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The following three interviews and three notes are all connected to the Soho Disaster Strike, as the series of repeated unfortunate happenings in the West End of London has been called. I am former police detective George Harkelt, and this is the case that made me quit. But even so, it is a case that deserves to be shared. People need to know what happened here.

INTERVIEW: GABRIELLA UTTERSON

GH: You are-

GU: Gabriella Jane Utterson. Yeah. Honestly, I think Mum knew what she was doing there. And lately it’s been a fucking self-fulfilling prophecy. (A short laugh.)

GH: How so?

GU: (noticeably sarcastic tone) Hm. Good question. How about I start with literally everything over the past few months? Also known as the actual reason I’m even in here?

GH: Miss Utterson, what are you getting at?

GU: I mean that the past few months have been like Jekyll and Hyde’s and Heathers’ love child. It’s been hell. It’s been absolute fucking hell. Three people are dead, one only just got out of hospital, and their notes have only served to prove my life is just one sick joke right now.

GH: Their notes?

GU: Yep. Allison (Allison Trang) gave me one when I visited her, good old Mr Lanwell left me one before he died, and I’ve got one from Holly right here - call it a suicide note, I don’t know. I guess it is one.

(A few visible tears, and a pause.)

GH: Miss Utterson, would you mind handing over the notes?

GU: What? Oh, yeah, sure. Have them. Just don’t read them till after the interviews are done. I’m sure you’ve got a lot to get through, and we wouldn’t want any spoilers now, would we?

GH: Miss Utterson, what are you trying to say?

GU: (Another laugh) Goddamnit, forgive me… bad jokes are the only thing I have right now.

GH: …How about we start from the beginning. From your perspective, where did the so-called events of the last few months begin?

GU: Oh, boy. Well, you gotta know first, before everything there was me and Roz (Rosalyn East) and Allison. We were friends, you know. We were always together, we hung out after school, we stuck together between classes, we chatted in the bathroom - I’d call us the classic popular girl trio. Like the Heathers. (laugh) But obviously it wasn’t only us - the bathrooms were always crowded with other girls talking and putting on makeup and we were all sort of friends and sort of knew each other, it was just me and Roz and Allison that stuck together the most - Roz is my cousin, did she tell you?

GH: We haven’t done her interview yet.

GU: Well, if you’re lucky maybe she’ll spare you the details. Anyway, yeah. That was how it was - we were all friends, but you know, they were saying I was getting a little boring. And I was just ‘look, high school is not a bed of roses, it’s not one huge popularity contest and boys and parties, there’s actual schoolwork to focus on here, we have our futures to worry about, so excuse me for not peaking here’ - well, something along those lines. You could see it with everyone - they hated schoolwork, they’d just had a huge amount thrust on them, didn’t know how to deal with it - so yeah. Maybe I’m boring compared to them, too concerned about schoolwork and tests now,  but it’s better than being homeless later. All that schoolwork stress - I think that was what I thought Holly (Holly Jackson) was visiting the counsellor for at first.

GH: Holly was visiting Harrison Lanwell?

GU: Mr Lanwell, yeah. I never really went to him, so I can’t say much about him before everything. But Holly… she… she was always… she’d…

(A short recess.)

GU: Look, what can I say? She’d talk to him after school and when I asked why she’d just say ‘I have a couple things I need to sort out.’ Holly… god, Holly. Please, please, after everything you’ll know after today, please don’t hate Holly. She was good. She was the nicest of us really; we could all be a little bitchy, a little catty, we’d call each other names and pass secrets in the halls and insult each other behind our backs, it was all an open secret. But Holly, she never got involved with that crap. She told us to tone it down, she knew when things were getting too personal, she knew when something was about to descend into a fight, she knew it, she knew. I thought she was going to the counsellor because she really did have things she needed to sort out… and, well, she did, but I never imagined they’d be this. She was the best of us… she didn’t deserve this. God, Holly…

GH: Do you need a break?

GU: Yeah… yeah. I do.

(A short recess.)

GH: And what happened, exactly? From your perspective, where did this all start?

GU: Oh… it was food tech class, actually. Allison and Roz and me, we were all working on our newest assessment task - food experimentation. We had to do some kind of experiment with food and how it can change form - curdling, coagulating, freezing, anything really, then there was a written report… anyway. Ours was collagen and how jelly sets - three different batches of jelly all with different ingredients in them, and we had to see how it would affect the way they set. One with lime cordial, one with frozen berries, one with just normal flavourless jelly, following the recipe to a T, and it was all going well until… (laugh) Until the day Allison waltzed in with a new pack of crystals. She said she got them from a pound shop and showed us the packet. And let me tell you, it did not look like a packet of jelly. It was just plain white except for this yellow bubble text on the front that said ‘Fun Crystal Jellies! Fun with friends and cool science! Add tiny pinch to water and have fun eating!’ Literally nothing else. No manufacturer, no list of ingredients, no nothing. I asked her why she brought it. “I thought it could be part of our experiment.” she said. “Some sort of jelly we haven’t even used before. It was the only packet of its kind I could find at the pound shop. Could be interesting to see how this sets.” So Roz asked her how she was even sure it was jelly. “If it’s not, we can just throw it out or something.” Allison said that. So we mixed a tiny pinch in with the water at first, like the packet said, and we left it with the other jellies. Then we came back the next day and it hadn’t set. It had turned green, but it was still plain water. So we noted the results of the other three experiments and poured the water out and… and then… (puts face in hands) Allison… Allison…

GH: Miss Utterson. Allison Trang is out of the hospital. Her natural hair colour is coming back and the only lasting effect is that her face is slightly thinner than it used to be. She will be fine. No harm has been done to her. 

(A short recess.)

GU: It was… it was still horrible to watch. So… I mean, you must know what happened, the ambulance came to school and everything, they let us all home early… but then there was… she didn’t tell you what had done it to her, did she?

GH: She claimed she had taken a packet of novelty crystals from a pound shop and snorted them as if they were a drug in order to ‘try something new’, even though it caused severe damage when she took it. She said it had come in an unmarked packet that looked like jelly crystals. Were these alleged drugs the same?

GU: (laugh) THAT’S what she told you? Oh god… Look, I don’t know what those crystals were but there’s no drug on earth that could do THAT to a person… but we were technically taking drugs before, I’ll give you that. We were all in the bathroom vaping. (mimics smoking a vape) Mine was sour apple, Roz’s was blackberry and Allison’s was vanilla. That I remember. And maybe we were already high or something, because Allison made a fucking stupid suggestion and we were all fine with it. She still had the crystals on her and she suggested snorting them. Like they were cocaine. Something along the lines of them being a cheapo piece of junk that did nothing anyway… none of us were in our right minds. God, I’ll never vape again, so there’s that. So she put a little line on her nail - she was wearing those really long plastic fake nails - and snorted. And then… well… (face in hands again) She sort of froze up and said her nose hurt. So Roz got worried and said it was probably the crystals, she should go to the nurse, blah blah blah, but it was like she didn’t even hear. She… Allison was just standing in place, she didn’t look like she could see or hear us, she was just looking into the distance… then she sneezed and it was like she went back to herself. Like the sneeze shocked her out of it. I don’t know if the crystals caused the sneeze or what, but she started hyperventilating. Like, the second she was out of it. “I’m gonna throw up, I’m gonna throw up, I’m gonna throw up…” she kept repeating it. She started shaking, she fell down, she was… twitching in this disgusting way, it was like she was a dying bug… god, it was terrifying. We were literally screaming at her to respond to us, but she wasn’t. Just twitching, shaking, “I’m gonna throw up…”, and we started shaking her but it was no use and then she sort of sprung up and ran into the nearest stall - I guess to throw up - and then there were the screams. I…I… oh… oh… those screams… I still have nightmares, you know. It was like she was being torn in half. We could hear her crying and screaming at the same time, and it was… she was scared, we could hear she was in pain, screaming her throat hoarse with it, so I got down on the floor and slipped through the gap under the door and I only saw her for a second but… she… she was covering her face, still twitching, but at the same time her bones looked like they were moving. I could see little shifts, little twitches, little pointed lumps moving about under her skin, she was still screaming the whole time. “DON’T LOOK AT ME!” she yelled, and her voice… it was cracking and changing, higher and lower, it was like she was going through puberty all over again all at once and regressing at the same time… I don’t know how to describe it. She knew, she knew something horrible was happening to her and didn’t want us to see the results… and her hair looked like it was scrunching up, turning sort of off-white… I didn’t believe it until later. At least, not her hair, but I knew something horrible was happening to her, and so did Roz. While I was in there Roz dialled 999 and some time later there was an ambulance and sirens and teachers and kids and parents everywhere and there was a stretcher and Allison was on it and being wheeled away… she’d pulled the sheet over her head. I think that’s what started the rumour she was dead. She wasn’t, but I sure as hell thought she was going to die, and so did Roz. All I caught was that last little glimpse of her white hair sticking out from under the sheet… I knew I hadn’t imagined it then. Excuse me… I think I’m gonna throw up now.

