Need

"Do you consent to this being recorded?" I asked the girl in front of me, I had called her out to a parking lot not too far from my house to get some information from her. Hopefully, something concrete enough to spark the fire. 

"I do, Liam," She responded, not able to smile. The look she had was grim as if someone just told her a family member had died, but I knew why. She was one of the first victims of Sam, the one I needed to speak to. 

I couldn't speak to her in school as they suspended me for two weeks, and for whatever reason whenever I tried to interact with her during class I was threatened by the school not to. Something about tampering with evidence and manipulating the validity of her statements. 

I cleared my throat, gave her a thumbs up, and finally turned on the voice changer. 

"My name is Unknown, I am here today with a victim of the student Sam Nester, the old band teacher, and the current victim of the history teacher. Last year, the band teacher made sexual comments towards her, and eventually, he went so far as to slip aphrodisiacs into her cup of coffee. Is this correct, Sasha?"

"That is correct, he made many passes at me, and one of them was in front of the dean. However, the Dean threatened to expel me if I ever went public with anything," She answered, a tear in her eye. 

I felt a harsh pang in my heart, what was I doing interviewing this girl and bringing back bad memories? As much as that thought took over, I had to push it down, I needed to get through this. Not just for her, but for all the other victims. If they couldn't speak, then no matter what happened to me, I'd be the voice.

"Are you okay with going into more information about Sam?" I asked, passing over the microphone to her. 

My heart sank with every word she said, the way she described what happened to her, and as she started to cry, it quickly turned into a full panic attack. She went over how he forced her into the bathroom and did things with her against her will. When she went to the school to report it, knowing the cameras in the hallway captured it, they did nothing but threaten her with expulsion again.

I tried to calm her down, giving her tissues, and offering words of encouragement, but I realized it was over. I turned off the microphone, threw it aside, and went to hug her. She hugged me back while bawling her eyes out, staining my shirt with her tears, but I let her continue.

After about thirty minutes, she managed to calm down, and I drove her home. Without anything else to do, I looked at myself in the truck mirror. 

I stared at myself, and even though my eyes were open, my reflection blinked. It was him again, the voice in the back of my mind. 

'What are you doing here Liam? Trying to do this the hard way?' It asked, giving a wild grin. In the reflection, he started to laugh, showing his sharper teeth, and his eyes turned a sickened shade of forest green.

"Shut up, I need to do this. I need to collect as much information as I can and build something," I tried to counter, but I couldn't even convince myself. This wasn't my place to interfere, it wasn't my place to get information from students, willingly or not.

'Just do it. Make all of them pay for what they've done! You have the power, Liam. You can make all of them suffer,' He fired back, his hand reaching out of the mirror and grabbing my cheeks. 'WAKE THE FUCK UP AND DO IT!' 

I jolted forward, slamming my head into the black steering wheel of my truck. "Shit," I mumbled, gritting my teeth and clutching my forehead, which now had a big red bruise. 

The voice was getting worse, even stronger since I started my medication, and it was growing by the day. With every passing minute, as I felt worse and worse, he got stronger, like he fed off my pain. 

'What's happening to me?' I thought, cupping my hands and placing them over my eyes. Purple bags were visible under the forming wrinkles, the once bright green color was now a darkened shade of emerald, lacking even a single sparkle. 

Although my head hurt with every movement, I reached into the glove box and pulled out my bottle of pills. 'Take 2, 1 by day, 1 by night.' I ignored the label and chucked three into my mouth, chugging it down with a bottle of water. "That'll hold me for a bit."

I listened to the recording on repeat, until I threw up in disgust. What she detailed was enough to make me cry, enough to get even a flea to listen, yet the police and school still ignored her. Why?

I replayed it a final time, ready to shut it off and try another approach. But suddenly I had caught a word I missed the first few times. "Jessica," A name, a lead. But there were so many Jessica's in the school, where would I start?

Not far from my truck, a boy was confidently walking down the street. His coat billowed behind him, flapping in the winter breeze, and I recognized his face, which drew me from my thoughts and made me sit up to get a better look. He was the brother of the girl who was left for dead in the alley, but he was in jail, wasn't he?

"Hey!" I called out, slamming the heavy truck door and sprinting up to him. The closer I got, the further he went, still walking. Eventually, I broke into a full run, sweating bullets as I struggled to catch up. 

As he walked into the light from one of the street lamps, I could see a thin outline of red around his pupils. "What the hell?" I questioned, pulling out my phone to look, but there was nothing. There weren't even footsteps in the snow. As if he never existed in the first place. So then who- or what- was I chasing?

'Heh, look at you, chasing ghosts now are we?' The voice said, this time louder, he was close to me. I didn't respond, instead, I simply turned around and made my way back to the truck, as silent as I could be. It wasn't possible, I saw his face, so what was happening?

"Wait a moment," I blurted out, pulling up the news report from all those years ago. When the school first covered up the incident, there were a few comments, one of them from Jessica Borden. The only reason I remembered her name was because she disappeared too, almost like a ghost, like he just did. "It has to be, come on."

I messaged her immediately on the one social media app I had, waiting for her reply, and sat back in the seat. Going back home at this stage would be suicide, my mom had already threatened to beat me so bad I'd wish I was in hell the last time I got myself suspended.

