Face-Slapping14 min read
I Took a Coin Flip and Ended Up in the Live Murder Room
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I flipped a coin on a kitchen table that smelled like old tea and sterilized bandages.
"I'll go if the ship side shows," I told the air. "Heads—I'll go. Tails—I'll stay."
The coin spun. I watched it like I watched people's faces for a living: searching for truth in a small, turning thing.
"It landed heads," I said to the photograph of Mom. My voice was thin. "So I go."
The contest poster on the square had promised a first prize of fifty million star-credits, plus room and board from auditions to finals. I was a college drop with a bachelor’s degree, a packed resume of rejections, and social anxiety like an anchor around my neck. Fifty million would buy me time. It would buy my parents care. It would buy a chance to breathe.
"You're really doing this?" a neighbor asked when I packed my single suitcase.
"I am," I said. "Or the coin made me."
They laughed. I didn't.
At the audition hub, a live host waved under the giant screens blinking "REASONING 101." One by one the names were called. My name—Jadyn Buchanan—felt small when the announcer said it.
"Number six holo-room," the staff robot read aloud, its smile a projected curve. "Good luck."
I squeezed the card. I had joined to win money, not fame. But the audition rule stabbed at me—twenty percent of scoring came from viewers' love on global live streams. Viewers loved two things: spectacle and looks. I had the latter, if not the confidence. My eyes were big and round and did things to strangers. That had worked once before—someone offered me streaming work and I refused because the thought of a camera made my palms go slick.
"Hi," a boy said at the village holoset, and said his name like it was a tune: "Axl Ferguson."
"Hello." I tried to make my voice small.
"Griffin Bryant," said another boy nearby, and his eyes found me like gravity. He didn't try to hide that he was looking straight at me. His look was not the loud whoop of fans. It was the quiet, dangerous kind that measured a person.
People in the live chat wrote things I couldn't see: hearts, crude jokes, tiny ruthless comments. My throat knit up. I kept my face flat like a plate, which apparently made some viewers angry and some viewers nostalgic.
The holo-scenario dropped us into a village called Tang. One hundred eighteen villagers dead. Two survivors. "Find cause, method, and motive," the system told us.
"We're investigators now, huh?" A man named Dominic Bass said too loudly. He wanted to be the center. He would be the center for a while—at least until better evidence beat him.
A thin woman at the door—she looked like someone who had been carved, not born—stood like she had a secret clipped to her skin. She introduced herself as Sophie Dillon.
"There's one guy who sounds like he belongs to the town," said Axl. "There's a stranger who insists he came for development. He put down a notice—wanted to find his lost daughter."
I crouched beside a dead woman at a table. Her skin was pale, lips and nails purple. No wounds. I smelled the air, turned the cup. Alcohol on some plates. Not all. "They're poisoned," I told the group.
"It was the farmer," Dominic insisted. "He left the poison out and someone laced the food."
"Check the hands," I said. "Check under fingernails."
People watched me like I carried a flashlight. I counted houses from my head. Twenty-five. A list in the village ledger matched twenty-three names of payments and gifts.
"Why would the village kill itself?" Axl asked.
"Because of red eggs," I said. "A wedding happened. Who had the bride's bloom on their chest?"
We found two people still not listed as dead: a young shaky woman—thin, with a crooked walk—and the stranger who'd claimed he was looking for a missing child. The stranger, who'd pinned a "Farmstays Development Manager—W. Fu" card inside his wallet, had mud on his shoes.
"You're not a local," I told him quietly. He flinched.
The evidence threaded itself: an absent bride, a chest with holes where a boutonnière had been, egg shells missing from every home. I checked fingernails and found a reddish-brown powdered tint in two children’s fingers. The bride, whoever she truly was, had coated red wedding eggs with toxin. She'd targeted people who would take a ceremonial egg in hand. She had an injured accomplice, someone pretending to be terrified. A story of an abducted child bounced like a pebble; the stranger wanted to own his innocence or his guilt. He'd gone to the police and planned to carry the blame if it calmed the storm.
