Her mouth split into a terrible grin as she stared at me in disbelief. “You don’t think I tried? Why do you think you haven’t called someone? Try it. They put all kinds of stuff inside you. You can’t tell on them.” She lowered her gaze again. “You can’t even kill yourself.”

My eyes widened. “Hannah. You didn’t.”

Shaking her head, she stood up. I thought she was done talking, but she paused before walking away.

“Before they’re done with you, you’ll try too.”

****

and it tells me terrible things.

I’d like to tell you I found some way to get the money or to fight them. Some way to trick or outsmart them. But in the end, I ran. For all her past deceit, I knew Hannah had been telling me the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it to be. And I had no way of winning against something like that, so my only hope was that if I disappeared, they would leave me alone.

Ten days after I learned to play the guitar, I learned that I was the one that killed Terry.

The memory was strange and slightly surreal, with everything tinted a deep blue. But despite this, it was very detailed and real to me. I remembered calling him up, asking if it was okay if I visited him in a couple of days, but to keep it just between us that I was coming. That I met him out in the parking lot of our old school, now closed and scheduled to be renovated into some kind of group home the following spring. I remembered his confused laughter when I pulled the knife on him and how he started to squeal and beg as I began to hurt him.

I remembered it all and knew it was true, even though every bit of it was a lie.

Because Terry had died of a sudden stroke while he was playing golf and I was over a thousand miles away. By the time Hannah had called me, he had already been declared dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Blue “tint marker” aside, there was no way that I could have killed him. But despite that objective reality, I could feel the weight of murdering my best friend crushing me.

No one even bothered contacting me again, either to shake me down for money they didn’t really want or for “new recruits” that I had already decided I would never give them. I wouldn’t make the mistake Hannah had made, dragging down someone else as I drowned in the sea of horror they were slowly pouring into my head.