After thirty minutes of silence, still waiting for anything, I started to drift asleep again, but then my eyes shot open at a ding. I had gotten a message back, this was it, she had to have something for me, right? Except her message made me pause and raise an eyebrow as I reread it over and over.

"This account has been deactivated as of ** ** **, for further opportunities, please contact *** *** ****." My one lead was gone in a flash. But why did it take so long to get a reply? Something was wrong, I could feel it, something was off. 

Everyone who had ever gone public, whether on social media or the news with anything negative regarding the school had either had their accounts deactivated or stopped showing up all of a sudden.

All of a sudden her account disappeared too? My hands tightened around the hard steering wheel as I bit my tongue hard and looked ahead at the falling snow. Of course, it was odd, it wasn't a coincidence.

Without thinking further, I called the number. It rang once, twice, thrice, four times, and then the line went dead. "SHIT!" I shouted, punching my dashboard. 

'Liam, can you trust me?' A softer voice spoke from inside my mind. I recognized its voice, she claimed to be the sister of the other voice, but how could voices be siblings? Everyone told me I was crazy when I explained it, so I quit trying. My therapist thought I was insane, but she still tried to help. 

"I- I don't know," I answered, breaking the rule that I set with my therapist. I had heard her voice before, she never told me to do anything bad, she had always done the opposite. Instead of yelling at me to kill someone, she begged me to calm down and think clearly. Unlike the male voice, I trusted her, at least as much as I could.

"Go back to that alley, the information you need will be there," She said simply, before going quiet. Even after I asked repeatedly why, she never spoke again. Yet, it was a lead. I needed anything I could get to finally crack this, solid evidence of anything regarding the situation.

"I can't believe I'm doing this," I muttered to myself, putting my truck in drive. 

***

After about twenty minutes, I arrived at the alley. There was a gravestone for the teacher, yet not a single flower for the girl who died. "Sick bastards," I muttered through gritted teeth, clamping them shut with enough force to shatter a chicken bone. 

As badly as I wanted to smash the flowers on the ground and stomp on them, I didn't. If I left any proof there was somebody here, it could lead the school back to someone trying to get the truth out, back to me.

Other than the countless boutiques, it was relatively empty, minus the fragments of trashbags and newspapers. The cold air wrapped around my breath as I exhaled a sigh and breathed in the stench of rotten eggs. The only light in the alley was the moon's reflection in a shallow puddle, allowing me to see my darkened eyes.

'Why am I here?' I asked myself, squatting down to touch the water. As soon as I did, I spotted a bright pink case tucked neatly below one of the trash bags in the reflection. I recognized the case, I had seen it dozens of times when passing her in the hallway, it was the student's phone.

Every time she stared at the blank screen when we passed each other, every time in class she had a flicker of hatred in her eyes while staring at it, the few times she almost slammed it into her desk out of anger. I could never forget the look of it.

I collapsed onto the ground, my legs and arms shaking. Sweat rolled down my forehead as I clutched my throat as if an invisible force was choking me. My heartbeat sped up, accompanied by the thumping of my chest. 

I let out a scream as what felt like flames engulfed my veins. My skin tightened, squeezing harder on my already faint breathing. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the pain began to fade. 

"Jesus…" I grumbled, wiping the drool off my lips as I stood back up. Whatever had just happened, I didn't want to know. I tried to walk away, but I remembered the phone, right beneath the trash bags. 

My body tried to go against me, but I moved the bags and found the beaten-up pink phone with a large spider web-like crack down the middle and right side. 

Whether it would still work was a coin toss and a half, but finally, there was a lead. "What the hell is happening to me?" I asked myself, grabbing it and walking back to my truck. 

I was just a student, one who was relentlessly tormented by the entire school, so why had it gotten to this? Sure, the rumors about me were bad, but those who knew the truth never held anything against me, they were on my side. So why did it ever have to go this far?

Mostly everyone called me "School Shooter Liam," All because I had shaggy black hair. Sure, it covered my eyes, but why did it matter to them? The school, of course, called me into the office dozens of times over it, but it never went anywhere. 

'No, stop thinking about it, just focus on this for now,' I thought, reminding myself enough to focus on the task at hand, the phone. If the phone was nearby, there had to be something on it, anything I could use. Besides, if I remembered that it would keep eating away at me.

'Hey, Liam. What if we just use the phone to bash in that bitch of a Dean's skull?' The male voice asked me, his voice covered in a chilling edge, enough to make me shiver. It wasn't just the cold winter, he was something else entirely. If anything was pure evil, it would be him.

"What am I even thinking about? Just, focus Liam. Charge the phone, see if it works, and collect more information," I reminded myself, zoning out to my thoughts again.

There was something about when they spoke that made me forget about whatever was going on as if they made me forget about what was happening.

I plugged the phone in, sat back in my truck, and watched the stars. Yet, something felt off, what had been going on? Why did the female voice help me and how did she know there would be something there? Too many things didn't make sense. 

'It's been a rough day. Maybe it was just a lucky guess,' I convinced myself, thinking over how the day went. From the sickening interview to the reminder on the news, hell even seeing the boy and the account being deactivated. 

Nothing made sense, nothing added up, and why was the school covering it up? Why couldn't they have fired the teacher? That would have saved their reputation.

"Ugh, I'm giving myself a migraine," I muttered, holding my forehead as the pain got worse. What if the amount I did know, everything, was only a fraction of the truth? What if no matter how far down this rabbit hole I went, there would only be more?