University Massacre

Cheryl Corbett had just one drink at Snugg’s Bar & Grille before she hit the dancefloor. A vodka and Red Bull, to be exact. It was all the rage in 2017 before enough people caught on to the fact the latter would mask the effects of the former, causing drinkers to imbibe more than anticipated and suffer the effects of binging more easily. However, Cheryl had much more in store that night than a dangerous alcohol concoction.

She swung her hips to “Your Love” by Glass Animals in her denim shorts. She discovered the song in a music video on YouTube a few days prior and visualized the vaporwave style of it as she danced. Her two friends she went with danced in front of their boyfriends as they held and rubbed their hips down. There was another guy who was single, and he gulped his Jack Daniels out of the glass despite the little red straw being right in front of his lips. He watched as Cheryl shook her abdominal muscles and spun around.

As she raised her arms in a trance, Cheryl could smell the bourbon trailing into her nose as two sweaty palms touched her bare hips under her crop top and above her shorts. She snapped back to reality.

“What? Who?” she asked as she peered back at the tall man with the 5 o’clock shadow. He grinned down at her.

Her friends, Monique and Samantha, as well as their boyfriends, Michael and Blake, immediately stopped dancing as they saw Cheryl’s face had flushed.

“Back off,” Monique said as she pushed the man’s shoulder and broke his grip.

“Hey, hey, I just thought she was pretty and was trying to have some fun, guys!” he said. To the group, he sounded like he was on his sixth drink of the day.

Michael stepped between the two parties as all the other feet on the dancefloor paused.

“Pal, you just made my friend really uncomfortable,” he said. “I see you’ve been drinking. I don’t want any trouble. If you don’t want any more problems, I think you should leave.”

Although Michael was only 5’6” and the drunk was at least 6’1”, he still looked up at him with his chest out, knowing security would help if he got attacked and overwhelmed. Even though his eyes couldn’t look in a straight line, the drunk scanned Michael from head to toe.

“Whatever, snowflake,” he said before he stumbled out of the bar. Cheryl fanned her face with her hand as she drew a breath like an inflating balloon. Her friends brought her to a table to sit as they surrounded her.

“You okay?” Samantha said as she kneeled before her friend and held her hand.

“Yeah,” Cheryl said.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Just let me breathe again for a second. I was having a flashback.”

“Of course, hun. We’re here for you.”

The memories flashed before her eyes. That night when she had a few too many while Jake danced behind her the year before. He was her then-boyfriend who was not the patient type when it came to getting frisky with a girl. His hormones were raging. Cheryl wasn’t ready, but he convinced himself he could play the long game with the right person. Jake lost that six-month streak of waiting once he poured the contents of that pill in her glass.

“I think I wanna get out of here. Can we go back to the house, please?” Cheryl asked.

“Of course. Come on,” Monique said. She lent her hand out and Cheryl held it as she stood up. Billy Natwick, with his long auburn curls, black turtleneck, and Levi’s jeans, observed the entire ordeal from his chair on the second floor of the bar which overlooked the dancefloor and the tables below. He remembered her, dear old Cheryl. They met in chemistry in art class, which discussed things like the materials paint is composed of. He took it because it was the easiest class he could find for his science credit. Michael and Blake were his roommates, and he introduced them to Cheryl at a party, who went with Samantha and Monique.

“Those bastards have the audacity not to thank me for introducing them to the girls they get laid with every night, while I have no one,” he thought to himself.

Billy was an avid fan of 80s action and horror movies, which he proved with his collection of blades he would show off to his roommates in the dorm. His parents and friends who graduated while he was in high school would tell him time and time again how accepting everybody in college was, no matter what you did or how you acted, and he believed it. Little did he know that people are just as scared of someone with a knife as they are everywhere else.

“I was in the military club in high school, so I can protect you guys against any dangers that come our way, don’t worry,” Billy said on the day the three guys moved in together freshman year while they sat in their beds.

In addition to his knives, Billy had a stun gun “so I didn’t have to kill anybody who would potentially attack me on campus,” he would tell his roommates when he showed it to them. He waited and waited for the day action would come his way so he could be a hero for his new friends, but to his dismay, college was too boring for such excitement.

The roommates realized Billy Natwick meant business when they walked to the party where they met Cheryl under the pitch-black sky, and he fired his stun gun in the air for fun. He expected them to say “woah, that’s cool. Where’d you get that?” Instead, the pair ducked and covered on the sidewalk.

“Billy is really weird,” Blake told Cheryl when he first met her. “We’re planning to move away from him next semester.”

Regardless of his demeanor, Billy had no trouble socializing with Cheryl, so when she took him back to the dorm to hang out, he couldn’t help but look at her luscious lips. He mistook her kindness for fondness.

“Can I kiss you?” he said.

“Thanks, but I’m okay right now,” she said.

His hands shook like boulders ready to explode from within, and he stormed out of her dorm and smashed the mirror in his bathroom when he got back home. God forbid you ever told Billy Natwick “No.”

