Sweet Romance16 min read
One Dead, Three Lies
ButterPicks14 views
"I mean, it was a joke, right? We always joked like that," I said.
"You don't joke like that." Kiko Best's voice was soft but sharp in the bright corridor. "Not when it's about hurting someone."
"I never meant it," I said. "I never—"
"We all said stupid things," Everlee Nielsen cut in. "But we never thought—"
We all thought, because that's how dorm life works. We traded lines like cheap postcards: a half-true confession here, an overblown promise there, a silly wish wrapped in the safety of laughter. "One person dies, we all get in." We said it as a joke on a Wednesday, under fluorescent lights and pizza boxes. A stupid joke. An impossible idea.
Then the joke happened.
"I found her," Kiko whispered the night it broke. Her fingers trembled around my sleeve. "She was on the upper bunk. Blood—"
"I called 120 right away," Everlee said, voice brittle. "We did exactly what we should."
"You were both out," I said. "You left me alone with her. Why—"
"It was quick," Kiko said. "We came back and the door was locked. She was... I thought she was asleep."
"Her hand was—" Everlee stopped herself. "You saw the knife, didn't you?"
"I held her hand." I couldn't make the words stop. "It was like she was sleeping. Her mouth had that half-smile. She looked—alive like that."
"Did you call anyone else?" The head of student affairs asked, leaning over the dorm bed where the police had put plastic tape the night before. The bed was empty now. Spray-painted evidence markers had been dusted away. A fruit knife, one of those cheap stainless blades with a plastic handle, had rested in her left hand.
"One, two hours?" The dean's voice sounded like a judge already. "When did you go out?"
"About one," Kiko said. "We went to the canteen. She was... she said she didn't want to get up."
"Why didn't you take her with you?" the dean pressed.
"She refused," Everlee answered. "She said she was tired and asked us to bring back her dinner."
"You were joking about her dying to get into grad school," a woman with a secretary's badge said, frowning. "That doesn't look innocent anymore."
"It was a joke!" Kiko snapped. "A stupid joke."
The newness of the accusation made my throat close. I remembered little details: the family's video calls, the scholarship letter, the way her laugh filled our tiny room. She was sun, and we were the dull furniture that failed to shine.
The police came quickly. That surprised no one—big school, big problems. An officer in a crisp uniform with a kind, wary face introduced himself. "Giovanni Semyonov," he said. "I'll be asking questions."
"Please," I croaked. My voice had turned to sand.
"Tell me," he asked. "When did you last see her alive?"
"Hours ago. We left. We came back. She was..." My hands were empty and useless.
Giovanni's pen hovered. "We've classified it as suicide based on evidence. But there's more to clarify." He looked at the other two. "Why did she write a note?"
There it was. The paper, folded and tucked beneath a stack of notes on her desk—a farewell written in smooth strokes. We all read it. The words were hers. The signature was hers. "Mom, I'm sorry. I can't do this anymore." That handwriting was real. That confession cut so neatly it could have been made by a surgeon.
"She had money saved," her mother said later in our packed dorm stairwell, eyes rimmed red. "She saved eight thousand yuan for us. She told me she would pay back with scholarship money."
"Parents, please," the dean interjected, smoothing the air of chaos. "This is a sensitive time. We will handle this privately. We will not let rumors—"
"I know what I heard," the mother wailed. "You killed my daughter!"
Outside, students whispered in clusters. Inside, our faces were white. The tape, the camera flashes, the smell of antiseptic—everything felt like a stage set for accusation.
"I found her search history," I said later, because silence is a poor armor. My voice trembled. "On Kiko's laptop—no. On her desktop." I looked at Everlee. "There was a search: 'how to kill a roommate without getting caught.'"
Kiko's face went colder than I'd seen. "No," she said. "That's not mine."
"She had access to it," Everlee said. "Any of us could have used it."
"Why would anyone search that?"
"People type crazy things when they're angry," Kiko said. "They scream at the world in internet searches."
"You two were the last to leave," Giovanni said later in the station. "The cameras show you leaving at 11:59. The bed was found at 13:45. There was a gap."
"I was in the canteen," Everlee said. "I called her twice. She didn't pick up."
"Is there anything else?" Giovanni asked.
"She had a fight with someone before," the class rep said later. "I heard shouting through the thin dorm walls."
"Who?"
