I found the list in the Notes app on Chase’s iPad. “Item 47: Steal his fellowship spot.” “Item 58: Give him acute gastroenteritis the morning of his interview.” “Item 73: Make his girlfriend believe he’s sleeping with someone else.” I stared at those lines until the blue light burned into my retinas, a bone-deep chill settling into my chest. Chase and I had grown up on the same street. We had shared scraped knees, cheap skateboards, and twenty years of birthdays. Whenever his brow furrowed in a classroom, I was the one who jumped in to finish his sentences and soften his awkwardness. Whenever trouble brewed, the teachers always called my name first. And Chase would always stand half a step behind me, soft-spoken and wide-eyed, murmuring, “It wasn’t his fault, please don’t be hard on him.” Back then, I thought he was shielding me. Only now did I see the truth: he wasn’t standing behind me to protect my back. He was positioning himself to shove me directly in front of the oncoming train. My finger trembled as I scrolled to the bottom. The final entry drove into my heart like a rusty nail. “Item 89: Destroy him completely. It’s going to feel so good to watch him break.” In that first life, I had run to him, shaking with fury, demanding an explanation. In response, he simply blinked through welling tears and told our entire circle of friends that I was having a paranoid episode and slandering him. Everyone believed him. My friends abandoned me. The faculty turned their backs. Broken, gaslit, and utterly alone, I walked to the edge of the science building’s roof and stepped off into the void. When my eyes opened again, I was back. Five years earlier. I curled my fingers into fists, my fingernails digging so hard into my palms that they nearly broke the skin. Chase, this time around, you’re the one who’s going to watch. Every single thing you stole from me—the fellowship, my reputation, my sanity, and my life—I am taking back. Every last scrap of it. … 1 I woke up to my phone vibrating violently against the nightstand. A banner notification flashed across the screen. It was Chase: “Adam, you awake? Don’t forget the preliminary dossiers for the Provost’s Honors Fellowship are due at nine. I’m heading back to the dorm now—I’ll take yours over to the department office so you don’t have to rush.” I stared at the letters, my breath catching in my throat. “Item 47: Steal his fellowship spot.” Five years. I had really thrown back the clock five full years. In my previous life, this exact text had arrived. He had walked into our dorm room with his trademark gentle smile, helpfully slipping my transcripts, competition awards, and published papers into a pristine blue folder. I had been so touched by his thoughtfulness that I handed him half my breakfast. It wasn’t until the committee reviewed the files that the trap snapped shut. He had swapped out the certified verification slip for my national research award with an unverified draft. The academic advisor had stood in front of the entire seminar room, holding the paper up with pinched fingers: “Adam Russell, there is a discrepancy in your documentation. It appears you’ve submitted fraudulent credentials. Your fellowship eligibility is under formal review.” Chase had stood in the back row, his eyes rimmed with red, voice trembling with earnest loyalty: “Professor, Adam didn’t mean to. He’s been under an immense amount of pressure lately. He probably just got confused and grabbed the wrong printout.” One sentence. Just one, and my supposed fraud was carved in stone as a botched cover-up. The fellowship nomination went to Chase. The phone buzzed again in my palm. “Still asleep, buddy? I’m almost at the door.” I threw off the duvet, swung my legs out, and planted my bare feet on the icy hardwood floor. The cold shocked my nervous system, grounding me. I was breathing. I was alive. Which meant it was his turn to be terrified. I yanked open my desk drawer. There it was: the blue portfolio folder. Transcripts, certificates, recommendation letters, neatly collated. I sat down, scanned every single page into high-resolution PDFs, and backed them up to two separate cloud drives. Then, using my phone, I photographed every original document with the morning’s date and timestamps clearly visible. Next, I drafted a quick, formal email to both the department chair and the fellowship advisor. It was only one line: “I retain the original physical copies of my competition awards in my personal possession. For the package submitted this morning, please verify the hidden anti-counterfeiting watermark ending in serial number 23.” I tucked the real, certified certificate between the yellowed pages of an old dictionary and locked it inside my desk trunk. He could take the folder. But the originals were staying with me. This time, if Chase swapped the papers, he wouldn’t be framing me for forgery. He’d only be providing the rope to hang himself. Three minutes later, the door clicked open. Chase walked in holding two paper cups of iced coffee, wearing that familiar, harmless, boy-next-door grin. “You’re just out of bed? Did you finish organizing the packet? Let me run it across the quad for you so you don’t end up late.” I offered him a mild, effortless smile and handed him the blue folder. “All set.” He chuckled warmly. “You know how scatterbrained you get under deadline. Let me double-check it for you real quick.” He flipped through the sleeve. When his thumb reached