I submitted the answer. My pulse hammered like a poor drummer. Heartbreak and an exhausted relief washed my cheeks; I let one tear fall into my collar.
"You cried?" Griffin, tall and unreadable, caught my sleeve as I left. "Are you okay?"
"I—" I looked down. "Holoset dizziness, mostly."
He didn't laugh. His hand was warm. Viewers called him a captain, a godhead, a ship we all boarded. He was that sort of person who walked into a room and made the air organize itself around him. He had fans. When he acknowledged me, a ripple went through the stream.
"Good thinking today," he said, and I felt the world tilt a degree.
They told us later that I had a pass straight through to the next round. I had not expected it, and neither had my coin.
In the capital, the building smelled like polished metal. One hundred one applicants had become teams. We formed a group; Griffin—my seat-mate—stood like a magnet and pulled a team around us.
"Team name?" someone asked.
"Team Leader Is Always Right," Griffin said without a beat. The name was ridiculous and the room laughed. The name stuck.
Teamwork meant cold strategy, and the show's format spun us into a classroom scenario. The holo stenciled: "You are a student. A teacher in your school receives lovers' gifts. Girls go missing. You must survive and find the killer."
"You got an extra line," I told Griffin as the font for my rules slid into my view: "If I die, you must submit." The line sat there like a knife.
"Then don't die," he said. He squeezed my hand. I wanted to say something brave. I said nothing and became quieter.
The classroom felt wrong fast. The teacher—Erik Horn—smiled like a lighthouse and guarded his desk like a fortress. The art teacher—Kamila Sanders—had paint under her fingernails and a smile that bent like a trap. Among the messages I dug up, the pattern pointed at Kamila—photos, a 'found' notice, the obsessive diaries of a stalker—and the evidence grew sharpest when I found a box of gifts in a teacher's drawer: bracelets and a broken watch marked Christmas date, love notes crossed with fury. Bones lived under the floorboards of the teacher’s office like a second language.
"Kamila and Erik were lovers once," I told the team. "But something broke."
The pieces fell fast. A lockbox opened with a date as code. Inside—white bones in neat rows, skulls that told stories in tiny fractures. A hidden compartment in Kamila's art room held hair and proofs of victims. She had tried to control, then to punish, then to collect parts like trophies when her jealousy turned surgical.
"Why?" Griffin asked quietly, breath making the air tremble.
"Because love curdled," I said. "Because she could not accept rejection and somehow turned the world into a private museum of proof." My throat tightened.
We confronted them—Kamila first, in the holoroom. She was calm, and in that calm she seemed darker than any storm.
"You can't hide this. It's on your shelves," I said. The lab light widened people’s faces. The cameras loved the confrontation. The live viewer count spiked.
"You're wrong," she said. Her voice slid off like oil. "You're grasping at noise and meaning."
"Then explain the box." I showed the photos.
She smiled, small and convinced. "You will never prove it."
I pressed the submit button. The system accepted. For a second, the world shrank to the sound of my own breath.
They tried to make the killer's arrest small and certain. In the holoset, they took Kamila away. In the crowd, a roar started like a tide.
"She'll be exiled," someone muttered on my shoulder.
"No," Griffin said softly. "Make it public. Make them see."
I didn't understand his plan. Then the producers reached out, and the idea was too bright to resist: a live public reckoning in the grand auditorium where finalists would be announced.
Two nights later, the lobby of the capital's Event Hall swelled with people—contestants, staff, sponsors, a million live viewers pouring light into the screens.
"Tonight, we clear the wrongs and announce the finalists," the host said, eyes glittering. "But first—an update in the Tang Village case and the... classroom case."
Screens above swung to show the bones and the pearls. Kamila sat in the audience with a face that had been styled into inhospitality. Blair Nilsson—another contestant who had learned to wear fame like armor—sat a few rows back staring like a viper.