(Short bathroom break.)

GH: So what happened then?

GU: Well, Roz and I, we got together, we talked, we wondered what that stuff was, we worried whether Allison was going to die… typical teenage crap, you know? (laughs) Like I said, bad jokes are all I have… anyway, we were worried sick. “What kind of stuff would do that to a person?” said Roz, and I told her what I saw. Her moving bones, her hair, ‘don’t look at me’, all that jazz. It was about then we realised. We’d left the packet in the bathroom. We… well, we panicked. We ran to the bathroom, and if you had been timing us, we would’ve clocked in at car speed. But the last either of us remembered was Allison dropping the packet on the floor, and it wasn’t on the floor anymore. We must’ve torn up the whole bathroom, we even emptied all the bins and forced the fucking tampon dispenser open, but no trace of those awful crystals. We only went home after they kicked us out, and I stayed over at her place that night to talk more about where those things could be. I was optimistic. I just thought someone probably threw them out, but Roz was all worried, she said someone might have picked them up… eventually I agreed to put up posters around the school asking about the box. ‘Have you seen a small white box with yellow text that reads ‘Fun Crystal Jellies! Fun with friends and cool science! Add tiny pinch to water and have fun eating!’ This box contains important material for a science project we are doing, and we have lost it in the girls’ bathroom. Please return to Rosalyn East or Gabriella Utterson.’ No one came. We thought about telling the teachers, but couldn’t think of the right way to phrase it… I mean, we didn’t want them to know we were taking drugs. I’m only telling you now because I don’t fucking care anymore. And, well, nothing happened for about two months. Allison was in the hospital, whenever we visited her she was in bed with bandages wrapped around her face, and I could have sworn she seemed smaller, but other than that she was doing surprisingly well. Although for the first month she was silent. Not a word from her. She talked to us by writing notes. But by the second month she could say more words, and her voice only got better over time and by the third month she could say full sentences, but she couldn’t talk for too long. Still, the staff seemed happy with her, saying she seemed on the way to recovery with the right procedures. Honestly, we almost forgot about the crystals. Then right near the middle of the third month, we saw (long laugh) her. Well, Roz saw her first. I only saw her later.

GH: Who?

GU: Casey Peyton. (laughs) Casey Peyton! Goddamnit! Casey Peyton is the only bad joke I don’t have right now, and I hope I’ll NEVER have her again!

GH: Casey Peyton… you knew her? What information do you have on Casey Peyton? 

GU: Well, it was Roz who met her first. Although according to her she’d seen her social media accounts beforehand - it was just a ragebait account, really, but it was the night of February 12th Roz met her in person, I remember that. I don’t know, maybe Roz can tell you more in her interview. She’d just been to visit Allison on her own - I had a nasty bit of science homework to take care of - and she was walking along the pavement, minding her own business and… well, stop me if this sounds familiar. (small laugh) She sees a girl on the other side of the road walking in the same direction as her. But then a door gets thrown open and another little girl - this one about 5 or 6 - runs out of her house and crashes into the girl walking down the street. And does Casey Peyton stop to apologise? No. She does not. She shoves the little girl - actually shoves her aside - and keeps walking. So this little girl is splayed out on the front path in her yard - concrete, by the way - and starts crying, and the mum and dad and what I can only assume was a younger brother run out and gather around her, try and make sure she’s okay, and Roz starts running after Casey. “Hey! Jackass!” she yells. “Get back here!” So she catches up to Casey and tries to drag her back to the family, but Casey’s a good fighter. She kicks and punches and shoves some more when Roz tries to drag her away, but eventually Roz forces her back to the family. “Shut up!” scream the neighbours. “We’re trying to sleep!” Casey comes quietly and keeps glancing over at Roz, the family chew her out and give her a nice verbal beatdown, there’s a big noisy commotion and that’s how Roz learns this girl is the troll she’s been seeing when she mentions her name - apparently her handle was literally ‘casey_peyton’, she asked me to confirm it later and I did when I eventually met her myself, but yeah. Eventually Casey shuts them all up by promising to pay fifty pounds to compensate. So she hands over a note and everyone’s somewhat happy. But… Roz told me. She saw that note. The corners had all been cut off. She said it looked like the family wanted to ask too, but Casey had speedwalked away by then, and the note was still legal tender so they didn’t bother. And Roz only thought it was really noteworthy because of a very recent project Holly had done for art class - a collage of the Royal Mint made of tiny cut-up bits of money. Teacher nearly had a heart attack when she saw it. Whole school was talking about the damn thing - who wouldn’t? And of course it was still on Roz’s mind, and that’s why she chose to catch up to Casey again and ask if a friend gave her that money, cause she knows someone who did an art project with cut-up money. Casey says yeah, her friend Holly gave her it for her birthday yesterday, said it was still legal tender despite the corners missing, but that only distinguished it - made it a real standout present. “Bit of a weirdo.” said Casey. “But she’s a good friend.” So understandably, Roz is concerned for Holly, having this ass for a new friend using her money as a get-out-of-jail-free and online trolling and ragebaiting. Roz caught up to her at school the next day and managed to mention Casey, her worries about her. “Your friend is an ass who uses your money to buy her way out of it.” That sort of thing. “Oh, don’t worry about Casey.” was the response she got. “I admit she can be… unpleasant, but trust me, if anything serious happens, I’ll be the first to know, and I can drop her whenever I want. But in the meantime, you clearly didn’t get off to a good start… I’d advise avoiding her.” And Roz just said, “Trust me, I will.” (A long fit of laughter here.) IT WAS EXACTLY LIKE IT! EXACTLY! IT WAS ALL ONE LONG BAD JOKE!

(At this point interview time was up. Miss Utterson calmed down after a minute.)

GU: Well, if interview time’s up for me, go ask Roz for the rest. Starting from after she first asked Holly about Casey. (Miss Utterson handed over three envelopes here.) Don’t open the notes until Roz finishes telling you what happened. Then read Allison’s note, then Mr Lanwell’s note, and read Holly’s note last. Together they’ll explain everything. Oh… and good luck.

To this day I don't quite know if this was an elaborate prank played on me, but on the off chance it wasn't, this needs to be told.

Rosalyn's interview will be posted next week.

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INTERVIEW: ROSALYN EAST

GH: You are Rosalyn East? Cousin of Gabriella Utterson?

RE: That’s me.

GH: Miss Utterson has just regailed part of a… rather interesting anecdote to us. Unfortunately, her interview time ran out, but she said you might be able to explain the rest.

(Everything Miss Utterson told us was recapped to Miss East in a timely manner. Some detail was left out for proof Miss East could not possibly know the details without her role being what it was said to be.)