the award certificate, it froze for half a beat. It was tiny. A flicker. But to an eye that had witnessed its own murder, it was as loud as a gunshot. He closed the folder, his tone breezy. “Looks perfect. I’ll take it straight over.” I watched him go, then quietly saved the voice memo I had been recording on my phone. I slipped on a jacket and trailed him out the door. Instead of heading left toward the administrative hall, Chase turned right, cutting through the shadows of the quad toward the student union basement. I kept my distance, slipping behind the tall metal display racks near the campus print shop. I already had my phone tucked between two binders on a shelf, its camera lens peeking through the gap in video mode. Chase stepped inside, glanced over his shoulder to confirm the hallway was clear, and pulled my blue folder from under his arm. With swift, practiced fingers, he slid out my certified award sheet, tucked it into his backpack, and slipped another folded document into the transparent sleeve. I didn’t storm in. I didn’t scream. The moment he pressed the folder shut and smoothed down the plastic, I tapped stop on the recording. I uploaded the video and the earlier audio clip directly to my drive, then forwarded an encrypted copy to my academic advisor’s inbox. Confronting him now would only give him room to invent an excuse—a mistake, a mix-up, an innocent errand. No. I would wait until he handed that forged file directly to the committee. Only then would the trap door seal behind him. 2 The next afternoon, the review committee convened in the conference room. I sat near the window, watching the department chair flip through the paperwork on the mahogany table. When he reached my file, his fingers paused. He pulled out the award sheet, held it up to the fluorescent light, frowned deeply, and lifted his gaze to mine. “Adam. What is this?” The air in the room instantly thinned. “This documentation doesn’t match the verified digital serials in the provost’s central database.” A sick, familiar vertigo washed over me. It was the exact staging of my previous life’s execution. Back then, I had panicked, stammering, arguing until my voice cracked, only for the room to dismiss me as an arrogant cheat who couldn’t stomach getting caught. This time, I sat completely still. My hands rested calmly on the table. I knew Chase couldn’t resist. Right on cue, Chase leaned forward from the chairs along the wall, his eyes rimmed with red, wearing an expression of pure, pained sympathy. “Professor, Adam didn’t mean to do this. He’s been handling an absurd amount of coursework and lab hours lately,” Chase pleaded softly. “He must have printed an old draft by mistake. Can’t we please just give him twenty-four hours to submit the correct version?” A couple of other students in the room began whispering: “Chase is too good for his own good.” “Rules are rules. You mess up your submission, you’re out.” “Adam always expects Chase to clean up his messes.” A faint, almost imperceptible shadow of triumph flickered across Chase’s eyes before he dipped his head, looking like a man carrying the weight of a friend’s failure. “It’s fine, really,” Chase murmured. “Adam didn’t do it on purpose.” “You’re an incredible friend, Chase,” someone whispered beside him. I didn’t look at any of them. I simply unlocked my laptop and plugged it into the HDMI cable on the desk. “Professor,” I said, my voice cutting through the murmurs with quiet precision. “I have evidence proving that I wasn’t the one who submitted the wrong file.” Chase’s fingers clenched around the armrest of his chair. “Adam, what are you talking about?” “The verified certificate I received has a micro-embossed security watermark ending in serial number 23,” I explained, casting a high-res scan onto the large projection screen. “The page currently in your hands has no watermark at all.” The chair lifted the paper against the light again, comparing it to the projection. “He’s right. There isn’t one.” For the first time, Chase’s mask slipped. A brief, naked flash of panic cracked across his features. He recovered with frightening speed, lifting his chin. “Then you must have printed the unverified draft yourself. You handed me that folder sealed, Adam. You never checked it again.” “Never checked it?” I clicked the remote. The video flared to life on the screen. There was Chase in the campus print shop, glancing around before pulling out my original certificate and sliding a foreign sheet of paper into the blue sleeve. I paused the video right on his hands. “Chase,” I said quietly, the room hanging on every word. “What exactly were you doing in that shop? Were you replacing my official documents?” Chase stared at the frozen frame on the wall. For three seconds, his breath caught in his throat. Then, his eyes watered up, glistening under the lights. He turned toward the professors, his voice cracking with hurt. “Professor… I did touch the file,” he stammered, his shoulders sinking. “When I looked at it on the way over, the ink on his original paper was smudged—you couldn’t read the date. I panicked for him. I ran into the shop to print a cleaner copy from the open student portal so he wouldn’t get docked points for presentation. I had no idea the digital portal didn’t include the physical watermark.” He turned to look at me, biting his lower lip, tears spilling over his lashes. “And this video… Adam, did you seriously follow me? Did you track me down