He starts making ghost noises, and I laugh, telling him to cut it out. That’s when Trinity walks in. She looks from me to Rory.
“Did I just hear you two talking about ghosts?” she says.
“Uh, no, we—” I begin.
“You were making fun of me, weren’t you, Hannah.”
Rory rolls his chair between us. “No, I was joking about ghosts, and Hannah was telling me to stop.” He gets to his feet. “I have a lab this morning, and I need to run. First, though…” He reaches into his backpack and hands me a wrapped mug. “Almost forgot this.”
I unroll the paper to find a Doctor Who mug with the “timey-wimey stuff” quote I’d paraphrased on the show. As I laugh, I catch Trinity’s expression.
I quickly rewrap the mug. “I’ll put this in my room.”
She snatches the mug and sticks it on the desk, facing the camera, with “There” and a defiant look my way. Rory counters with a narrowed-eyes glare, but Trinity doesn’t notice, just plunks herself into the chair with, “So, did you find any evidence of tampering?”
* * *
So these comments came from our account. From our computer. And they’re being posted after Trinity goes upstairs to bed and I am alone, sleeping it off on the couch.
I’m the logical culprit. Trinity isn’t buying my protests and excuses. She’s convinced I’m responsible, and I need to fix that.
I keep thinking of what Rory said about Trinity seeming suspiciously freaked out. His comment about her having murdered someone was a joke. And yet…
The more paranoid Trinity becomes, the more I wonder whether there is something in her past to warrant it. Not that she’s actually killed anyone. But whenever I slip and say we’re being accused of murder, she’s always quick to clarify that the comments never say that. Only that one of us is responsible for a death.
I’d joked about I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which a group of teens accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian. What if there’s something like that in Trinity’s past?
It doesn’t even need to be that dramatic. I’d been at summer camp with a girl who drowned, and I still feel guilty for not noticing her go under the water…even if a dozen other kids and three counselors didn’t notice, either. Survivor guilt, my mom calls it.
Someone could know that Trinity feels guilty over an accidental death and be trolling her. Tormenting her. If there’s something in Trinity’s past—connected to those comments or not—it’d help me understand her paranoia.
I conduct my search in the library. If the public computers weren’t crammed with undergrads, I’d have used those to better hide my search history. Is that paranoid? Maybe, but I need only to imagine Trinity discovering what I’ve searched, and my back tenses, triggering an ache that suggests I’ve been more stressed lately than I like to admit.
I think of what Rory said, about quitting the show. I’d be fine with that. I might even be relieved. My parents are both corporate researchers, and while we’re hardly rich, I don’t need the show income—I’ve been stashing it in a savings account. Also, I’m really tired of the drinking. The occasional pub night with friends used to be fun. Now I nurse a Coke…or blow off the invitations altogether.
The problem is Trinity. I can’t be the bitch who takes away a critical source of income. And maybe I won’t need to be, because I find the answer to my question a lot faster than I imagined.
In high school, Trinity was blamed for the suicide of a bullied classmate.
My gut clenches reading that. I won’t pretend that I don’t know what it’s like to be bullied. I mostly flew too far under the radar to attract attention, but there was one girl in high school who decided I was a vastly underappreciated and overlooked target. Even today, I’ll tense seeing her first name online.
Trinity isn’t named in the actual articles about her classmate’s suicide. They only refer to bullying by “an unnamed sixteen-year-old classmate who has not been charged at this time.” It’s social media that fingers Trinity as the perpetrator, and even there, while no one disputes she’s the one accused, they hotly debate her guilt.
The short version is this: When Trinity was sixteen, a classmate—Vanessa Lyons—committed suicide. In her note, she alleged ongoing and systematic harassment by Trinity, who had been her best friend in middle school. Vanessa claimed Trinity had dumped her as a friend after becoming a cheerleader and joining the popular clique. When Vanessa tried to maintain a civil relationship, Trinity turned on her, bullying and berating her until depression claimed Vanessa’s life.
It’s a common story that carries the mournful ring of truth. Girls are BFFs, but then one grows into a gorgeous cheerleader and the other…does not. Popular girl ditches uncool friend, who flounders, trying to make sense of it, and when she reaches out, popular girl drives her away with insults that lacerate the friend’s already paper-thin self-confidence, driving her to a place where suicide seems the only option. In death, she can finally accuse her true killer.
Reading that article, I cannot help but picture the orb behind Trinity. Cannot help but see those messages again.
In death, she can finally accuse her true killer.
I shiver even as I berate myself for it. Vanessa Lyons’s ghost has not returned to wreak beyond-the-grave vengeance. Someone else has, though. Someone who blames Trinity.
The problem is that few people did seem to blame Trinity. On social media, her friends defended her, insisting Trinity had never said anything unkind about Vanessa in their hearing. Of course they would say that, being her friends. But only a couple of other classmates claimed to have witnessed the bullying, and no one put much stock in their credibility. Most of those blaming Trinity never saw or heard anything—they simply condemned her with variations on “Of course she did it. Girls like her are total bitches.”
Reading this and knowing Trinity, I’m not persuaded she’s guilty. I do know why she’s freaking out, though.