RE: Oh… oh. Yeah. Holly Jackson. Casey Peyton. Allison, Mr Lanwell… blah. It’s been the single most insane few months of my life. Trust me. Nothing will ever top this. I’m just… sort of numb at the moment, but I’ll try and pick up where Gabby left off. So, Gabby isn’t on social media very often - it’s not her thing - but I am, and I noticed Casey Peyton’s account. It started on Instagram when there was some post from a family account - you know the type. Exploiting their kids just because they look cute, doing family outings for show, the kids are gonna have trauma - real awful stuff. It was on my homepage for some reason and I only looked at it out of morbid fascination. But Casey’s comment was right near the top and had a load of replies. She’d commented ‘you all deserve to die, honestly it’d be better for your kids to be put out of their misery’ and there were a bunch of replies saying things like ‘ you should die’ ‘i bet your dad regrets that broken condom’ ‘someone should’ve put you out of your misery when you were born’. Real rage bait. I started to see her elsewhere too, she’d always say things along those lines. Some Youtuber playing a video game? ‘I couldn’t be worse if I tried. Why don’t you stick to being that person in mobile game ads who can’t pass level zero.’ Her words, not mine. Movie trailer? ‘This looks like trash and the filmmakers should go jump off a cliff.’ I play piano - I even saw her on one of my tutorials. ‘You’re terrible and everyone within a thousand mile radius of you has you to thank for their deafness now.’ I looked her up on other sites too after noticing her initial comments. She’d post on Reddit and stuff about how so-and-so was overrated or such-and-such was amazing when it was awful - you know the sort of thing. She even commented on a video of Kevin Miles rehearsing as Pugsley for the school musical. You know what she said? ‘Terrible voice for a terrible pile of shit excuse for a play. Fitting.’ And you know how the school musical went down… blah. Awful. I actually went to Mr Lanwell to vent about her for a bit. Anyway, I knew it was her because she didn’t even use a fake name. Her handle was just ‘casey_peyton’. So I told Gabby to ask her if she saw her that the account was hers, just to confirm, and what do you know, Gabby did see her later. I’d described Casey to her - blond braids and blue eyes and white blouse and grey pants, she was wearing big black shoes with laces - but there was something else. I swear, I absolutely swear there was something weird with her face, but I remember her face, it looked totally normal, but I swear part of it looked… fake, I don’t know. Like it was made of plastic. Like someone had been asked to sculpt a face and did too good a job. Her face was… perfect. It didn’t look fully natural. I just… I don’t know how to put it. There weren’t any blemishes. But I didn’t know if I was tired or I couldn’t see properly at night or if the streetlight was playing a trick or what, so I asked Gabby to confirm if she saw Casey again. I even finally told our other friends about her, and a couple of them said they’d seen her comments too… I even called Allison and brought up Casey. Allison said she hadn’t been on social media lately, but she’d keep an eye out as best she could. And a little while later, Gabby did end up confirming Casey’s appearance for me.

GH: When?

RE: Oh, maybe a couple weeks after I met her. According to Gabby, she was at the supermarket and who should she bump into but Casey herself? Well, not literally, but she met her in the baking aisle - knew her from my description. “Casey!” she says. “You’re Casey Peyton, right? The girl who commented on Kevin Miles’ audition and called him terrible? You’re absolutely disgusting and nothing short of a bully.” Casey looks Gabby right in the eye and says, “Yeah, that’s me who told Pugsley the truth there. And you’ve just hurt my feelings, so butt out and leave me alone.” But you know, you could tell she wasn’t hurt. You could tell it was sarcasm. So Gabby just storms off, but she was able to confirm for me that Casey’s face really did look like a plastic mask stuck on. A very realistic one, but one nonetheless. But we didn’t really think it was anything significant, and we just decided to ignore her. Maybe she’d go away, same as any other bully or troll when you don’t feed them. But then there was the school musical… god. The musical. It was supposed to be our time to shine, and it was terrible…

GH: How did it involve Casey?

RE: Well, we were doing the Addams Family - the musical by Andrew Lippa - and Gabby was Morticia, and I was one of the ancestors, and Holly was Alice, and I already told you Kevin was Pugsley. Allison would have been on the backstage crew, but you know, hospital and all, so they had to fill her spot with Michael - god, Michael’s cute. Anyway, it was Caleb’s idea - he was Gomez - to post videos of our rehearsals on a shared playlist so we could all watch and give each other feedback. Got the idea from Kevin posting his video in the first place. We all loved the idea and we all did it - Gabby posted less often, but I expected that, but then Casey started spewing all over us. In hindsight, we should have made the videos private, but at the time we didn’t think of it. We were just having fun, and then Casey came and posted hate messages below every one of our videos, going on rants about how dumb and sexist and derivative the musical was, how we had a white kid playing Gomez and putting on a fake accent and going all ‘la cucaracha enchilada taco sombrero blah blah blah’, how Morticia was a stereotype of a harpy, how Pugsley was dumb, how Wednesday seemed like she had been brainwashed and ‘Pulled’ was ‘a parody of a parody of Disney Princess songs.’ Also apparently we were all terrible performers anyway according to her. Eventually we all just blocked her, and I begged Holly to drop her the way she said she could if anything happened, but Holly only agreed to block her just this once if she was being that terrible. So then Holly blocked her too - I saw her do it - and for a while everything was fine. Casey left us alone. But the night before opening night, she posted another message on one of Holly’s videos - I saw it. We all saw it. When Holly seemed like she was in shock, kept questioning how Casey did it - we concluded Casey probably hacked something, but we didn’t know what. (laughs) Well, at least now I know how she did it. Anyway, this was the message: ‘Something is going to happen at your awful little play tonight. Maybe people will be entertained for once instead of having to sit through that bucket of schlock.’ We… well, we were all paranoid. All on edge. We told the teachers, I gave them Casey’s description, and they said they’d keep a lookout for her. And on opening night, we were all getting ready, all putting on makeup, and Mr Lanwell came in. He’d volunteered to help with the musical, and he asked where Holly was. Before he came in Holly had gone to the bathroom, and I told him so. He told me to tell her from him that she was making great progress - he hadn’t seen her in his office in ages, and she seemed a lot more relaxed in general. But I was still concerned, so I brought up Casey and Holly’s history with her. He said he’d talk to Holly about her, and that was the end of that. Then a bit after that he came back in and said he’d seen Casey in the schoolyard heading out of the backstage, and he tried to catch up to her but Casey ran away and he couldn’t find her once she ran into the park outside school and hid - it’s a big park, and it was pitch-black outside. So some other teachers left to help search for her, then Samantha found her dress missing. Samantha was playing Wednesday, and she wears a black dress during the first half of the first act before changing to yellow, but someone had replaced it with a blue one - and what’s more, it was a Cinderella dress. A dress-up costume for little girls. It was all scratchy and glittery and, well, given the Disney Princess comments from Casey, we were pretty damn sure we knew who’d done it. So we let the teachers know, and while we were all searching we found Alice’s shoes graffitied, Mal’s tie swapped out for one that said ‘fancy a quickie?’ and Lucas’s hat had been cut in half. We couldn’t find anything to replace them, so while the teachers searched the audience for Casey and questioned everyone there, we went on with the show. Lucas had no hat, Mal wore his tie backwards to hide the dirty message, Alice had no shoes, and Wednesday… blergh. Wednesday. Poor Samantha. Had to go onstage in the yellow dress first just because it looked slightly more in-character than Wednesday wearing a Cinderella dress, then during the scene where she’s supposed to first put on the yellow dress we played it like they were noticing it for the first time, and it was all annoying and humiliating and awkward, but we thought that was where it would end. Nope. Fucking. Nope. FUCKING CASEY!

GH: Miss East, do you need a break too?

RE: No, no, I’m good. So anyway, at the end of the first act Fester was supposed to summon a storm to trap everyone in the Addams mansion. We decided to go the extra mile and have a fog machine and some lighting tricks and sound effects. So Fester yells “Okay, dead people - gimme some weather!” And we - the Addams Ancestors - we have to wave our arms around and act like we’re helping him summon the storm. We waved our arms around and all the effects kicked in but, well… the lighting was green. It was supposed to be white. And the thunder sound effects had been replaced with a really loud instrumental of some song, and the fog machine… well, the fog machine just fully shorted out. Sparked and smoked and shuddered around and tipped, and then it caught fire and it spread to the curtains and then the fire alarms started ringing and the sprinklers turned on and we were wet and scared and pissed off at the same time. Mainly at Casey for doing all this shit. Once we’d been herded out I remember Daisy (Daisy Clark) was fully ranting at Holly. Daisy didn’t like to yell, but she was getting close to it. Ranting about how Casey Peyton had destroyed our play and our auditorium and was a menace and Holly needed to drop that toxic, dangerous bully as a friend right now. Daisy played Grandma… her makeup washed right off, she was directly under one of the sprinklers when they went off. And she tripped on her dress when she tried to run out, and her wig fell off and her hair got ruined… she was not happy. And Holly promised over and over that Casey wouldn’t bother people again, that she’d drop her as a friend and get rid of her and make sure of it, and eventually I guess Daisy sort of believed her because she walked away. And that was that. They had to close the auditorium to repair the fire damage, but other than that we were mostly okay for a while. Looking back, I didn’t even see any new comments from Casey anywhere online. She was nowhere until the… the fair… (crying) Daisy was looking forward to the fair… jesus, fuck, Daisy…

GH: We all know what happened at the fair. The Daisy Clark case is still under investigation. Are you saying you have information about Casey Peyton and what she did there?