and film me because you already decided I was out to hurt you?” The shift in the room was instantaneous. The suspicious glares that had momentarily pinned Chase softened into uncomfortable confusion. I looked at him, and a strange calm washed over me. I had forgotten his real talent. Chase was never a master strategist; his brilliance lay in weaponizing his own apparent weakness. He knew exactly how to make any demand for accountability feel like cruel, unprovoked bullying. The chair cleared his throat and closed the folder firmly. “We’ll keep the materials here. Until the academic committee reviews the raw files and metadata, neither of you will take any action.” As the meeting dispersed, Chase lingered by the door, his head down, rapidly tapping a message on his phone. When he sensed my gaze, he locked the screen in a snap and offered me a soft, wounded little smile. That night, my phone chimed with an unknown number. “Back off while you can. He isn’t someone you can afford to cross.” I didn’t reply. I took a screenshot and backed it up. Three minutes later, a second text landed. “Keep digging into this, and that fellowship won’t be the only thing you lose.” The sender knew the exact details of the closed-door meeting. They knew what I was investigating. The people behind Chase were already moving into place. 3 When I stepped back into my dorm, my phone vibrated again. It was Lauren: “What the hell is going on between you and Tara?” A bitter taste flooded my mouth. I didn’t even need to open the campus forum to know what was happening. “Item 73: Make his girlfriend believe he’s sleeping with someone else.” He was sticking right to the playbook. Spread the poison early, feed the insecurity, let the girlfriend do the tearing down from the inside. I typed a single response: “If you trust me at all, meet me by the steps outside the biochemistry hall.” Ten minutes later, Lauren was standing under the yellow lamppost at the bottom of the concrete stairs. The wind was whipping her dark hair across her face, her arms crossed tight over her chest, eyes dark with hurt and exhaustion. “You’d better have a damn good explanation, Adam.” I unlocked my phone, opened the anonymous thread on the campus board, and handed it to her. “Look at the angle,” I said, keeping my tone level. “The photo was taken from the second-floor stairwell landing. The timestamp is 7:47 PM. That was the exact minute I left the reference archive. Tara was waiting at the bottom because she needed my lab notebooks for the organic synthesis module. Nothing more.” I pointed at the text beneath the image. “And the account that posted this burner thread belongs to Chase.” Lauren looked down, her brow furrowing, but she didn’t drop her guard. “He’s done this before, Lauren,” I pressed, stepping closer. “He tried to sabotage my fellowship documents yesterday. I have him on video swapping papers, and even with the footage right in front of the board, he cried his way out of it. Now he’s feeding you this garbage because he wants to take away every single person in my corner.” Her eyes flicked up to meet mine. A ripple of doubt broke across her rigid posture. And right on cue, gravel crunched behind us. Chase stepped out from the shadows of the walkway. He must have caught the tail end of what I said, because his eyes were already rimmed in crimson. He stood just behind Lauren, his hands shoved timidly into his hoodie pockets, his voice a trembling whisper. “Adam… how could you possibly think that was me?” A couple of undergrads walking past slowed down, glancing over at the commotion. Chase pressed his lips together, looking like a man wounded to the marrow. “I know you’re stressed about the fellowship review. I know you’re angry at the world right now, and you need someone to blame. If you need to take it out on me, fine. But please… don’t lie to Lauren just to save face.” Looking at him, a dry, humorless laugh almost escaped my throat. It was always this. Play the martyr, paint the target on my chest, and let everyone else pull the trigger for him. Sure enough, Lauren’s face hardened. She turned away from him and glared at me, her disappointment freezing over into anger. “Adam, don’t you think you owe him an apology?” Before I could speak, Chase reached out, his fingertips catching the sleeve of her denim jacket, his voice pleading and gentle. “No, Lauren, don’t. He’s in a bad place mentally right now. Don’t push him.” “Don’t push him.” As if he were holding back a rabid dog out of the goodness of his heart. I stared at the two of them—at the girl who was supposed to know me better than anyone, and the parasite who had hollowed out my life. A heavy, quiet exhaustion settled over me. “I’m done here,” I said, and walked away. Half an hour later, as I sat at my desk in the quiet dark, Lauren’s text lit up the room: “Adam, you really got this wrong. He’s trying to help you.” 4 The following afternoon, I caught them near the ground-floor vending machines of the lecture hall. Chase was standing in front of Lauren, his fingers trembling with theatrical hesitation. “I really didn’t want to show you this,” he was saying, his voice hushed, eyes wide with conflicted sorrow. “But if I keep quiet, Adam is just going to slip further down this path.” From twenty feet away, I saw him slide a manila folder into her hands. “Lauren, these are the text logs between Adam and Tara. I kept telling myself it was nothing, but I can’t watch you get