10:00 P.M.

        If everything goes right, he’ll be finished by 11.

        Out of the corner of his eye, Terry glances towards Stacy’s phone, the screen cracked, the stopwatch app glowing faintly. He clicks the green “start” button.

​

        Go time.

​

        His hands are shaking, and his gloves—double-layered dish gloves from a Dollar General three towns over—are slick with a dark liquid. He steps over a streak of brownish-red, tripping a bit as the linoleum floor squeaks underneath him. The motel room smells of bleach, rot, and something sour.

​

        His mind slips—back to Stacy. Her Ridgeview letterman. Her dumb jokes. Her soft “bye-bye” over the phone on the night of her basketball match.

​

        Terry slams the bathroom door with his elbow, hitting his funny bone. He sucks in some air as he groans, slightly spilling the last tub of the cloudy mess.

        Drain cleaner, brake fluid, and lye. There were other ingredients, Reddit said, but under pressure, all he remembers is: it dissolves. He dumps the last batch into the tub; it hisses like a snake. The soup is already eating away at the bathtub, whining for something bold enough to take a plunge. It’s not perfect. He didn’t measure pH or buy a proper container. There are no goggles or a lab. Just last week, he was cramming for a forensic chemistry quiz in Lab B209, the second floor of Edith Hall. Fourteen students. Bright lights.

        A sense of order.

        But this isn’t a university lab.

        This is revenge.

        A scream fills Terry’s head—it’s not his. It’s high-pitched and sickening. Raw.

        “Let me go—please, Coach, I swear to fucking God—”

        “Stacy, hey, hey, don’t ruin this—”

        Terry squeezes his eyes shut. That was the voicemail. The one she didn’t mean to send, yet he listened to on loop, fueling his justification for this act. Memorized.

        “Enough stalling,” he mutters to himself.

        The closet creaks open, yawning like a dying animal.

        Five lumpy construction bags stumble over each other, hitting the floor. Dancing as if the man inside is still trying to fight back. One of them splits slightly, leaking his resistance onto the tile.
       

10:15 P.M.

​

        Terry retches and covers his mouth. The duct tape reads: FACE

        “Fuck me, man...” He grimaces.

        It’s heavier than he remembers, wetter too.

        The air curdles as he unties the bag, the smell of death. It’s not just a rot, but a biological breakdown. The contents smelled like spoiled meat, mothballs, and something he couldn’t put a name to—all holding hands as they burned in a locked car for the summer.

        He peels the bag open.

        The man’s head stares up at him. Eyes open.

        Terry stares back.

        The same eyes in that still frame from the school hallway camera—his hand tight around his baby sister’s arm.

        The same eyes from the courtroom screen where the judge called it all a “misunderstanding.”

        He fishes the severed head out of the pool of water and rot. The flesh sags, wrapping around his fingers. Pieces of meat were shredded from the high cheekbone down to his mangled lips. The frayed skin, swaying in the murky water. Chunks falling off where the hacksaw slipped.

        Terry can feel the bile rising in his throat, his disgust almost overpowering his anger.

        “Divine judgment, if I say so myself, Mr. Owens.” He thinks to himself, almost uncomfortable by the joke that popped into his own head.

​

        The ID floats into view. Ridgeview ISD: Matthew Owens. Head coach. Girls’ basketball team. Stacy’s killer.

        The tub hisses as he dumps the head in. Hair drops off in clumps. Eyes cave in. The face collapsing in on itself like it’s ashamed.

        For just a moment, it looks just like Stacy’s autopsy report.

        Unrecognizable.

        Terry stumbles back onto the floor, resting his hand on the toilet, dry heaving into the bowl.

        He remembers the voicemail again, the whisper at the end:

        “Terry, please pick up, I think he’s gonna—”

        Crash. Then nothing but wet, crackling breathing.

        He should have picked up. He bangs his head against the tiled wall. If he hadn’t muted his phone for midterms. If he hadn’t gone out with his dormmates that night.

        Would she be—

        No—“Focus,” he orders himself.

        Smoke spews out of the tub. It burns to breathe now; he has to move faster. He grabs the second bag—“LEGS”—and throws it into the tub, the plastic rips and spills into the tub, foaming into a mess of meat and denim. Next bag, one by one.

        TORSO.

        HANDS/FEET.

        The soup switches between pink, then red, then a sickly gray color. Fumes and steam choke the air, peeling paint from the ceiling. Terry burst out of the room coughing.

        Shutting the bathroom door behind him. He stumbles towards the phone on the nightstand. The screen sputters a bit, then it lights up.

​

        4% battery.

 

***

​

10:29 P.M.

