Chapter 17: The Edit

The clip went up on a Wednesday night.

I didn't see it until the director put his tablet on my lab desk the next morning.

"It's from Felix's account," he said. "Four hundred thousand views by dawn."

I pressed play.

It was the visitor lobby, shot from a phone that Bridget must have held up that day, and her voice was the first thing I heard.

"Why did you wipe it?"

Then my voice, cut and joined.

"I used them. I'm done."

My lab partner leaned over my shoulder and went still.

"You never said that."

"I said both halves of it. Eight minutes apart."

The caption ran across the bottom.

HE DESTROYED HIS FRIENDS' CHILDHOOD ON PURPOSE. AND ADMITS HE USED THEM ALL ALONG.

Under it, in a pastel font: Elliot Koster hurt the people who loved him most. Please share, so no one else gets used.

"Felix wrote that," I said.

"His father took his phone and his laptop yesterday," the director said. "He must have posted it from a library."

The comments were already the worst thing I had ever seen with my own name in it.

Two hundred people from my old school had written the same sentence in different words.

Cold. User. Always so perfect. I knew he was fake.

A girl from my chemistry class wrote, I sat next to him for a year and he never said hi.

I had said hi every day.

At 9:40, my lab partner's phone buzzed, and she read it and swore.

"The guy with the bucket reposted it."

"Of course he did."

"He wrote, Westie finally told the truth. And then a bucket emoji."

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