She’s convinced Vanessa Lyons has come back to haunt her.
* * *
I try to cancel the next episode of Drunk Girl Physics. Trinity won’t hear of it. The show must go on, apparently. I do convince her to let us switch seats. That way, if the orb appears over me, I’ll know it’s just a random asshole hacker, nothing to do with the death of Vanessa Lyons.
I set my alarm for seven the next morning to beat Trinity to the comment section. When I wake, I find a text from Rory. He asks me to call him as soon as I wake. The fact he’s asking for a call rather than a text means it’s urgent.
He picks up on the first ring.
“First, I need to apologize,” he says. “I overstepped my bounds and did something that, in retrospect, is going to seem really skeevy. It was for a good reason, though.”
“Okay…”
“I set up a spy camera on the desk in your office.”
“Uh…”
He hurries on. “I only activated it after last night’s episode went live, and it’s focused on the computer. I can’t see the rest of the room. I just wanted to monitor the keyboard after you uploaded the show.”
“To see which of us was tampering with the film and posting the comments.”
“Yes.” He exhales, as if in relief that I understand. “Not that I thought it was you. Honestly, I expected to catch Trin.”
The hairs on my neck prickle. “But it was me? Drunk sleepwalking?”
“No, no. Nobody tampered with it, Hannah. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I have the entire night of tape, and no one came near the desk.”
“Okay, is the orb gone, then?”
His hesitation tells me otherwise, and I hurry to the computer.
“Two minutes, ten seconds,” he says.
I find the spot. As I watch, the orb manifests over Trinity’s seated form.
�
�Shit,” I say.
“You switched spots,” he says. “That was a good idea.”
“No,” I say. “It was actually really stupid. Now she’s going to see that and—”
“See what?” says a voice behind me. I wheel as Trinity walks in. She stops. “Who are you talking to, Hannah?”
“J-just Rory.” Did I stammer? Why the hell did I stammer?
Her gaze slides to the screen, and she blanches. I mumble something to Rory and hang up.
“Someone’s hacking the system,” I say quickly. “That’s what Rory was calling about. He put a camera in here and—”
“He put a spy camera in our house?”
“He apologized. He could only see this desk, and he only turned it on after we posted the show. He was watching in case I was posting the comments in my sleep or something.”
“Or something?” Her voice hardens. “He was trying to catch me. Except he didn’t. He caught you. That’s why he called. He installed a secret camera and caught you doing it, and he called to warn you. He thought he was going to catch me, and instead, he caught the girl he likes. That puts him in a really nasty position.”
“I didn’t do anything, Trinity,” I say. “Ask Rory.”
“He’ll lie for you.”
“Then ask him to show you the tape.”
“He’ll have erased it by now.”
“What the hell?” I stop myself and take a deep breath. “Explain why I’d do this to you. Why I’d undermine our show like this.”
“You’re not undermining it. Our show is more popular than ever, and you don’t want to ruin it—you want it all for yourself. You want me to quit.”
“No. I’d quit myself before I—”
“Do you think I haven’t seen those solo offers? They send them to our damn show address. I find them in the trash folder.”
“I delete them because I’m not interested. If I wanted you off the show, Trinity, I sure as hell wouldn’t do something as silly as this.”
“It’s not silly. It’s clever, and you’re always clever, Hannah. You know I believe in ghosts. You know I’ve said this house has a weird vibe. You found out about my past, didn’t you? What I was accused of. You used that to fake a very public haunting. An on-screen haunting, complete with accusatory comments. You’re hoping I’ll quit. If that doesn’t work, then eventually someone will dig up my past and humiliate me, forcing me off your show.”
I take a deep breath. “Yes, I know about Vanessa. I found out yesterday. You were freaking out, and it worried me, and I had to investigate. Whether or not you bullied her—”
“I didn’t.” She spits the words and steps up to my face. “She bullied me.”
I open my mouth.
Trinity continues. “You don’t believe that, do you? No one did. Obviously, the pretty, popular girl was the bully. That’s why you don’t even bother to name me in those comments. Everyone will presume it’s me. Geeky little Hannah wouldn’t bully anyone. But Trinity? Oh, yes, she’s just the type.”
“I know you and Vanessa stopped being friends—”
“Because she was a nasty, vicious bitch, always putting me down to pull herself up. I made new friends, and Vanessa couldn’t handle that. She came at me all the harder, posting from anonymous accounts, telling people I was a slut, a two-faced bitch, anorexic, all the things that kids are quick to believe about someone who looks like me.”
“And then she…killed herself?”
Trinity laughs. It’s an ugly, raw laugh. “Oh, she didn’t mean to. That’s the irony. Vanessa was like you—a clever girl who always had a plan. She wrote a suicide note blaming me, and then she took just enough pills to be rushed to the hospital for a good stomach pumping. Except she passed out from the sleeping pills and choked to death on her own vomit. Joke’s on her. Only it wasn’t, because the school believed her suicide note. Zero tolerance for bullying. It didn’t matter that they had absolutely no proof. I had to go live with my aunt so I could attend a new school. I spent the rest of high school on depression meds and suicide watch. The fact I’m here—getting my PhD, no less—is a freaking miracle.”