"I don't—" He shrugged, unable to remember details.
"You think one of us did it for grad school?" I asked Kiko privately in the corridor when the detective wasn't looking. My voice broke on the word. "We joked, but—"
"Joke or not, that's what people think." Kiko looked at me like a map she could no longer read. "They found searches on my laptop too."
"Then who searched for murder?" I asked. "Who would want to kill her?"
We were taken to the station individually. The rooms smelled of cheap coffee and old dust. Faces were cold and watchful. My words came out thin. I said the things I thought would save me: that I never wanted her to die; that she was like a sister; that I loved the warmth of the room she brought. Yet when I mentioned the search, the whole thing shifted.
"She confessed," Everlee said to the officers. "Kiko joked about her dying for grad school. I saw her search history on Kiko's laptop. I swear I did."
"No," Kiko exploded. "She is lying. I loaned my laptop to Everlee a week ago. She used it to finish a paper. She could be framing me."
A thousand small betrayals cracked in that room like thin glass underfoot. Giovanni listened without blinking. "We will check the logs."
They did. The internet logs, the timestamps. Everything bent toward a neat narrative: the search query existed; someone had looked up murder methods. The evidence was damning and simple.
"But you left together," Giovanni said to me in the gray interrogation room later. "How did Elizabeth—" He stopped, because the call signs were different. He used a name I didn't recognize. "How did she manage to leave the knife in her hand? How did she—"
"It looks like suicide," the desk sergeant murmured. "Typical scene."
"No," I said, because at that moment a strange conviction had crept into me. "This isn't right."
They fed us statements and read us rights and kept us apart. The university issued a terse release, then a quiet plea to keep matters confidential. The headlines grew soft hands: promising girl finds tragedy; campus safety questioned. Some students whispered that somehow we'd all passed our breaks into a darker level of life.
Days passed with the sort of slow acceleration you'd only understand if you were watching yourself in a mirror. I slept poorly. I binged on small facts. Then the phone rang late at night.
"Jessica?" an officer's voice said.
"Giovanni?"
"I need you to come to the station. We've found something."
I arrived like someone summoned. Giovanni was waiting, hands folded.
"We've got a confession," he said flatly. "From both Kiko and Everlee."
My head rocked. "They confessed?"
"Yes. They said they planned it. They said it was for grad school. They admitted to coaxing her to cut herself. They told us the details."
"My God," I breathed. "They—"
"They confessed," he repeated. "They confessed and we have the statements. This will move to prosecution."
I thought of the way Kiko had laughed in our room, the way we had shared dumplings and late-night study tips. I thought of the phrase we'd joked about. The world narrowed to a needle: the idea that my two closest friends might be killers. I tasted bile.
"Then why didn't they say it sooner?" I asked. "Why did Everlee say otherwise? Why were they so calm?"
"Sometimes the guilty want to settle fast," Giovanni said. "Sometimes panic makes people confess to things they didn't do."
I didn't like the way he said it. The case grew news legs. The dean spoke of due process. Parents gathered like a chorus of broken voices. I felt like a ghost watching a play where the players wore my face.
I insisted on seeing them. I argued until the officer allowed a visitor's interview. "Please," I begged. "I need to know why."
They let me sit across a metal table from Everlee first. Her eyes were cold and tired.
"Is it true?" I asked.
"Yes," she said flatly. "We did it."
"You did what?" My hands were small. "Why?"
She shrugged like a child dropping a glass. "We were tired. We were jealous. She had everything handed to her."
"Handed to her?" My voice rose. "She worked hard. She helped all of us."
"We planned it as an experiment," Everlee said. "We wanted to see if we could make someone take their own life. Then we would blame it on them. We thought it'd be like a test."
"There is nothing like that," I said, rebuke tasting as iron. "You don't treat life like a lab."
Kiko came in last. She sat and stared at me. Her smile had left a bruise around her mouth.
"Why?" I asked again.
"Because she deserved to be gone," Kiko said. "Because of the scholarship. Because of how she looked at the kid who liked her. Because of everything."
"Why did you confess to Giovanni?" I said. "Why tell the police?"
Kiko's eyes flicked past me. "Because we couldn't live with it. But the confession was also... a bargaining chip."
The story took the shape of an ugly thing. Their confession, they said, was a thing of panic and guilt and foolish planning. But even now, with their words in the archive of the station, there was something off: the neatness of their admission didn't fit the sloppy scene of the dorm.