RE: Ugh. The spring fair… Holly’s brother had even made plans to set up a cake stall there himself. Her mum and dad went out on some business trip a few weeks before the fair and they left Paul in charge, and they’re still out, and he’s just 19 and this happened and her parents are going to have to come back to this… god.

GH: Her parents have already been contacted and are on their way back.

RE: I’m sure they’re over the moon. Anyway, Holly and Gabby and I, we were all helping him. We’d even get Allison on FaceTime and she’d give us advice. Turns out he’s really good at baking. The spring fair was something he’d been looking forward to for ages, and you know how huge that thing was. Rides and stalls and farm animals everywhere, absolutely packed with people, barely room to move your arm in the worst crowds. (laughs) Allison was on FaceTime again there too, Gabby and her and me, we were all having a great time. We got cotton candy and pet some farm animals - Allison liked the little piglets even if she couldn’t pet any - and we went on a rollercoaster and Allison said it was like she was there, minus the motion sickness and then we watched a contortionist they’d hired, then we all got on the Ferris wheel and looked out over everything… it was really a beautiful view. I remember Allison said she had benefits because we could hold the phone out of the carriage and she could get a further view. Then Gabby reminded her we weren’t allowed to do that, and she laughed and called her a wet blanket. It was a joke though, just a joke… it was wonderful, wonderful before everything went wrong. We went to Paul’s cake stall and tried to get cupcakes for free given we were Holly’s friends and had helped with the stall, but he charged us anyway and Allison made us buy one she picked to bring to her later and we were eating them when Mary ran up to us. She was crying, hyperventilating, absolutely terrified… I.. I need a break…

(A short recess.)

GH: Mary? The Mary Reilly who called the police?

RE: Yep. The same. She told us, she told us… she told us Daisy was dead, she said she had just been on the Ferris wheel herself when she’d seen it. Dangling right at the side where she couldn’t do a thing, the wheel was still stopping to let people on… Daisy had been walking along when she’d stopped to talk to a girl in the far corner near the farm-animal pavilion. No one else was there. It looked like she’d been asking for directions from the way the girl was pointing. But they’d talked for a little bit longer, and it started to look like Daisy was angry after a bit, and the other girl seemed like she was getting angry too, and then they were fighting, and one punched the other, and then the one who’d been punched hit back, and then the girl fighting Daisy got a switchblade out of her pocket and (draws finger across throat) cut her throat. Grabbed her by the hair and just stuck in the knife and drew it and left her bleeding and ran off and Daisy was twitching but then she wasn’t and… and…

GH: Miss East, you’re sweating.

RE: This needs to get out. There was blood everywhere, and the girl just ran off and Mary started screaming to be let off the Ferris wheel and then she was and she ran around screaming that she’d seen Daisy murdered and then she led me and Gabby to the corner she’d seen it happen and there was already a crowd gathered around and Daisy’s body was there, Daisy’s body was there… I need to go and throw up.

(Bathroom break.)

RE: So then Mary described the girl - about our age, blonde, black blouse and skirt but she could swear something looked off about her face - like it was made of plastic, or an imitation of a face made by AI. She said it could have just been her not being able to see the girl properly being so high in the air, but that’s when we knew. We hadn’t really described that aspect of Casey Peyton to anyone yet - and I wish we’d explained her face to Daisy - but we told Mary. Of course Mary already knew about Casey, most of the school did, so she told the police about who’d done it and then there were warrants for her arrest, but Daisy was still dead… Daisy’s still dead now. Tell me, what did you find on Casey Peyton?

GH: That is private police business.

RE: You couldn’t find a damn thing on her, could you? No other Peytons. No home. No records. No belongings. As far as you could tell she didn’t fucking exist! And god, I WISH that were true! But she existed, all right! You’ve got proof, and you’ll know everything once you open those notes Gabby gave you!

GH: We are interviewing Paul Jackson after you. I trust he will be able to regale the rest of this story. In the meantime, you need to leave right now. Your interview is over.

RE: Yep. Good luck with him.

Paul Jackson's interview will be posted next week.

Chapter Text

INTERVIEW: PAUL JACKSON

GH: You are Paul Jackson? Holly Jackson’s older brother by three years?

PJ: Yeah.

GH: Is the story Gabriella Utterson and Rosalyn East have been telling true? What were they involved in with regards to the case of your sister?

PJ: Ugh… they were all friends, then my sister was shutting herself up and they were still friends but then they weren’t - bleh. Sorry. Tongue-tied… I’m in shock.

GH: Understandable. Tell me, did your sister have a history of any problems? Any mental health issues or anything like that?

PJ: Well, back in primary school she actually wasn’t a good student - bad grades, in trouble every other week, we kept getting calls from the school, she was pretty much constantly on the verge of being suspended and she knew it. She kept lashing out, having some real difficulties, we were seriously thinking of putting her in the special classes, but over time it got better. She matured, started behaving better at school, made friends, but… well, it’s all for nothing, isn’t it? She never got to go to university or graduate or live on her own or anything!

GH: Mr Jackson, we don’t know that for sure -

PJ: Well, I know for sure! What did Gabby and Roz tell you about my sister?

GH: …An account of the story up until the murder of Daisy Clark. What happened immediately after?

PJ: Holly was in shock. We drove home in total silence. I could sort of hear her next to me though, she was breathing really hard. And I remember when we got home she texted to her whole group chat, ‘Rest assured, I am done with Casey.’ Casey being-

GH: We know who Casey Peyton is.

PJ: Do you really?

GH: Casey Peyton is a wanted murderer who was found dead yesterday, with Holly Jackson missing. We are still trying to track down Miss Peyton's family, and if you have any information whatsoever on her or her family, you need to tell us.

PJ: Oh… oh, you really don’t know the whole story. Trust me when I say you're not gonna find anything looking for her family.

GH: Miss Utterson left these three notes from Allison Trang, Harrison Lanwell and Holly Jackson herself. She claims together they will explain everything. Do you know about these notes?

PJ: Of course I do. Read them myself. And by the way, she’s right. Allison’s note first, then Lanwell’s, then Holly’s. In that order. Anyway, Holly seemed normal after that… nothing noteworthy happened for about a month. Then in April she started having sleeping problems. I could tell. I heard her up at two in the morning, I caught her fake-sleeping at one, she started getting bags under her eyes and she was always stumbling about like a zombie… I asked her if she needed melatonin or something, but she always said she was fine. But I could tell she was staying up late. And it wasn’t just that, she was always looking around, over her shoulder and stuff, like she was paranoid something was going to jump out at her… made me really concerned. So I talked to Lanwell and told him to get another appointment with her, and he agreed. Said she’d been visiting him anyway regarding her feelings about the murder. But… (laughs) Two days later, good old Harrison was in the hospital too. Gabby talked to me after. Said she went to visit him, but they said he’d had some sort of a shock and she couldn’t see him at the moment. But I wanted to know what was wrong, and I wanted to know about Holly… she was still staying up late and banging around at night. And I suspected she was taking uppers - I found Mum and Dad’s bathroom cabinet open and Holly’s old bottle of Ritalin out of place, and she hadn’t taken it since year 8. So three days after Gabby came, I went to see him myself. They let me in after I said I was the brother of one of the students he was treating and needed to check on her progress just this once, as she had some serious problems… and you know, in the moment it was true. I was getting increasingly worried. So I went in to see him, and there he was lying in bed, looking pale and scared. I greeted him, he said it was nice to have some company for once, but then I brought up Holly and he just… shot to attention. Yelled. Actually yelled at me to never mention my sister again, that she was insane, that he’d never treat her again, that she should be in jail right now… he only calmed down enough to write his note and hand it to me. Told me I should only open it if Holly dies or disappears. They escorted me out after.

