suicide

numbers

The first few photos were... normal. A teenage girl with long blonde hair, a toothy smile, and some leftover acne from her preteen years. She had taken a lot of selfies and stupid pictures with her friends. Judging by her appearance alone, I figured I had been right in the first place, that she was a high schooler. But why would a high schooler be doing this? Could she even pull it off? She would have needed a pretty good fake ID to get into the club. And I think I would have remembered seeing someone so young. This just didn't make sense.

I continued scrolling. Pretty soon a guy started appearing in the pictures, with messy brown hair and a dangerously charming smile. They seemed to be getting pretty close. Her friends slowly disappeared from her pictures and were all replaced by who I could only assume was her boyfriend.

And then the pictures turned black.

That was it, just blackness. Assuming it was a dud, I went to the next picture.

Black.

We scrolled through a few like this. Anna shrugged. "This is totally weird."

I swiped right again, and the screen seemed to explode with color.

I saw the blonde teen again, but this time she was lying on the ground. Her hair actually looked like it had turned strawberry blonde. It took me a moment to register that it was matted with blood. Her head was crooked to the side and her right arm was twisted at an odd angle behind her. Blood had pooled around her and her formerly bright blue eyes had dulled and were staring out into nothing. Dead.

Anna let out a scream. I threw the phone down and ran to the bathroom. I was sick for a few minutes, before I returned. Anna was shaking on the couch, staring at the phone, still lying where I'd left it a few minutes earlier.

"Are you okay?"

Anna nodded. "What the fuck is this?" she asked.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"We have to find out who this girl is. And if her boyfriend did this."

I nodded. Gingerly, I picked up the phone again. I figured the remaining pictures might give us more clues.

Without looking, I swiped past the gory catalogue of the girl's death. Next was another black picture. And another one. And another. My anticipation and anxiety grew with each swipe.

This time, it was the brown-haired boy who appeared first. I have to admit, up until this point, he had been my first suspect. She had spent all her time with him, after all. But when I saw his body half smashed through the windshield of his car, glass sticking into his stomach and blood pouring out of his eyes, I gave up on that theory. Looking at the screen, I felt his body would twitch any second, as death overcame him on the hood of his own car.

Swipe, swipe, swipe.

The next picture was another girl, older than Blondie, with long black hair and crows' feet around her eyes. She looked like she was in her mid-30s. It was a formal picture, with her looking directly into the camera, standing stiff and straight in business attire. It looked like she'd taken it for her job.

Next. A similar picture, but this time it was a man staring into the camera. Colleagues?

A few more black swipes. Then I saw the woman lying on a patch of concrete, a knife stuck in her stomach, her face stretched out into a scream. Her eyes were lifeless, but only just so. She'd died just before the picture was taken.

More black stills. Would this ever end?

Then I saw the man. At least, I was pretty sure it was the man. As he hung from the rafters, his back faced the camera and I couldn't get a good look at his face.