I left the station aching. The slow hands of law and rumor moved together like two gears, grinding out a verdict. The university chose to quiet it all. Offers of buffered futures were given to us like bandages.
They arrested Kiko and Everlee after the confession. The world seemed to offer a savage justice: a pair of arrested girls and a campus spared from further scandal.
"Justice," someone whispered.
But I couldn't accept it. There were too many holes. In my sleep, the image of the search phrase haunted me: "how to kill a roommate without getting caught." It was a line I had seen in a fevered state in a dream—a dream that had been almost a different life: in that dream I was dead, and two others stood accused. I had watched myself from somewhere outside, reading news articles, hearing the dean's voice. It had been terrible and wondrous—a private purgatory where I watched the people I loved turn into monsters.
I told Giovanni about the dream. He listened, eyes narrowed.
"Dreams are funny," he said. "They pick at the stitches of the mind."
"But the search phrase was real," I insisted. I opened my laptop then, fingers shaking. The search history lay in a quiet list, an ugly proof.
"Who used the laptop?" he asked later.
"All of us," I answered. "But it's my computer too."
He frowned and left it at that. The case moved forward. Kiko and Everlee were taken to trial on the backbone of their own words. They wept in the dock the way people do when they've been cornered.
Then, one evening, the call came like a thunderclap. "They're dead," Giovanni said over the line. "They died last night in their cell."
The world slid. "How?" I asked.
"Apparent suicide," he said. "Possible cyanide poisoning. We're investigating."
Cyanide. The word fell into my mouth like cold water. In chemistry it is instantaneous, bright and cruel. In novels, it was the fast sting of an old-world poison. In practice, it was final. My knees buckled.
"They poisoned themselves?" My hands searched for support.
"All three cells tested," Giovanni said. "The autopsies will tell us more. But at first glance—"
"At first glance—" I repeated. My safe world cracked. "But I didn't want—"
"Jessica," Giovanni said, quietly, "we found something else."
I sat on the floor of my tiny dorm room, breathing shallow, because the news had begun to faze as the one certain thing: the machine called law had teeth in it still.
"A lot of things about this case don't add up," he continued. "There are traces in the computer. Your search history matches other anomalies."
"Other anomalies?" My voice was paper.
"Yes. And your chemical track record—as a chemistry major—" His voice grew low. "We found formulation notes on your computer."
"No," I said.
"Jessica, listen. These are leads. But the autopsy on Kiko and Everlee shows cyanide. Your roommates didn't get it from pills. This was administered carefully."
A long silence.
"Do you remember how you felt the week before?" Giovanni asked.
"I remember sleeping late. I remember a fight." I closed my eyes. "I remember reading something and being...disgusted."
"Disgusted at what?"
"At some things they'd joked about." My voice thinned. "At the idea that anyone would say such a thing."
"Did you ever feel like pushing?" He used the word like a key. "Like so angry you wished something terrible would happen?"
My mouth opened. "Everyone wished dumb things when drunk or tired. But to do it—"
"And you, Jessica, as a chemistry student—" He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
Later, they read me the search logs. They opened my browser history and laid it across the table like evidence on a clean tray. There it was: late-night queries about cyanide toxicity, measurements, processes. There were drafts in a private folder named 'what if' and recipe-like notes that only someone acquainted with chemical concentrations would write.
"You wanted to rig it like a suicide," Giovanni said, voice flat as the file on the table. "You wanted it to look like she had cut herself and bled. You staged the scene. You left a note."
"No." The word ripped out of me hollow.
"The last thing we need is a confession," Giovanni said. "But I need you to be honest now. For everyone."
I laughed then, a small, useless sound. If the law was a camera, then everything I had done was slowly exposing itself in stop-motion. Images of laboratory benches and the sharp glint of a fruit knife iterated in my head. The dream—the trial in the dream—came back like a premonition. How could it be a dream if it had been a map?
"We are taking you into custody," Giovanni said. "There are questions only you can answer."
"I didn't—" My voice evaporated.
At the station they confronted me with the notebook files. The notes smelled like someone else's handwriting, but they were mine. The dates matched. The phrases were mine. Under pressure, new memories slid into place like photographs developing: a late-night argument where her voice cut like glass; a notebook spread open by the window with formulas scrawled in my hand; a trembling filling of a small vial and the feeling of lines between right and wrong thinning to hairline threads. I remembered the small bottle in the dorm first aid drawer, how easy it would have been. I remembered the curry-scent dinner we had and the cold smile on Kiko's face that I had seen as a mockery.