I watched as the flow of evidence moved from private to public. I felt a stone settle in my stomach. Griffin squeezed my hand like he was keeping the world steady.
The projection rolled the timeline: gifts, stalked messages, stolen eggs, a diary with the same handwriting, fragments of shell embedded in a classroom sculpture. Live commentators walked through the forensics; an expert mapped toxins. The audience leaned in.
Kamila's expression shifted. At first she was porcelain-sure: a practiced, small smile. Smug. Confident. The camera loved smug.
"How convenient," the host's voice said. "But the show will not let a murderer hide behind performance. From Tang to our classrooms, we follow the threads."
"That's me?" Kamila asked out loud. She said it like a note being sung to check pitch. The crowd murmured.
The chief judge—Dominic Bass, who had until then enjoyed the role of expert—stepped up, notetaker in hand. He read the list of evidence. "Gift receipts. Phone records. A witness who saw Kamila entering the teacher's office on the day a girl disappeared. An art sculpture with organic remains. A pocket watch with dates aligning precisely with missing persons."
Kamila's face lost color. A crease near her lip tightened. She blinked.
Someone in the audience snapped a photo and it spread like a sneeze. The livestream overloaded.
"You're wrong!" Kamila's voice climbed from smug to sharp. "You have no right—this is—"
Her denial was the second act.
A screen then showed a recorded interrogation. Kamila, on tape, had cracked at the edges and murmured about "keeping them safe" and "only the parts that matter." The voice on playback trembled.
"That's staged!" Kamila shrieked. "That's—"
The floor of the auditorium hummed with whispers: shock, replays, disbelief. The priestly air of certainty went away like a curtain with a hole.
"She is denying it," someone said near me as the cameras zoomed on Kamila's face. The smile had become a thin line. Her eyes were wet but not the humble kind—not the one that asks for forgiveness. Just wetness where something inside unknotted.
"Stop the livestream," someone screamed from the production booth, but it was too late. The upload continued. Phones lifted. Fingers typed. Recorders rolled.
Kamila's voice broke. The next stage arrived: shock.
"You can't prove—" she started, and then the videos—the messages she'd sent, the shop receipts where she had bought chemicals, the painting sketches where she practiced unwinding skull shapes—played in a strict, clinical order. Each clip reduced her land of denials.
"That's not mine!" she shouted, the denial she had offered now dull and too late.
She moved from being composed to being shocked to seeing the footage of herself walking to an abandoned lot where she'd hidden eggs. She watched like she was the one in the seat, not the one in the footage.
The crowd did not rush to mercy.
"You're wrong again," a man behind me whispered. "The show wants blood."
Kamila's face collapsed. Denial buckled. She reached out for something that wasn't there: "No, no, no. I didn't mean—"
A woman in the audience stood up, someone whose daughter had been one of the victims in a previous cold case. She walked down the aisle and faced Kamila.
"You made art out of our children," the woman said. Her voice had been polished on grief and time. "You claimed you were saving them. You left bones like a perverse library. Why?"
Kamila's eyes became a cave. "I loved him," she said, and the love made her voice a thing of tragedy and odd defense. It did not excuse the bones. It only explained a little of how terrible things looked.
That moment—shock turning to denial and then to collapse—was where the third act of wrongdoer unraveling happened. But the law, and more importantly the eyes of everyone, demanded a fourth act: pleading.
"I didn't mean to—I'm so sorry," Kamila croaked. She sank into the chair—knees buckling—hands clasping for anything to hold. "Please—please don't—"
The auditorium filled with the sound of cameras clicking. People nearby recorded. Some stood, silent in horror. Some clapped. A cluster of teenagers began to chant for justice. Others cried.
"Cameras, stop!" an assistant begged, but the crowd had already turned into a sea of recorders and phones. The reaction flooded the feed. The judge read out formal charges. The host recited the code the show used for legal handoffs. The security staff, stern-faced, escorted Kamila away with a grip that did not loosen.
