The Forum by Marie Reyes (short books for teens .txt) 📕

off during the night. Maybe after her hot drink had warmed her up a little, she could function.

Garbage spilled out over the top of the trash can with the lid balanced on top, but there was no way she was going to empty it tonight, so she avoided looking at it as she put the kettle on, and unceremoniously chucked a spoon of instant coffee powder into a stained white mug. Despite having used the mug over and over without washing it, she couldn't bring herself to use the world's greatest mom mug that sat on the top shelf gathering dust. She shut the kitchen door behind her to keep out the smell from the week-old trash and sat back down at her little desk positioned in front of the window.

The internet replaced alcohol and Oxy as her new drug of choice, a much more socially acceptable addiction. She shuddered as she glimpsed her reflection in the glass screen. Once upon a time, she had considered herself fairly attractive. It was surprising how quickly things could slide out of control. She tried to recall the last time she had run a brush through her hair, or cleaned her teeth for that matter.

She briefly considered befriending someone in the alcoholic chatroom, to convince them it is possible to give up, but then she remembered how much she hated it when people did that to her when she wasn't ready to stop. No, tonight was a wallowing night.

Her cursor drifted across the screen and her brain tried a last-ditch attempt at convincing her to work on the website she had started one night when drunk and thinking above her station. The idea had been to sell her art online, but who was she kidding? There were always better artists out there than her. What was the point in even trying? She'd need to buy materials, which she couldn't really afford anyway.

The gore website she had left up flashed with a new image which popped up with neon green arrows around it, stark against the black background.

FATTY MADE TO PAY - VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED.

It was hard to make anything out at first. That was until the camera was moved to another position and a light source came on from behind the camera. Not much light, but enough that Piper could see a large, unconscious man secured to a chair by his arms, legs, and chest, with copious amounts of duct tape wrapped over itself again and again until it bulged.

The man's head hung to one side limply, his mouth open so wide she could imagine him drooling any second. His chest rose and fell gently, almost peacefully. A shadow stretched from the left-hand side of the screen as a figure came into view, their outline barely visible at first, until they stepped into the light, towards the restrained man, who was stirring a little now, barely perceptibly.

For a moment, Piper considered what she might do if she found herself in that position. Pretend to be unconscious still while trying to get free somehow? No, she expected she would scream at the top of her lungs, crying and sniveling.

The person was dressed in black from head to toe: black balaclava, black hoodie, black pants, black boots. They inched towards the unconscious man and just stood there waiting. Nothing was happening, and Piper thought the video might have frozen until she noticed the man twitch. Her eyes scanned the rest of the room, and from what she could tell, it looked like a pleasant home. Tidy, spacious, everything her apartment was not, with a large television, maybe even 75 inches.

A swift movement and a flash of metal tore her eyes from what she was looking at, and she watched as one person stabbed another in the gut. She flinched and placed a hand in front of her stomach instinctively, as if it were happening to her. They must have plunged the knife deep, as the blade was no longer visible, just the hilt. The blood escaped fast when the knife slid out. It just looked like a regular kitchen knife but covered in blood that glistened slick-black in the darkness.

The victim's eyes opened wide, bulging almost. Fear like that was unmistakable. The sound was muted, so thankfully, she couldn't hear his screams, but she could see them in his contorted face. His eyes seared themselves into her brain, even more so than the knife and the blood. Those eyes stirred something in her, and she moved the mouse so the cursor hovered above the pause button, but she couldn't bring herself to press it yet.

She had to find out if it was real. If it were real, maybe she could do something about it, she told herself, but deep down, she knew that wasn't why she continued watching. It was that fucked up part of her brain that she could hide from others, unlike her addiction. To make herself feel better about her perverse curiosity, she told herself it was natural. How many people slow down at the scene of a crash? It is only natural to want to see behind the curtain, to know what awaits every last one of us.

The person in the balaclava cut the victim's T-shirt away from his body, which looked ghostly white against the blackness. Then they started carving. She flinched a little, taking her eyes away for no longer than a second before looking again. At first it appeared to be indiscriminate cutting, gouging away at the man's chest with the blade, but the longer they went on, the more the cuts started to look like something, like part of a whole. She stared at it like one of those magic pictures, that if you squint at them long enough, you can see an image emerge. It was like that, but not quite. She did not expect to see a dolphin, or a coffee