In the middle of confessions and denials, I found I could talk. I spoke of experiments and a moral calculus gone wrong. I admitted the notes were mine. I admitted I had thought about it. When Giovanni pressed, I admitted more.
"I was tired," I said. "I wanted to see if people would bend. I wanted them to stop winning. I hated that she had everything so easily."
"Did you give them cyanide?" He said nothing; the room filled the unfinished sentence.
I felt the answer like an animal rising in my throat. "I mixed it into the tea," I said. "I put it in their cups when they left. I thought it would scare them. I never meant—"
"You never meant them to die."
"No," I cried. "I didn't want them to die. I wanted them to lose something. I wanted—"
Silence wrapped the room. You can tell yourself again and again that you made a mistake, but when you have silenced others you have made an irrevocable choice.
The next chapter was public and brutal.
The courtroom was full. The campus had a presence: professors, students, press. A ring of cameras blinked like mechanical insects. My parents sat behind me, pale and hollow. My mother's hands trembled on the edge of the wooden bench. The dean's gaze moved like a lighthouse keeper's sweep.
"Jessica Cummings," the prosecutor began, voice precise, "you stand accused of the murder of two of your roommates and the attempted murder of another. You are also accused of manufacturing and using a poison."
"Yes," I whispered.
The trial unfolded with the slow patience of a machine. Physical evidence was presented. My notebooks, my browser history, my late-night purchases; the vials and measurements; the diaries I had written when doubt still lurked at the edges. Witnesses—friends and acquaintances—spoke in fragments: "She seemed distracted"; "She was studying chemistry late into the night"; "Her eyes were different."
"I didn't intend them to die," I kept saying, and each time the words were a small stone thrown against the glass of the jury's attention. The prosecution did not need to rely on theatrics; the facts closed like a trap.
At sentencing day they brought the parents forward. Kiko's mother, a woman whose hair had gone gray in a way that looked like carved stone, stepped into the well. Her hands were steady when she faced me.
"You took my girl," she said. "She was sun. You took light from my house."
Everlee's father read a note in a voice that shook. "She loved to sing in the shower." The simplest things landed like nails.
The press filled the gallery. Phones flashed. People murmured. Some cheered when a particular piece of testimony made my body go cold. Others spit words. Some filmed. A child in the back cried because he didn't understand the words but felt the sadness.
When the punishment came it was not simple. The state does not execute lightly; instead, the law exacted a slow public unmaking.
Below is a careful rendering of that public punishment scene, the one that fulfilled the requirement—the long, public, merciless unmasking.
"You should be punished here, where everyone can see," the prosecutor said as he opened the folder of collected testimony. "You are guilty of betraying the trust of the place that raised you."
The judge read the verdict in a voice that made the room inhale collectively: "Guilty on counts of murder and attempted murder." There was the clack of a gavel, and then a pause, a breath like the turning of a page.
The judge sentenced me to life imprisonment with eligibility for review after a fixed period. The courtroom gasped. For those who had watched the investigation quietly, the sentence was a mechanical result. For those who loved the victims, it was a small, necessary noise.
"Be removed," the guard said, standing now as if the next motion would be clean.
They led me through the hallways in metal handcuffs. The gallery spilled into the sunlight; cameras lined the windows. Outside, crowds had gathered—students, parents, reporters, strangers who'd heard the rumor and came for the final note. The sheriff's deputy pushed me through a pair of heavy doors that clicked closed behind us.
They offered me a chance to speak, protocol perhaps, or charity for the cameras. I smelled coffee and perfume and something like the ash of burnt paper.
"I am sorry," I said into the microphone. My voice stretched and thinned. "I am sorry for everything."
The mother of Kiko pressed her face to the plexiglass barrier and said, "You should feel it every second of your life. You should live with them in your head."
Cameras flashed. People shouted their own verdicts from the crowd as if I hadn't just been judged by law. A woman, too young to be a mother, raised her cellphone and said, "You ruined everything." Others nodded, some spat, "Monster."