GH: So that’s his note. How does Allison Trang come into this?

PJ: Roz and Gabby visited a couple days after that. Holly had started staying home from school, said she was sick… I believed her. But Roz said different. Roz said she and Gabby had just been to visit Allison, and she said Holly had been coming to visit too. What’s more, Holly seemed to really want to know what exactly had happened to her - starting with the crystals. You, um… you know about the crystals, don’t you? Roz and Gabby, they’re bound to have told you by now…

GH: They did.

PJ: So Roz said that Allison told her Holly had been pretty much interviewing her. Allison thought she was just curious, so she told her what she knew. But she said there were a few occasions where Holly started to look sick and had to run into the bathroom for a bit… she didn’t think much of it at first, except for there was this pink plastic water bottle she’d always take with her in there. Still, Allison was still having some issues speaking, so she couldn’t say everything. Eventually, she just wrote her own note and gave it to Gabby and Roz. They took it with them, and then they came to see Holly - they were concerned for her, and wanted to know why she’d been visiting Allison too.

GH: Allison’s note that Miss Utterson gave us?

PJ: Yes. Anyway, they told me what happened after - they went to Holly’s room, and she unlocked the door and let them in. She was there in her pyjamas looking tired and messy, but they said she seemed happy to have them. They chatted for a bit about what was going on at school, who was talking to who, some embarrassing things people had done lately… trying to pretend everything was normal. But they said that halfway through a sentence, Holly started looking like she was about to throw up… she held her stomach and started breathing really heavily, and they asked if she was about to throw up… she didn’t respond at first, but a second later she snapped out of it, pushed them out of her room, yelled “YOU NEED TO LEAVE!” and slammed the door. They heard her lock it, but they knocked again. They kept knocking, kept asking, kept begging to be let in, but there was just some crashing around and no response from Holly. So they told me, and they left, and I kept knocking and asking, but Holly just texted me telling me not to come in, that she needed some space right now, that she was still sick. Roz and Gabby said they got texted apologies later. And… well, two days later Lanwell died. You know that, right? They said it was a heart attack?

GH: Yes.

PJ: Well, it was. That much is true. We all posted some stuff in tribute to him, and for three days after that, things somewhat resembled normality. But you know, Daisy and Lanwell were still dead, Holly was still shut up in her room, things weren’t normal at all. And on the fourth day they just took a dive and kept going down. I went to Holly’s room in the morning and knocked, she didn’t answer, and then she slipped me her purse from under the door. Texted me to go to the pound shop down the street and buy her a packet of jelly crystals. Or at least, a little white box that had yellow bubble text on the front that said ‘Fun Crystal Jellies! Fun with friends and cool science! Add tiny pinch to water and have fun eating!’ Told me she really needed it for a school project, the cost didn’t matter, just get the crystals… so I went to the pound shop and asked about them. They said they didn’t stock anything of the sort, only things like jelly cups and those little packs of fake snow you add water to. Still, from the ‘have fun eating’ thing I could tell it was probably edible, so I just bought regular jelly crystals from the supermarket and left them outside her door. A few minutes later she texted me back and said they weren’t right, I needed that specific packet, check another pound shop if I can’t find it, the pack definitely came from a pound shop. So I kept searching and searching and searching, even buying her a pack of ‘space fun crystals’ from a pound shop with a packet that somewhat resembled her description, but it wasn’t right, nothing was right, and it lasted all day, and eventually at around 9pm or so I called Gabby and Roz over to see if they knew what she was talking about. I told them Holly had me running all over town, trying to get a very specific packet of crystals and I didn’t know what she meant and she was starting to scare me, but when I described the packet they both just… went pale. Told me what had happened with Allison. Told me about how the packet had gone missing. Apparently Allison thought they’d thrown it out and had told people at the hospital that the packet had been thrown out, and that’s why they didn’t search the school or let them know - there was more, but her note’ll explain the rest. They barged in and pounded on Holly’s door screaming for her to let them in, and eventually a voice yelled that they needed to leave, but the voice that yelled… (head in hands) That was not my sister’s voice. According to them, it was Casey Peyton’s. And… well, I panicked. They panicked. There was a murderer in there with my sister, and I was hyperventilating and nothing made sense anymore, so we started trying to break the door down and then that didn’t work, so we called 999 and then I took a screwdriver and started taking the door off its hinges, and when I did… (crying)

GH: Mr Jackson, do you need a break? Miss Utterson and Miss East needed breaks before you during their own interviews.

PJ: Yes.

(A recess significantly longer than the ones needed for Gabriella Utterson and Rosalyn East.)

PJ: I came in, and you know what I saw. You saw it too. Casey Peyton wearing my sister’s pyjamas, with her throat slit. She was holding my sister’s pocket switchblade - I’d forgotten about that thing, Grandma gave her it in year 5 but she never even used it, at least not until now  - and my sister’s note was next to her in that little envelope. Gabby took it. We read it together, and nothing made sense anymore. Then I let her read Lanwell’s note, and she let me read Allison’s, and the police were there, and, well, here we are. When are you done with interviews?

GH: We will be done when we feel we have gotten satisfactory answers.

PJ: Well, you won’t get any from those notes. I mean, you’ll get answers. But they probably won’t fit your definition of ‘satisfactory’.

GH: This interview is over.

PJ: Good. Read Allison’s note first. Then Lanwell’s, then my sister’s. Remember that. Allison, Lanwell, Holly.

GH: I will remember.

Allison Trang's note and Harrison Lanwell's note up next week.

Chapter Text

ALLISON TRANG’S NOTE TO HER FRIENDS

I’ve been in this hospital for months now. When I first snorted those crystals, it was normal for a second, but then everything froze and started hurting and then I broke out in a cold sweat and the room started spinning and it felt like my guts were rearranging. I remember that much, and who knows? Maybe they were. Then it was my bones… my bones felt like they were moving around, changing places. I broke my leg once. Broke a bone completely in half, and I had to deal with the displaced halves inside me. It did not feel right. That’s what the bone-rearranging felt like. That and like there were a bunch of enormous bugs crawling around inside me, like the story about the girl who had a nest of baby spiders in her spider bite. But bigger. More solid. And it hurt like hell. 

Once I was at the hospital, they asked me what had happened. But I couldn’t talk - it was a couple days before I even had the energy to write my notes. I told them that I’d snorted some wacko jelly crystals from a pound shop like they were drugs, just to see what would happen - and then this happened. They’ve been keeping me here so long mainly to run tests on me, because what the hell kind of jelly crystals could do what this did to me? My hair had gone dry and turned white, my skin had wrinkled, my voice was raspy and barely functioning, I couldn’t stand up straight, and they’d swear up and down I was shorter. I was like a caricature of an old lady. They wanted to contact the manufacturers, but I let them know there was no info on the box, just the yellow bubble text. They were even more intrigued after that and googled the box, but there were no results. There’s generally no results for cheap pound shop products. How many ‘Pretty: A Fashion Princess’ dolls or weird naked Buzz Lightyear crochets do you think there are? I think the only reason they didn’t end up searching the school or asking them is because I told them I had thrown the box away. I know you threw it out, but I didn’t want to throw you under the bus for vaping in the bathroom or anything, so I told them I’d thrown it out. Never mentioned either of you.

Anyway. I couldn’t talk, as you know, so I wrote notes, and things somewhat improved over time - I think I’ll be let out soon. Like I said, they’re really only keeping me here for testing purposes by now. Then Daisy got murdered, and we were all in shock. Remember me at the online vigil? I remember. How could I not? Daisy was a really good friend, and I regretted every time I’d not-so-secretly made fun of her or called her a name. It’s what we all do to each other at school, but once I get out of here I am not taking part in that crap again. And it was a month after the murder that Holly started coming to visit.

