Chapter Twenty-TwoKami
I couldn’t sleep all night.
Julian was Momo.
Julian was the bad guy.
Julian was the one who’d made that video and uploaded it to the internet.
Julian had pushed my friends away.
Why?
Why?
Why?
I couldn’t stop asking myself. I couldn’t understand why he had lied. Tricked me. Used me. Manipulated me.
Why did people like that exist?
But the worst was that I couldn’t get my head around how deep Julian’s manipulation had gone. He was a psychopath. He was the worst kind of psychopath, and at the time I still didn’t realize just how dangerous he was.
I thought of Kate. She was living under the same roof as someone completely deranged. The same guy who had written all those horrible messages under the pseudonym @omv_ovamat.
I thought of my brother… That bastard had been tormenting my poor little brother. He’d scared Cam enough to make him sneak into my room and steal my photos. He’d probably asked him to do other things: tell him where I went, who I was with…
Jesus!
What would I do when I saw him?
What would I do when he popped up with that fake smile stretching from ear to ear and I had to tell him that I knew everything? That I knew who he was, what his real name was. What he was doing, how he had lied to me.
I was scared. When things like this happen, you never know what it could lead you or others to do. I was scared, and I felt rejected. Rejected by my friends. I had tried to be real, to be sincere, and where had it gotten me? All my ideals and beliefs seemed to be collapsing in around me just because one psychotic weirdo had decided to manipulate me and everyone close to me.
I thought of Thiago. Of everything he had done for me, everything he’d done to get to the bottom of what was going on. I thought of how he looked at me, how he tried to protect me, and those messages he’d written warning me about Julian. I thought of how I’d ignored him because I’d thought he was just jealous.
Things were bad, and I was even more scared of how they might turn out.
I thought of Danny. He was a dickhead, but he didn’t deserve what had happened to him. He’d been beaten up, shunned, called a rapist. That was my fault. I had never doubted he was behind all this; he was the only person who made sense.
Now I understood the importance of evidence.
You’re innocent until proven guilty, right? And yet the entire school, including me, had judged him for a crime he didn’t commit.
I couldn’t fix it.
But I needed to try.
I needed to say I was sorry.
I needed to let him know that he, too, was a victim of Julian.
Julian had piled on with everyone else, landing Danny in the hospital, supposedly to defend me!
How could a person be so horrible?
I called Danny and waited for him to pick up. It was around seven in the morning. Soon I’d be seeing everyone at school. I was scared of that, and I was scared of what Danny would say, but he needed to know what Julian had done.