Meanwhile, Blair Nilsson—she who had tried to sneak a blade into me in the classroom holo and who later stabbed me during a live submission in another round—sat in the same hall with a taut face. Her earlier arrogance had been a mask. The production team turned the lights toward her when the footage of her attack played. She had been filmed brandishing a knife and trying to silence me. That footage was threaded with the live audience feed from weeks before, showing her whispering dark things and practicing a furious smile.
At first Blair's lips were defiant. "You can't pin this on me. I was defending myself. She—she stole my chances." Her voice climbed and then fell.
The projection showed the night she followed me. Then it showed a clip from a later live case where she plunged a blade while the cameras rolled. She had tried to kill me in the holo-classroom and again inside a case room.
"How could you?" I asked through the mic when the host offered me time on the stage. My voice trembled but held like a rope.
"It was him!" Blair shouted, and her voice was the old showbiz shriek that kills sympathy. She gestured toward Griffin, as if he had ordered her.
The crowd reacted like a wave. "Liar!" someone called. "You attacked her!"
The evidence stood between her lies and the stage lights: a kitchen knife with a serial trace left in a locker, fingerprints under a fingernail that matched hers when the forensic team processed the clips, and a recorded text where she boasted about "teaching a lesson to the girl who took my man."
Her smugness cracked first, then it slid into denial—she told a story where everything had been different. "I—she—" She turned red. Then she gave a stalling laugh, then the laugh fell off and her face shrank.
Then the cameras caught the moment the audience reached the fourth stage: collapse and begging.
"I didn't mean—" Blair sobbed. She sank onto the stage steps. "Please—please don't—"
Cameras panned to the crowd. People recorded, some cried, some clapped. A stranger took out her phone and streamed Blair's pleading live so the world could see. Teenagers shouted "Disqualify!" and "Justice!" Staffers took the stage microphone to inform the hall that Blair had been stripped of her credentials and removed from the competition.
The good thing about live feeds is their clarity. The bad thing is their permanency.
"For anyone wondering what happens when the cruelty you hide meets a million eyes," Griffin said quietly when we left the stage, "the room remembers."
I couldn't speak for a long time. The buzz of viewers kept climbing; trending topics lit like flares. Later, the show's leaders issued a formal announcement: Kamila Sanders and Blair Nilsson were out—fired, and both facing legal processes. The live feed replayed their breakdowns until people had downloaded every second and stored it under "evidence."
This was public punishment. It was worse than a quiet arrest: it was the slow, communal seeing—smugness, then the bright reveal, then denial, then collapse, and finally the plead. A thousand strangers saw them unmade in steps. They crumbled.
They reacted as the rulebook predicted.
At the reveal moment, Kamila had first been small and confident. She became pale. Then came denial: "You can't—" And a rush of false explanations. The evidence shoved her into shock. She shouted about plagiarism, about being framed. Then the head judge played a recording showing otherwise. Her lips moved; she shook her head. Then the crowd's eyes fell on her shoulders and the weight became unbearable. She bent forward as if someone pulled a cord. Her voice shrank from fury to a whimper. At the end she whispered the only thing she had left that might be clung to: "I loved him."
Blair looped the same steps. She had swagger, then evidence, then a small denial, then something raw and naked: "I didn't want to lose," she said, and then she sobbed for mercy.
Around them, the crowd's reactions ranged. Some filmed for proof. Some stood in mute shock. Some applauded when security led them out. Some praised the team that brought the truth to light. Some turned to join the trending hashtags.
I had to stand in the middle of a storm of cameras and feel both ashamed and vindicated: ashamed that my vulnerability had become a show; vindicated because the truth had survived the pressure.
"That should have been private," I said to Griffin later as we sat on the roof of the hotel, wind combing the city's neon hair.