She’d mainly ask questions about what did this to me. I told her about the crystals, and she wanted to know more. Like, how’s my progress going back to normal? What are the doctors doing to help me along? Do I think I’ll ever look like my normal self again? I thought she was just curious, and I didn’t want to snub her given Daisy was still fresh in my mind and I kept thinking this might be the last time I ever saw Holly too, so I gave her all the answers I could. She’d always bring this pink water bottle with her, and a few times I saw her start to look sick, run into the bathroom with it, and come out looking fine. I asked if she was sick after about the fourth time I saw her do this, and she said yeah, she’d been having some bad flu and had mixed some medication in with her water. It was easy to believe. She looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. So I told her she shouldn’t visit me anymore, given it’s a hospital and there are plenty of sick people here already who don’t want flu on top of everything. I haven’t seen her since.

HARRISON LANWELL’S REPORT ON HOLLY

Holly Jackson was one of the students I was the most familiar with. She visited me regularly ever since she started high school, at least once a week. She was having some serious problems: repressed anger, fears of how she was doing socially, thinking she wasn’t good enough and that everyone would hate her and mock her if they knew who she ‘actually’ was, her grades, her worries she’d never have a future, all of that. I talked her through it all, and thought I was helping. I especially thought I was helping when she started visiting me less often around December. The few times she did visit me, she seemed a lot more relaxed and less on edge,and I thought she was making good progress. I was happy, thinking I’d helped her. But at the same time, a few more students were coming to me than usual. Mainly ones who were worried about Allison Trang and what had happened with her. And then there was Rosalyn East - she first brought Casey Peyton to my attention. Rosalyn visited me a few times herself, both during Holly’s regular visits and during the time when it she looked like she was making progress. She claimed she was coming across online hate from an internet troll who went by ‘casey_peyton’, and it was really bothering her. I told her to just block the troll and ignore them, or report their comments. But I was still a little concerned about Rosalyn potentially being harassed. Still, I admit I was not as concerned as I should have been. Especially knowing what I know now.

Casey was very much a generic troll until the opening night of the school musical. Rosalyn and many of the other performers claimed that Casey had been commenting hate on videos of their rehearsals, and had threatened to do something to ruin the play that night. So all the teachers kept a lookout, and eventually I saw Casey by the bathrooms.

There was nothing very noteworthy about her appearance - blonde hair, plain black dress, noticeably shorter than average - but she looked like she might have been wearing a mask or some sort of disguise. Or at least, her face looked like a mask, but I couldn’t see anywhere the mask might disconnect from the actual face. It was as if her face was a perfect fit, or the mask really was her face. And the mask itself didn’t look quite like a mask - it looked somewhere between skin and plastic. She looked like a Barbie that had almost-but-not-quite turned human.

Regardless, I went after her, but she noticed me, cut across the schoolyard and ran into the park outside where I couldn’t find her. We started more actively searching after that and kept an even closer lookout, but it was no use. During the scene where the family ancestors summon a storm, the lighting changed colour, the sounds were replaced with some rock instrumental, and the fog machine shorted out and caught fire, which spread to the curtains and triggered the sprinklers in the ceiling above the stage. The musical was shut down after the first act, and we all knew who it was because of.

I did end up talking to Holly afterwards, but she just told me she’d dropped Casey. She'd even deleted her number from her phone. Casey did seem to be rather inactive afterwards - Rosalyn didn’t even come to my office anymore - and then suddenly at the spring fair Daisy Clark was murdered. Mary Reilly was on the Ferris wheel and saw Casey Peyton slit her throat, while she was unable to do a thing. Mary started visiting me after that, as did many other students. Holly included. She seemed even more anxious than she’d been before - quite understandably, I thought - and seemed to be in shock the whole time, going on and on about how she never thought Casey would have done this and how they used to be friends but she was ‘done’ with her and it was like her whole world had frozen up. I listened. I advised. I tried to be sympathetic. She only got worse, and eventually it was painfully obvious she had been losing sleep over it. Bags under her eyes, messy and uncoordinated, clearly struggling to keep her eyes open… I told her to get some sleep, and it would all be fine. This was not worth destroying herself over, and she should probably get a professional therapist for this. Not a school counsellor. But eventually, it came to a head I did not think possible. I don’t think anyone would. Even now.

I had Holly’s number. She messaged me after school, saying she’d left her bag in the science lab and could I go and get it and leave it outside the girls’ bathroom for her? So I got it, and I left it there and messaged her back saying it was there, and turned to leave, but as I did I looked back. And she didn’t see me, but I saw her. Casey Peyton.

She picked up the bag and walked back into the bathroom with it. 

I was frozen for a second from the initial shock - the wanted murderer had come back, and was in the school for Christ’s sake! And she’d just texted me from Holly’s phone! Who knew what she was doing to Holly? 

After it all registered, I ran into the bathroom myself - no one was there at first, but then I noticed one locked stall. So I climbed through the gap under the stall, and I saw Holly. And I saw Casey.

Or at least, I saw something that was half Holly, half Casey.

She had Casey’s plasticky skin, but Holly’s ginger hair - at least in some places - and one eye was blue like Casey, but the other was brown like Holly, and she stared at me. And as she stared, she changed. 

Her hair lengthened. Her skin seemed to lose its plastic-mask quality, and almost seemed to shift into Holly’s. Her remaining blonde hair turned ginger, her one blue eye shifted to brown, she even shot up in height a bit, but the worst part was her skin. God, her skin. It looked like it was melting. The plastic sort of dissolved away to show real skin, but it seemed to dissolve directly into her, like she was absorbing it. And I could see lumps moving around under it. Little misshapen lumps, like her bones were reconstructing to build Holly from what remained of Casey. And there were little cracking noises too - soft, wet cracks, barely audible while her bones were squirming around.

I screamed.

She screamed. Throughout the transformation and after. But I think it was shock more than anything.

I went to run and call the cops, the hospital, anyone, but she stopped me. Grabbed my shirt collar and pulled me back. Yelled for me to let her explain, then a second later started explaining anyway. Probably afraid I’d get loose before she could.

She told me she’d been dealing with crap her whole life. No one liked her in primary school, she had repressed emotions and hatred by the ton and it was only recently she could really deal with her issues. She’d thought talking to me would help, then she’d started some online troll account in order to vent her anger and hatred, then Allison Trang snorted some crystals that made her body change and she’d picked them up after hearing two of her friends talking about them. Apparently Allison hadn’t taken them properly. She figured out the right way to take them and used them to change her body ‘properly’. Not the painful way Allison had done that left her hospitalised. She changed back and forth from Holly to Casey using the crystals, and used Casey to do ‘everything I want to do but can’t as Holly. The stuff everyone would hate me for. The bad stuff. Sometimes the dangerous stuff.’ But Casey was getting out of control, and she hadn’t counted on the murder or the auditorium fire, but Casey had, at least with the murder… It was all way too much to take in, and I was just confused and terrified and couldn't even really breathe right at that point. Honestly, I consider it a miracle I remember the gist of what she said. She was talking incredibly fast. Babbling, really. She was clearly desperate to get everything out.

My head spun.

She begged me not to tell. Told me she’d been involuntarily turning into Casey and was just trying to get it under control, that she would never willingly turn or do anything as Casey, not after Daisy’s murder, and she didn’t want her life to be ruined, she regretted everything…

I woke up in the hospital. They told me I’d passed out and turned blue and Holly had called 999 for me. I tried to tell them about Holly, but words didn’t come. My brain refused to let me talk. I think it was still processing everything. Still in shock. Or maybe it was a side effect from the heart attack they said I’d had. Even now I can’t really form words right.

I got this note out, though. Maybe I’ll die before it’s read. Holly made up some cock and bull about the heart attack being random. Just know it wasn’t. Just know how fucked in the head that girl was.

We did question Holly during this whole mess. She just claimed she’d completely deleted Casey as a contact and couldn’t get in touch with her anymore, didn't know where exactly she lived and hadn’t really bothered to memorise her number so ‘sorry, I can’t help you find her… I really wish I could.’

All this time and I just thought Casey’s parents ditched her or some shit. Everyone we questioned - no info. No student at that school named Casey Peyton. No student anywhere in the Soho area named Casey Peyton and matching her description. No one who knew her family. Honestly, we were starting to suspect she was homeless. And I really wish that had been the case. I wish it was something as simple as a crazy homeless person.

