jack frantically turned around. "Did you hear that?" he asked, his eyes widening in shock. I nodded as another shriek rang out, and my heart immediately dropped to the floor. Oh my God, I thought. It's happening. The killer is in the house.
"Let's go," I breathed, jogging for the bedroom door with Jack on my tail. "Come on, hurry!" I burst outside, expecting to see a bloodbath, but somehow the fate of the crowd below me left me even more shocked. I stood on Dean's upstairs balcony with Jack, leaning over the rail in pure horror. My classmates were stampeding for the front door, all of them shouting in terror and urgency. Some were even climbing over others, sending them tumbling to the floor to be trampled. It was the common denominator that turned my core to ice–they were all holding their phones, most of them screaming in fear and agony as they stared at their screens.
It couldn't be...did they all get that same video? I peered at a few screens while I bounded down the twirling staircase with Jack, and sure enough, to my ultimate despair, the footage of TJ's final moments was blaring from every cell. Maybe it wasn't an active massacre, but it was a formidable enough threat to where the student body of Thief Creek was running for their lives.
"GIANNA!" I screamed into the crowd. "QUINN!" The girls were nowhere to be found, and I could only hope they'd made it out alright. My throat ached as I hyperventilated, pushing and shoving through the crowd on the main floor. "Marley!" I heard Jack call. We were slowly being separated by the terrified mosh-pit. "Get out of here! I'll find them! If I need to, I'll find them a ride. You just GO!" I nodded at him as he disappeared into the crowd, and I made a beeline for Dean's wide-open double doors, which filtered a congested sea of students out to the driveway.
Outside, people were on their phones, people were crying, and people were running for their cars like they were being chased. I think I even saw one girl with a broken leg, probably from the violent stampede that ensued. She was being tended to by her friends on Dean's front step, which I leaped off of to start my sprint down the driveway. My Audi was all the way down the black bricks, right next to the gate, about three hundred feet for me to run.
I took a shaky puff from my inhaler before taking off, not caring that I had to forcefully shove some people out of my path. I didn't even bother with saying 'excuse me' this time–I had bigger concerns than my classmates's feelings. Gravity helped me speed up my pace as the driveway descended, and I finally spotted my little gray coupe behind a blue pickup truck. I pulled the key fob out of my pocket, spamming the unlock button with my thumb as I slid to a stop near the driver's side. I yanked the door open, tossed my purse inside, and fell into the bucket seat with an enraged groan. "Uuuugh!" I cried, pounding my fist repetitively on the steering wheel. The forceful impact sent a breeze through the car, and a sudden fluttering sound captured my attention.
I looked up at my dash and was immediately taken aback. A note, or something, was sitting eerily on the black plastic. A sinister chill rested on my shoulders–someone had been in my car. I hesitated before reaching out, feeling like the stationary would bite me if I wasn't careful. When I picked it up, I saw that it was three things–two playing cards and a photo.
The playing cards looked like novelties. The backs were artistically designed with dark, gothic linework, and I couldn't place it, but something was uncomfortably familiar about them. I turned them over and looked at my hand, my eyes meeting the faces of a ten of spades and an eight of diamonds. There was something else, too–a message. On the ten of spades, 'A PROMISE IS A PROMISE,' threatened me in loopy dark ink, but it was the eight of diamonds that made the hair stick up on the back of my neck. In the same black scribe, the message 'XOXO, NICO.' dug into my eyes.
Nico...
I hadn't thought about him in a long time, and for a good reason, too, but now my mind was racing as I plunged into the dark memories. I set the cards down on my lap, focusing my attention on the photograph that was left with them. It was a picture of me, elementary-aged, standing next to the neon sign of the Thief Creek Drive-In and smiling brightly as the wind caught my hair. The abrasions on the photo's surface were identical to the wear and tear of the copy that I usually had in my desk drawer, and my insides froze as I processed the thought. Was someone in my room, too?
The dots connected in my head with a fearful snap. It couldn't be...but what else? The cards and the photo were timed mysteriously well with the death of TJ and the mass video explosion...but I hadn't seen or heard from Nico in years. If he was the killer, then I feared that the town of Thief Creek would soon be facing an unspeakable, destructive, and meticulous force...
...my childhood stalker.