Chapter 57: Receipts

POV: Zara

My phone wouldn't stop buzzing.

Notification after notification stacked up so fast the screen looked like it was glitching, names and comment counts climbing in real time while I sat frozen on my bed, still holding the photo of the folded paper with my name on it, still trying to figure out if I should tell someone about the message or do exactly what it said and stay quiet.

I almost didn't open the new tag. Almost. But my thumb moved before my brain caught up, and there it was.

Jade Okafor, live on her page, laughing.

I hit play with my stomach already sinking.

"So apparently," Jade said into the camera, perfectly put together, not a single trace of fear anywhere on her face, "some of y'all think I owe Zara Cole an apology." She rolled her eyes so hard her whole head tipped back. "For what? Filming something that was already happening in public? Babe, I didn't make them almost kiss on a porch with the lights on."

The comments scrolled under her so fast I could barely read them. Lol, she's right though. Zara needs to relax. Not Jade's fault some girls can't handle attention.

My hands went cold.

Two days ago this girl had been tied to a chair with tape over her mouth, eyes wide and terrified in a photo someone sent to threaten me. Two days ago she'd been a victim, same as Naomi, same as the rest of us caught up in whatever this was. And now here she was, laughing into a camera like none of it had touched her at all, like she hadn't spent a single second being scared.

That wasn't grief. That wasn't even relief. That was a girl who knew exactly how to use a moment, and she was using this one to bury me deeper while everyone watched her do it.

My phone buzzed again. A new comment, fresh, climbing fast. I knew the username. Jade's friend from the cheer squad, the one who never said a single word unless Jade said it first.

Someone should post the FULL video. People only saw the edited clip. There's more.

There's more.

My whole body went rigid. There wasn't more. There was nothing else to show; nothing happened beyond what everyone had already seen and torn apart for a week straight. Unless they were planning on making something up entirely, stitching together a lie dressed up to look like proof.

I scrolled further and found it already happening. A new thread on the town's community board, the same one my mom used to post about lost cats and yard sales, now filled top to bottom with my name. Posts from people I'd never spoken to in my life, arguing about what kind of girl I was based on eleven seconds of video and a stranger's caption.

Something in me went very still and very clear, the way a room goes quiet right before a storm hits.

I'd spent this whole summer reacting. Crying on a roof. Hiding behind hoodies. Closing doors on people instead of facing them. Letting Naomi's silence eat a hole through my chest because I didn't know what else to do with it.

I was done reacting.

I opened a blank note on my phone and typed a single line at the top.

Timeline. Everything. Starting now.

Then I started writing. The first video and the exact time it posted. Jade's account and the two backup accounts Eli told me fed comments into it before sunrise that morning he went to her porch. Screenshots of the comment board, saved one by one before anyone could delete them later. The texts from the unknown number. The photo of Naomi tied to a chair. The photo of Jade in the same condition, in a different room, sent from a different angle.

I screenshotted Jade's live the second it ended, the comment about there's more sitting right there in proof, permanent, impossible to take back once I had it saved.

My hands were shaking the whole time, but I kept going, because shaking hands could still type, and somewhere underneath the fear there was something steadier starting to build. If nobody was going to believe me just because I said it out loud, then I'd give them something they couldn't argue with.

I texted Eli without thinking twice about it. I'm building a file. Everything. Every post, every text, every threat. If something happens to me, it's all saved in one place. I need you to know where.

His reply came back in seconds. Send it to me too. Both of us hold it. Nobody touches you without going through both of us.

Something in my chest loosened just slightly, reading that, the first thing in two days that felt like solid ground instead of sand.

I went back to the threatening text, the one demanding I come alone, the one threatening to tell Naomi some secret about the night her dad left, a secret I didn't even fully understand myself. I screenshotted that too, my name spelled out on that folded paper sitting heavy in my chest the whole time, and added it to the file with a label.

Threat #3. Sender unknown.

Then I scrolled back up to look at the handwriting on that paper one more time, the loops and slants of my own name written by someone else's hand, something nagging at the back of my mind that I couldn't quite place the first time I'd looked at it.

I looked closer.

And my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

I'd seen that handwriting before. Not on a stranger's note. Not on anything random or unfamiliar.

I'd seen it on birthday cards. On notes left in my locker back in middle school. On the bottom of homework Naomi used to copy off me when we were twelve, her handwriting bleeding slightly to the left, the same way, the same slant on every single letter.

It wasn't a stranger's handwriting on that paper.

It was Naomi's.