This doesn’t feel real.

I don’t think it ever will.

Holly Jackson/Casey Peyton’s own statement/suicide note posted next week. 

Chapter Text

HOLLY JACKSON’S FULL STATEMENT

I wasn’t a good student in primary school.

I got into fights with my teachers, I had outbursts at other kids, I had bad grades, I was in the office every other week and Mum and Dad spared nothing when it came to lectures. “You have so much potential, you are not worrying about your future, do you want to be expelled,” blah blah. The night they told me they were considering putting me in the special class is the night I learned to suppress everything. I have nothing against kids in the special classes, but I have everything against myself, if that makes sense. I’d call myself horrible names I would never call those kids.

I had a lot of hatred in me. I still do. But my mistake was letting it show. I didn’t know how to behave and I got overwhelmed and pissed off easily. But I did not want it to have this permanent of an effect on me, and once they told me about what they were considering, that’s when it registered. I did not want this to be my future. And I did not want to hate myself more for it.

So I learned to stay quiet when it got too much, and keep my screaming inside. I learned to save my more vicious insults to hurl at people only in my mind. I learned to bite my tongue and count to five. I learned to push my worse qualities, my worse urges away. They liked me when I did it. They said they were impressed with how I’d grown.

And even through the years, as little tiny things caused my hatred to grow - general injustice, this world blatantly spitting on people, the atrocities you see in the news every day, people contributing to them and acting like they’re doing what’s best, people ignoring those atrocities and acting all cheerful while they feed you lies about them, even things as mundane as ‘problematic author’ lists of who you’re supposedly allowed to like and not like and my favourite TV series ending in a way I hated - I kept smiling, and I was social. I stuck with the popular people I’d made friends with. I kept up appearances. I knew that no one would like my worse thoughts if they knew. 

Still, by high school it was really getting hard to ignore everything. Eventually, by year 10, I started confiding in the counsellor. Mr Lanwell. He promised over and over he’d tell no one, and as far as I know he didn’t. Still, venting didn’t seem to be enough. So at the start of year 11, I created a bunch of hate accounts on social media, all under the username ‘casey_peyton’. I threw bits and pieces of my hate back into the world under my little cloak of anonymity, and it felt good. Letting out everything after so many years spent pushing it back, even getting others to feel bits of it too. And they showed it just as much as me.

Even before Casey was a physical person, I saw hundreds of others just like her. Everywhere. People do and say awful things under internet anonymity, and no one bats an eye. I doubt ‘elble14rain’ would have called me a retarded fuckrag if I was standing in front of them. We all get behind screens, we know no one can see us, and everything we’ve put up to hide our worse thoughts falls away. Casey is not the only one of her kind. She’s just the only one who could do what she did on the internet in real life. She was one anonymity cloak among millions.

And even at the start I wouldn’t have minded doing something bigger with that anonymity. Bigger displays of my hate. Lashing out physically at the world, so they could see all my built-up emotion on display. But that opportunity didn’t come until the day Allison Trang was hospitalised.

She was one of my more popular friends. She always stuck with two other girls, ones who are probably reading this note right now - Rosalyn East and her cousin Gabriella Utterson. They were my friends too - I do genuinely like them. So the day Allison was wheeled away on a stretcher alongside sirens sounding all around the school and rumours of her death, I was terrified. But when I ran back inside to get away from the sirens, I found Roz and Gabby talking about what had done this to Allison. I hid behind the lifts. They didn’t see me.

“Those crystals - what the hell even were they? Nothing from a pound shop should be able to do that!” I heard Roz say.

“It looked like she was shapeshifting. In the most awful way possible.  I saw. Her bones were moving around, I could see the lumps from them moving under her skin, her hair was changing colour… her bones stopped moving, but she still looked different last I saw her. Smaller. And her skin was all tight and wrinkled, and I saw her hair on the way out - it’s still white.” said Gabby. There was more, but I didn’t hear the rest of it - I ran away too fast.

Allison had been taken out of the girls’ bathroom. On the off chance the crystals were still there, I bolted for it.

I don’t really know what my thought process was - I can’t even fully tell you now. But the idea of my appearance fully changing had been planted in my head, and even though there was every last chance in the world I’d be hospitalised too, I wanted to have an option, even with the equal chance I’d never end up using it, given what had just ensued with Allison. But I wanted to have access to the one other tiny chance possible - that I might be able to control whatever it was those crystals had done to Allison. To change my own appearance and take full advantage of it. Do the stuff I wanted to do in real life, with no consequences to me if they didn’t know. Those were the thoughts that had been planted in my head with the idea.

I found the little white box in the bathroom. Right on the floor. ‘Fun Crystal Jellies! Fun with friends and cool science! Add tiny pinch to water and have fun eating!’ That’s what it said on the front. No other info. But I took it. 

Of course, I didn’t use them right away - I waited. I waited to hear what became of Allison and I waited for more details about what had hospitalised her. Once Roz and Gabby put up posters around the school asking about that specific box, I knew it was the right one. And once word got out Allison had snorted something, I knew what she had done wrong.

She hadn’t taken the crystals the right way. It said ‘Add tiny pinch to water and have fun eating’. She had snorted.

So I added a tiny pinch to water, and after a minute or so it turned green. I was reluctant to drink it for reasons I think are obvious, so I just tasted a tiny sip at first. Barely anything.

It still tasted like water, but part of my hair turned blonde. It was a weird sort of blonde, though - not quite natural. More like a very realistic blonde wig. It looked like a hair extension that had blended flawlessly with my real hair. But I took another sip, and more of my hair turned blonde. Another sip, and my skin started to look a little synthetic too - like it was plastic, almost. Best I can describe it is skin from a very detailed Barbie.

But I couldn’t help it. I took more and more sips, and eventually a big gulp. And once I took it, it felt like a bunch of random objects were moving around under my skin - I could see the lumps Gabby mentioned. It did hurt, but it wasn’t on the level of Allison’s awful screams that everyone near the bathroom had heard - more like a temporary bad dose of flu combined with a dull ache that spread throughout my body and got gradually worse, and for a bit I did worry it was going to put me in hospital too and I’d made an incredibly dumb mistake - but it faded after a minute or so. After it did, I looked at myself in the mirror, and Casey Peyton stared back at me.

Knowing the crystals are from a pound shop, that probably explains the plastic part of Casey’s looks. A cheap plastic Hallowe’en costume brought to life. Casey was my costume, my way of hiding myself physically whenever I did what I’d be punished for as Holly Jackson. If she had been a regular costume, everyone would have known it was me. But she was part of me. She didn’t even really look like a plastic statue come to life - more like something had tried to turn a plastic statue human and given up when it was almost done.

I did start wondering how I would become Holly Jackson again. I waited some time to see if it’d wear off, but I stayed Casey. Just as I was beginning to panic, I took another gulp to see if that would make a difference - and again, it was like my bones were moving around and rearranging, just as Gabby had described. The ache was there and went through my body again, but once it stopped I looked in the mirror and Holly Jackson was there again.

I’d found my physical cloak of anonymity, and I used it.

It was that way for months. Holly would keep up appearances, and whenever she could Casey Peyton would slip away and let out Holly’s hate. Vandalism, loud fights that got physical on at least two occasions, and other things I’m sure there were complaints about. No one liked Casey, but it didn’t matter. They liked Holly.

You know, I once heard it said - probably by someone with better foresight than me - that people are never one thing. People do good and bad shit all the time. People have good traits and do horrible things and vice-versa. I used to know a girl whose dad hit her with a wrench once. He took her out for ice cream later. A lot of my friends vape and smoke and can’t keep secrets, and they’re some of the best friends I have. Even Paul once used a slur online when he was 12. I suppose Casey was kind of a way of simplifying things - Holly is all the good stuff, Casey is the shit people would hate me for.

It felt good to be Casey. I even visited Mr Lanwell less now that I had a real outlet. I started letting her out more and more frequently, and my activities started getting more serious - worse insults in public, regularly hurting random people by pushing them out of the way or ‘accidentally’ kicking or tripping them, Casey’s property destruction habits just got worse , and I even started stealing, but I wasn’t one bit worried about anything. At least not until the school play.