​

        He was so focused on getting the ingredients that he forgot to bring a charger. He should
have another eleven minutes. That’s what the math said, but time is moving wrong now.

        His eyes sting. He rubs his eyes with his sleeve, and for a second—he’s sure he sees Stacy in the mirror standing near the drawers by the bed. But when he turns, the room is empty.

        He tosses the phone into his backpack, hands shaking.

        The fizzing in the bathtub finally stops. He leans down into the tub and unplugs the drain. A satisfying slurp drags down the last of Owen’s humanity, leaving the bones.

        As he fishes the bones into a dry construction bag, he tries not to think about the sounds Owens made. Not just the sloppy lying attempts to reason with Terry, as Owens cried, “No, please—check the locker room cameras.” But also the wet-bag-of-cement splatter when Terry broke his jaw with the motel’s busted coffee table leg. Or the one he made when Terry kept going. Even after he stopped reacting.

        He disregards the thoughts and finishes packing, double-layering the bag before shoving it into his backpack.

        The entire room is doused in peroxide and bleach; he scrubs hard until his knuckles split. The floors, the walls, he replaces the sheets, and dumps anything identifiable into his bag. The receipt from the sandwich he had at four that morning, Owen’s keys and ID,and his bloody clothes. He erases them both—Owens and himself—from Room 219.

​

***

​

10:49 P.M.

        His fingers itch. His hands are raw. He’s agitated.

​

        He didn’t bring lotion. All he had was the peroxide and bleach.

        He’s driving fast—too fast—but the roads are empty. He’s never seen the speedometer going this far; it’s almost therapeutic. The vibration of the car would almost lull him to sleep if not for the fact that he was sickening himself driving Owen’s car. The car stinks of death. He’s going to ditch it, that was always the plan. It’s probably petty, but Terry feels like it’s good karma for himself.

        A blue light blinks on his dashboard: Stacy’s phone. He’s not sure how it’s still alive.

        New notification:
        OneDrive Backup Completed: 1 New Voice Recording Synched.

        He frowns and pulls over onto a sandy shoulder. The road is silent, completely deserted.

        The file is marked: “AUTOSAVE01.m4a”; it’s only 23 seconds long. The date: October 15th, the night Stacy went missing.

        A cold sweat washes over Terry before he eventually hits play.

        Her voice is softer than he has ever heard.

        “Hey...um. I don’t really know what to do. Coach Owens was annoying again, but he pulled me aside to talk about Coach Darrow. Yeah...The assistant coach. He told me he’s making weird comments—that I’m pretty and that I should stop covering up so much.”

        Terry freezes.

        “I’m scared. He’s always looking at me. I think he still has keys to the locker room. I keep calling, but your phone must be dead. Terry, please call me back, okay? I wanna go home.”

        Click.

        Silence.

        Terry’s fingers lock around the steering wheel. He’s not breathing.

10:50 P.M.

 

        Terry bursts out of the driver's seat and vomits onto the ground. The phone screen glows dimly, as its life force dwindles.

        1% battery.

        His hands shake, more than they did as he conjured up this entire plot in his dorm room. More than it did when he lied to the motel receptionist that he was Owen’s cousin visiting from Midridge. More than it did as he chopped up his mangled corpse into “manageable pieces.” This kind of shaking doesn’t stop.

        He claws through Stacy’s old files—pictures, messages, and call logs. The dying phone lags horribly, and Terry’s eyes water with frustration. There’s a photo from three days before she died. A selfie in the school gym, making a dumb pose with a group of girls.

        Behind her, almost too blurry to make out: a man in gray slacks. Clipboard in hand. Watching. Unsmiling.

        Not Matthew Owens.

        Terry zooms—the phone dies.

        His reflection is staring back at him. Tears in his bloodshot eyes, his hair is caked with grime and dust. His face has smears of what’s left of Owens on his cheek. His hands are peeling, and his clothes smell of death. He looks down at Stacy’s phone.

        He digs a hole beside the road with his bare hands, ripping his nails. Shoves everything in. Bones. Phone. Bag.

        He stares at the mound. Buried inside: Matthew Owens—innocent.

        And Stacy’s last message, proof of who it really was.

        He fucked up and got it wrong.

        It doesn’t matter.

        A smile creeps onto Terry’s mouth as he realizes he’s already headed towards Ridgeview.
The guilt should be eating him alive, but his head has never been clearer. There’s no more doubt
in his mind; finally, concrete proof of who he needs to delete.

        The drive is silent, his mind formulating plans. He checks the clock.

11:00 P.M.

        If everything goes right, he’ll be finished by 12.