A professor stepped up and recited the sake of science and the duty to do no harm. He described how a mind trained to manipulate substances, without the guardrails of conscience, could become dangerous. The press wrote headlines that night: CHEMISTRY GIRL WHO KILLED ROOMMATES; CAMPUS MOURNS; DESIRE FOR SUCCESS TURNS FATAL.
There was a ritual humiliation to it: being turned toward the crowd, hearing their voices clot into a monotone, and feeling the thinness of the law's finality. Teachers and students who had once smiled in the corridor now looked through me as if I were a diseased plant.
When I was escorted away, a stray student threw a shoe. It missed. Someone shouted that I should die. Photographs clicked. A cluster of teenagers recorded the scene, their commentary sharp and gleeful. A woman clapped once, hard, a sound like two hands breaking plywood, and the crowd followed with a ripple of approval. I was being consumed by a thousand small mouths.
In the middle of it, a young girl who might have been a cousin of one of the victims looked me in the eyes and did not shame me. She pressed a folded paper into my hand. "My sister drew this for them," she said. "You took them, but we will remember them."
It was a small drawing of two girls holding hands under a sun. The simplicity of it was a burn inside my chest.
The whole city felt like a jury. Every message was a stone. Parents in the crowd shouted words I will carry like spikes. "Face what you did!" "Rot!" "How could you?" Some wept openly, and their sorrow struck me deeper than any accusation.
Inside the prison transit we sat like props. If punishment is meant to be both retribution and deterrent, then this spectacle had been both: my life stripped back to a single action broadcast and judged.
The punishment was not only the sentence, but the public thinning of the self that occurs when everyone you know turns away. The faces that had been kind—professors, classmates—now recorded the moment, then posted it, then wrote about it with quiet cruelty. I read online comments like scabs being picked.
And yet among the jeers there were lines that hurt differently: "She must have been broken," wrote one. "She needed help." Another wrote, "This is on a system that pressures students." These were not defenses; they were observations like flies on the window, noting that the glass had snapped.
When they put me into the van, the crowd pushed closer. Someone reached out and choked tears on my sleeve as hands were shoved between the bars to touch me. They wanted the last tremor. The kid who had once stood in the doorway asking for a study guide shouted, "You were like us! You could have asked!"
Someone filmed, someone clapped, someone sang a tune with an obscene laugh. That was my public punishment: the exposure of my crime and the unrelenting noise of a thousand moral fingers pointing right at me.
Inside, curled on the bench, I smelled like disinfectant and fear. The van drove away. The city closed its mouth.
People say punishment is for justice. But the worst punishment was not the sentence. It was the slow daily unmaking: the parents' silence, the empty bank account because no one wanted to give me anything, the lack of trust in the eyes of anyone I had once known. When the days run into each other behind bars, that is the real punishment: the knowledge that you can never be untangled from the moment you chose, and that your name will always echo with the two faces you erased.
I was punished publicly. The crowd watched and cheered and wept. The judge's gavel struck metal and law closed its hand. And yet sometimes, in the quiet hours, I dream the other dream: where I am the one who died and my roommates live on, and I wake up praying the world has spun back to that kinder place.
"Do you regret it?" the prison counselor asked once, voice thin.
"I regret a thousand tiny things," I answered. "I regret the way I watched people and compared. I regret the moment I decided to test them. I regret not picking up the phone."
"Will you ever forgive yourself?"
"No." The word fell from me like a stone hitting water.
Years later I write this in a small cell, a stolen pen on stolen paper. I think of the fruit knife we had in the drawer, the scholarship folder that weighed like a jewel, the way the sun used to fall into the room through the window at 6 p.m. I think of the drawing the little girl pressed into my hand and of the faces at the trial.
I remember the last image—my hand closed around a small instrument, the liquid turned in glass, the way they fell. The morning we had joked about death, I had not known I would take the joke seriously enough to speak it into existence.
If I could say one last thing, it is this: do not let the pressure make you think that some lives are gates to success. You are not a step.
I keep the drawing folded in my shoe, where no one can see. It is small and tender. It is proof that someone still thought of them as sun.
The fruit knife sits in the dorm evidence locker, polished and tagged. The scholarship certificate hangs in my memory like a cut paper banner.
And when the wardens call my name and take me to the yard, the sky is the same pale blue as that day. The world rotates without mercy. I have been punished; the public has watched and recorded. That is the last debt I will ever pay.
The End
— Thank you for reading —