“No,” I say. “It’s a sign of hard work and resilience. What happened to you was shitty, Trin, but—”
“Oh, spare me your patronizing bullshit, Hannah. You’re gingerly patting me on the head like a rabid rottweiler who has you cornered. I’m not going to hurt you. But I am going to make sure you don’t get away with this. I’ll prove you’re behind the orbs and the comments.”
“Sure. Go for it. You may find your efforts hampered by the small fact that I didn’t actually do anything but—”
She wheels on me. “You aren’t going to give up, are you? You’re determined to make me look like a fool.”
“Nope, actually, right now, I’m just determined to end this conversation, go out and enjoy my Sunday while you dig for evidence you’re never going to find. I’ve tried to be reasonable, Trin, to pussyfoot around your paranoia. If anyone is behind this, it’s you.” I start to step past her. “If this is a cry for attention, I’m not listening anymore.”
She grabs my arm. “Don’t you dare—”
I wheel to throw her off, and she flings me. My stockinged feet slide on the hardwood. When I stumble, she shoves me with all her might. I fly backward, feet sailing out from under me, head striking the desk edge.
The last thing I see is Trinity, staring in wide-eyed horror as I crumple to the floor.
* * *
I wake on the office floor, my head throbbing. I grab the chair, which of course wheels away, and I sprawl face-first onto the hardwood.
“Trin?” I manage to croak.
There’s no answer. I lift my head and peer around an empty office. There’s blood on the floor, and when I touch the back of my head, I feel sticky, wet hair. I wince as my fingers brush a gash in my scalp.
Blinking hard, I grab the desk edge and pull myself up. I’m standing in front of the computer monitor. On the screen is Trinity with that orb behind her. Except what was an orb is now changing into a very clear figure.
A ghostly figure standing behind Trinity.
Standing right where I am.
Below it, there’s a new comment.
gonegirl5: You killed me, as surely as if you’d bashed my head into that desk.
No.
That’s not…
It can’t be. It makes no sense.
And yet…
I swallow hard. When I look at the figure again, I can make out long dark hair and what looks like a pale T-shirt. In the reflection of that screen, I see myself…with long dark hair and a gray tee.
I am the ghost behind Trinity.
I am the ghost accusing her.
Not Vanessa Lyons.
Me.
But that isn’t possible. We saw the orb three weeks ago. The comments started three weeks ago. How could I be the one…?
My gaze shifts to the mug prominently displayed on the screen. The Doctor Who mug from Rory, with the time travel quote I’d said on the show.
Things don’t always happen in the right order…
Footsteps thunder down the hallway.
“Hannah? Hannah!”
It’s Rory.
Oh God, Rory. He’s about to race in and find my body. I spin, as if I can stop him, but he’s already frozen in the doorway, his gaze on the floor. Then it lifts to me.
“Sit,” he says, rolling the chair toward me. “You hit your head, and there’s blood…Damn it! Where the hell is Trinity? Did she just shove you down and take off?”
“You can see me?”
His brow furrows. “Of course I can…” He sputters a ragged laugh. “How badly did you hit your head, Hannah? No, you’re not a ghost. Sit down for a minute,
and then we’re getting you to the hospital.”
As he puts me in the chair, he explains that he saw part of the fight on the hidden camera. Without any sound, he only caught a glimpse of Trinity pushing me, in the screen reflection. Then he saw me crumple to the floor. He caught an Uber and spent twenty minutes banging on the door before breaking in through a back window.
“Fucking Trinity,” he mutters. “I hope this is the hint you need, Hannah. She’s no friend of yours, and you have to get out before…”
He trails off, his gaze fixed on something behind me. I turn to see he’s looking at blood on the floor, a pool of it creeping from behind the desk.
I’m about to say that’s just mine. Then I realize it’s in the wrong spot—I fell on the other side of the desk, and this is a pool of blood, trickling along a crack between the floorboards.
That’s when I see Trinity’s sneaker.
I bolt up from the chair so fast my head lurches. Rory grabs my arm to steady me. Then we make our way to the desk. There, on the other side, sits Trinity, holding her slashed wrists on her lap. Dead eyes stare at us.
There’s a note by her leg. I pick it up as Rory hurries to check for a pulse that I know he won’t find.
I skim the note. It’s barely legible, a crazed rant about my trick with the orb and the comments, how I tried to drive her off, and we argued, and I fell, and Trinity knew everyone would blame her, just as they did with Vanessa.
“She thought she killed me,” I whisper.
“What?” Rory takes the note and skims it. “Wow. I knew she was unstable, but she lost it. She totally lost it.”
He’s still talking. I don’t hear him. I’m staring at the screen as that figure behind Trinity slowly comes into focus. It’s a slender young woman with long dark hair. I see the ghost’s shirt—a pale blue V-neck. My gaze goes to Trinity’s body…wearing a pale blue V-neck.
That’s when the comments begin to scroll.
gonegirl5: You’re alive, and I’m not, and that’s your fault, Hannah.
Final Cuts Page 5