"Private truth stays private only when no one is harmed," he said. "You did the right thing. You were brave."
"I was terrified," I admitted. "I still am."
He curled his fingers with mine. "Then be terrified with me."
From then on, the game shifted. The judges treated violence on contestants as a criminal case. The public's appetite didn't lessen; it sharpened. We used their attention to shine light into other corners. We worked as a team—"Team Leader Is Always Right"—and for the first time, I stopped seeing the world as an obstacle and started seeing it as a surface where things would show up if you looked long enough.
Griffin and I began walking the line of something complicated. He called me names that made me feel like a person: "summer" and "my summer"—small phrases that saturated the world with warmth. One night, after a round that had left my hands shaking and my heart open, he said, "Let's be together. Officially."
"I can't," I said. "I have a family burden. There are diseases in my bloodline. I might make you suffer."
"You won't," he said. He sounded tired of arguing. "If that day comes, we'll sign a contract, and if you wish, we'll let go. But not now."
"That's absurd," I said.
"Then date me," he offered. "Let me practice being uselessly dedicated."
So I let him be uselessly dedicated. We learned each other's breath patterns like a ridiculous new language. He protected me on stage and off. He kissed me somehow with the gentleness of a person who knows what is fragile.
"You're being ridiculous," I told him once.
"Good," he said. "I'll be ridiculous if it keeps you."
The contest marched on. We solved cases—some were staged puzzles, some were hollow boxes containing grief deliberately placed by the producers to create drama. The public loved certain patterns: a bold accusation in the last minute; a tender human moment between rounds. We gave them both.
Eventually the final rounds approached. The show tightened security around contestants. Legal teams sat on chairs backstage like sentries.
At the finale, we stood beneath a dome of soft lights. The host's smile had gone somewhere between amusement and relief. The show had made money and exposed monsters. Viewers tuned in in colossal numbers.
Before the final reveal, there was one last piece of business: the public documentation of the punishment had been requested by families and authorities. The show, wired into every archive, had assembled the footage into an investigatory reel. It was shown right before winners were announced.
From my seat I watched Kamila's face on the screen. From triumph to collapse, again. The crowd watched it again, as if repetition might teach them a lesson in how small the proud become when their constructions are leveled.
"Will that ever stop being painful?" I asked Griffin.
"It should be painful," he said. "Pain makes people remember not to build in cruelty."
He and I won, in the sense of being chosen to proceed in this cruel, glittering ring. But the real thing I carried away was not a trophy but a certainty: exposure is a kind of justice. It is public, messy, and sometimes it means the guilty collapse where everyone can see.
After the lights and the applause, after the producers' clapping and the cameras' buzz, Griffin and I walked home under a string of streetlights. A small robot glided toward us making a cheerful chirp—the same little guide that had led me into my first holo-room.
I reached into my pocket and felt the old coin.
"I kept this," I said, holding it out to Griffin.
"What for?" he asked.
"To remember a small choice," I said. "That a coin can send you somewhere you didn't expect and that you can still walk home."
He looked at the coin, then at me. "Then keep it," he said. "Carry it like proof that once you let chance decide, you also chose to show up."
We laughed. We kissed. The city's neon reflected on Griffin's jawline like a promise. Above us, the giant billboard of the show faded into a softer glow.
I had come for money. I had nearly died in a holo-classroom. I had watched killers unravel with the world looking. I had found hands to hold. I had learned that being seen was sometimes the only real punishment—and sometimes the only real cure.
A week later, a clip of the reveal—Kamila's collapse, Blair's pleading—sank into the net like a magnet. People used it to teach about the costs of obsession. Families of victims used it to demand better protections. I used it to remember how thin the difference was between being watched and being loved.
I keep the coin in a new drawer.
Sometimes I take it out and spin it.
"Who's the liar?" Griffin asks with a grin, and I toss the coin.
It flips, and I laugh when it catches the light.
The End
— Thank you for reading —