I don’t like the Addams Family musical. I love the Addams Family, but the musical is garbage. I only tried out given I like theatre, and this was my only option to actually act given I couldn’t find any other plays going on around me that would just let a random girl try out. As Casey, I expressed my sentiments per usual. Leaving hate comments below videos of people rehearsing, even myself to throw off suspicion, going on rants about everything I hated about the thing. They all blocked me, but as Holly I unblocked Casey eventually, and as Casey I left a comment below my last video rehearsing as Alice, promising I’d do something to ruin the play.

And I did. I let Casey out at the play to do what she’d promised, and with a few simple costume switches and putting graffiti on my own shoes, everyone thought that was it. A few stupid pranks. But I had something bigger in mind.

I switched the lighting colours. I changed the sound effects of the thunder they’d prepared for the end of Act 1. But with the fog machine… I was planning to let it short out, I’d fixed it a little, put some extra water in places it shouldn’t have been, but I wasn’t counting on it catching fire, let alone it spreading to the curtains. They had to close the auditorium to repair the fire damage, and people getting soaked from the sprinklers was just the cherry on top. I had a full mental debate with myself after - Casey was a known trespasser and even if the fire had been an accident, it had still happened. Was it worth letting Casey out anymore? My friends hated her guts and she was probably going to get arrested if she showed her face anywhere near school again. This was serious. Holly may have been restrictive, but she was safe

My activities as Casey were increasing in frequency, and in seriousness, and the fire was the wakeup call I needed. I decided it was for the best I stay Holly permanently.

But if you’d experienced something like that - something letting you do whatever the hell you wanted no matter how awful and all the blame would get pinned on a person who didn’t exist - you wouldn’t forget it. And you wouldn’t forget the feelings that came with it. Euphoria. Relief. Freedom. Freedom to finally show years of pure bottled-up hate and awfulness that had been slowly and painfully eating away at you with nowhere to go.

I wanted more. You’d want more too. So at the spring fair, I did one more hit. It was so crowded already; Casey would just be a face in the crowd. There were plenty of short, blonde teenage girls out there - no one would pick her out among everyone, as long as I stayed away from people who might recognize me up close. I remembered them - Roz and Gabby, people I’d got into fights with in the past, and a few others, but I knew their faces and would know to stay away from them, And it was incredibly unlikely most of them would be at the fair anyway, especially all on the same day. As long as they didn’t see Casey again everything would be fine, and I could still do what I wanted. That was what I kept saying to myself.

But Casey still had no restraints on what she did. No sense of consequences. So when Daisy Clark got into an argument with her, even over something as tiny as which way the funhouse was, Casey did the first thing that came to her. 

She was already pissed off at Daisy for what she’d said about her after the auditorium disaster, and this was just the last straw. She murdered her. Slit her throat with Holly’s pocket switchblade.

I was only planning to use that thing to scratch graffiti into walls - maybe slice up some stuff at the fair like I had with Lucas’s hat at the school musical - but then that happened. My bottled up anger and hate taken to its worst extreme. I was sick after the fair.

It was after Daisy’s death that I knew I genuinely didn’t have Casey as a choice anymore.

She wasn’t just some online asshole. She wasn’t just a bitch looking for a fight. She wasn’t just a trespasser. She was a wanted murderer. And there was zero chance she’d ever escape actual, real consequences if anyone, anywhere, saw her now.

There was no way in hell she could ever come out again. 

So I deleted her account, I stopped taking the crystal drink, and left Casey be. I only took out my hatred by screaming to myself when I was home alone, punching things in my room, or else just writing vile letters to people that I knew I wouldn’t send.

But even though I wasn’t using the crystal water anymore, every time I let my hatred show, that was still Casey. And it was enough to feed her. To help her along physically showing herself again.

One morning, I woke up and noticed a plastic hand in my bed. I freaked out, but when I tried to get out of bed, the hand moved. It moved with me trying to move my own hand, and that was when I noticed the arm it was attached to was wearing my sleeve. I looked in the mirror, and Casey stared back.

I took the drink, of course, and I changed back, but the knowledge I had gone to sleep as Holly and woken up Casey still haunted me. And it was all downhill from there.

I started taking the drink with me all the time, in a pink water bottle. I started losing sleep. At first Casey only came out if I slept too long, so I had to shorten my nightly sleep to six hours. Then five, then four, then three, then two, then eventually she was coming out no matter how longI slept for. I could take a quick nap and when I woke up I’d be Casey again. I was sick and tired and scared, mostly terrified of the possibility that I might die from lack of sleep, but there was also the possibility someone might see me sleeping, and the thought that I might reach the point where the drink didn’t work to change me back, if I was already transforming without it.

Then in class one day, I started falling asleep, and even before I was fully asleep the feeling came over me again. Luckily, my water bottle was nearby, and I snapped out of it and took a sip before I started transforming. But I knew what was happening. And what’s more, that feeling started getting more frequent too. I’d let myself fully transform when no one was around, but I kept my bottle close, and kept on refilling it with the crystal water. And yet, I lived in perpetual fear by now. Casey absolutely could not ever come out while anyone could see. Ever. But since I was always tired and couldn’t let myself fall asleep, it was getting insanely hard - eventually, Casey started coming out just if I was tired enough. I didn’t even necessarily have to be in the process of falling asleep. There were some uppers in Mum and Dad’s en-suite bathroom - my old bottle of Ritalin, actually. I got fully hooked on those, just to not feel tired. But some part of me knew I was slowly killing myself even then.

I tried googling the box to see if I could get any more information on the crystals, but there were no results for anything. Even now I still have no idea where those things came from or what they’re even made of. So instead I started visiting Allison in hospital. Asking her questions about the crystals she’d snorted, hoping that I might get an answer that would allow me to stay Holly permanently. I got nothing - only Allison’s own confusion over what had happened. She was healing, but it seemed to be happening on its own, and the doctors themselves were still trying to figure out what had happened.

Then came the day I transformed when my bottle wasn’t there. I was in the girls’ bathroom after school at the time, and the familiar sick feeling washed over me. My bones were reshaping, the pain was coming back, and before I knew it I was Casey. What’s more, I’d left my bag in the science lab, and it had my water bottle in it.

I texted Mr Lanwell and let him know - the teachers were the only ones left in the building. He left my bag outside the bathroom, but he saw Casey go and get it. So he came into the bathroom himself, and saw me half-transformed.

He went into shock, and I had to call 999.

I knew I couldn’t stay at school - Holly’s fear and guilty conscience wouldn’t let me. Plus, this was the fourth time someone from school had called 999 in the past few months - they knew something was very wrong at this point. So I admitted I was sick, and started staying home, desperate to hide Casey and desperate for a way to be Holly permanently. Mr Lanwell eventually died from that heart attack, and my own condition only got worse, until one morning I woke up as Casey again, and when I went to make the drink the crystals were all gone.

I’d had to remake that drink over and over and over just to stay Holly throughout most of the day, and by now I was completely out of the one thing it needed to even exist.

I gave Paul my purse and told him to go find the pound shop Allison bought them at, but after a while when he couldn’t find them I started writing this. I’m still scared I’ll be Casey permanently, that he might never find the crystals again - cheap pound shop costumes don’t tend to be mass-produced - and if that’s the case, consider this Holly’s suicide note. 

To Mum and Dad: I’m sorry for every outburst.

To Paul: I am sorry for what I’ve put you through now.

To Gabby: I should have been a better friend.

To Roz: I’m sorry for the hell this has caused.

To Daisy: You deserved to live. I don’t.

To Mary: I am so sorry what I made you see.

To everyone else: I’m sorry for fucking up your lives with what I didn’t want to deal with properly.

To Casey: I’m sorry I created you.

Know that Holly Jackson and Casey Peyton are both gone.

Know you don’t have to deal with them anymore.

Know that this nightmare is over for everyone.

These statements and notes have not been released to the public. Even so, given the events the public does know of, the Soho high school where this happened has been nicknamed ‘School Of The Dead’ and is currently on the verge of closing.

Other than Holly’s, no fingerprints were found on the pocket switchblade that slit Casey Peyton’s throat.

Makes sense. Costumes don’t have them.