played for a fool anymore.” Lauren didn’t open the folder immediately. Her hand lingered on the cardboard. “Where did you get these, Chase?” “Remember freshman year?” Chase said softly. “The night Adam and Tara supposedly pulled an all-nighter in the computer lab? I covered for him back then because he begged me to. I thought it was a one-time thing.” Lauren’s fingers tightened on the folder. She remembered that night. What she didn’t know was that the lie Chase had given her back then was something he had manufactured himself, an insurance policy he had banked years ago for this exact moment. “I hate doing this,” Chase whispered, looking down at his sneakers. “But Tara isn’t the only one anymore.” Lauren flipped the cover open, her face draining of color with every line she read. I stepped out from behind the pillar and walked straight up to them, reaching down and ripping the papers out of her hands. Lauren jumped, her voice sharp with betrayal. “Is any of this a lie, Adam?” I looked at the printed screenshots—crude, manufactured text bubbles, fabricated timestamps, words I had never spoken in my life. Then I looked at her eyes, searching for a single grain of faith, and found none. “If you truly believe I am capable of this,” I said, my voice dropping low and steady, “then there is nothing left for me to explain to you.” Her jaw clenched, tears spilling over her cheeks. Without another word, she spun on her heel and stormed down the corridor. Chase watched her go, a breath escaping him. When he turned back to me, the sorrow evaporated from his face, replaced by a momentary, startled blankness. “Adam,” he said, retreating half a step. “I didn’t mean to… I just couldn’t let her stay blind.” I stepped into his space, my voice tight with rage. “I have never touched Tara. I have never sent these texts. Why are you doing this, Chase? Why the fake screenshots? Why the forged photos? What the hell do you want from me?” Bathed in his victory, looking at the broken pieces of my relationship, Chase’s mask finally fractured. A smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth, ugly and sharp. “I just wanted you to taste it,” he whispered, leaning in so close I could smell his mint gum. “I wanted you to know what it feels like when everyone you love looks at you with disgust.” The fury in my blood turned instantly to ice. I held up my phone, screen glowing, the digital waveform frozen mid-track. “What do you think the academic board will say when they hear that?” I said evenly, and hit play. “I just wanted you to taste it. I wanted you to know what it feels like when everyone you love looks at you with disgust.” Chase’s color vanished. In a split second, his smirk warped into raw, manic terror. He lunged for the phone. I pivoted sideways, but his hand caught my wrist, knocking the device loose. It went flying through the air and crashed onto the polished concrete, the glass screen spider-webbing into a dozen fractures. Chase stared at the phone on the floor, then at the students turning the corner at the end of the hall. Before I could react, he threw himself sideways, smashing his arm against the jagged metal corner of a broken locker latch. The sharp edge tore through his skin. Dark red blood welled immediately, splashing across the gray floor. “Adam, stop! Don’t hit me!” Chase collapsed onto the floor, clutching his bleeding forearm, his scream echoing off the concrete walls with enough force to rattle the windows. I dashed forward to grab my phone—the audio was still looping faintly through the cracked speaker—but three students from our seminar burst through the double doors, freezing in horror at the scene. All they saw was Chase crumpled on the floor, blood pouring between his fingers, and me standing over him with a smashed phone in my fist. “Adam, please!” Chase sobbed, his face smeared with tears, pointing a trembling, bloody hand at me. “I told you I won’t forge your papers anymore! You don’t have to threaten to end my life!” The students rushed forward, shoving me back as they crowded around Chase, pressing paper towels against his arm. Then, with his free hand, Chase fished a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and threw it onto the floor. It was a printed screenshot titled: “Adam’s Notes.” “Make Chase take the fall for the falsified documents.” “Get Lauren to dump him so he has no one.” “Push him until he drops out of school.” The murmurs around us swelled into an ugly, suffocating roar. I looked at the piece of paper. The font, the bullet points, even the weird double-space between the words “Fellowship Review”—it was an exact mirror of the entries I had seen on his iPad. Except for one detail. In the bottom right corner of the printout, the auto-generated system timestamp read: “Created today at 2:17 AM.” Chase was hoisted to his feet by two guys from our floor. As they guided him past me, he slowed his pace, brushing my shoulder. He didn’t look at me. But as his mouth passed my ear, his voice dropped so low it was practically a ghost of sound: “Adam… did you honestly think you were the only one who woke up?” My entire skeleton locked up. The world went deafeningly silent. He turned his head, looking back at me through the sea of horrified, condemning faces, and smiled. There were no tears in that smile. No fear. Only a cold, venomous clarity: he knew how I died. And he knew exactly why I had returned.
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