These memories all looped in his head as he watched Cheryl stroll out of Snugg’s with his enemies. He descended the stairs and followed outside.

“Remember that weirdo you guys used to live with?” Monique said.

“What about him?” Blake said.

“Didn’t he keep a samurai sword in his trunk and carve pumpkins with a combat knife in the dorm?”

“Yeah he did. I really hope he’s alright now. We just couldn’t live with him anymore. He was way too unpredictable.”

Michael’s perspective differed slightly.

“Dude, he brought weapons to school,” he said. “He would have tantrums when he didn’t get his way. He talked to Nick about stabbing people in the jugular with a hidden knife. He was violent.”

“He never wanted to hurt any of us,” Blake said. “I think he was just troubled.”

“I’m shocked he still goes to school and hasn’t gotten himself in trouble. He belongs in an institution. He needs professional help.”

“Guys, our night was rough enough,” Monique said. “Why don’t we talk about Professor Moses’ weird noises he makes when he thinks we can’t hear it?”

Billy trailed behind, avoiding streetlights along the way. He was too far to hear their conversations and also didn’t want to be close enough for them to hear his footsteps. The two men he loathed would wrap their arms around their partners, which made him clench his fists even tighter.

“Don’t hit them yet, Billy, don’t want to be caught,” he thought.

As the group entered their house off campus, Billy took the knife out of the sheath hidden in his boot. He camped behind a bush and window outside which overlooked the living room. Cheryl, Monique, and Samantha all lived together and decorated the room in an amalgamation of all their interests, like a Kendrick Lamar poster, a lava lamp, and an antique couch from 1974.

“Guys, could we put on Harold and Kumar and light up a blunt? I wanna wind down after all that,” Cheryl said. They all agreed.

Billy watched the movie with them, with only a glint of his left eye visible from the light in the living room.

“This movie’s making me hungry,” Blake said. The film was about two stoners who embark on a journey to White Castle after they got the munchies.

“We actually got White Castle burgers in the freezer if you wanna heat them up for us,” Samantha said. He could never resist that twinkle in her eye and was always ready to serve her.

“My pleasure,” he said before he kissed the back of her hand.

“That liar doesn’t deserve her,” Billy muttered to himself. “They’re not gonna be together. Billy will make sure.”

Cheryl was giggling when the film’s duo was at a college campus and Kumar was trying to buy cannabis from a hippie who charged an exorbitant amount for it.

“They don’t make absurd shit like this anymore,” Cheryl said.

“Your laugh is so beautiful,” Billy said. “We’ll be together soon, Cheryl. Real soon.”

The house had a trellis and vines on the side, which Billy ascended to reach the attic window that he pried open with his knife. He remembered introducing it to his roommates in their dorm a few days after they moved in together.

“This is a Ka-Bar,” he said. “My grandfather used it in Korea in the Marine Corps. It was his gift to me before he died. Neat, huh?”

“Yeah… it’s pretty cool,” Michael said.

Billy vaulted into the dark attic and heard the group two floors underneath. They didn’t suspect a thing, so far, so good. The house was built in the 1970s, which he could tell from the smell because the attic hadn’t been renovated since then.

“Guys, I gotta use the bathroom. I’ll be back in a bit,” Blake said. He went up to the second floor to brush his teeth and get that White Castle aftertaste out of his mouth.

Billy heard the water in the faucet splash against the sink, a perfect ambience to drown out his footsteps down the stairs. He held the knife to his chest as he pointed the blade down. Blake could make out a familiar frizzy hairstyle in his peripheral vision.

“Bil-” was all he could say before his old “friend” covered his mouth and kept the knife just a hairpin away from his throat. As soon as he saw the knife, he could recall the time Billy introduced him to it, where he didn’t think he would ever use it on him, but at the same time was confused why he would bring it to school in the first place.

“Is he ill? Does he just not know any better?” Blake thought at the time. “He’s clearly just a knife enthusiast and showing off a gift from his grandpa. He was odd, but he never showed any sign he wanted to hurt me.”

“Sh, sh, sh,” Billy said. “Now’s not the time to scream. You’ve been very bad to Billy. You lied to Billy. Nobody ever lies to Billy.”

“Billy sure as hell never talked like this,” Blake thought.

He raised the knife and plunged it into his heart, the body part where Blake damaged Billy the most by not telling him the truth of why he left him behind. He masqueraded a friendship because he was too afraid to say that he felt uncomfortable by his behavior, hoping that ignoring him for long enough would make him go away eventually.

Each retraction drew out more and more blood out of the epicenter that pumped it. Billy used the walls and mirror as his canvas, the knife his brush. Patterns of scattered blood vessels decorated the lilac blue color that permeated the room. Although he let out a sigh of relief at his work, Billy still had an exhibition ahead of him. The faucet still ran.

The movie was about three quarters of the way over, where Neil Patrick Harris zipped past the stoner pair as he snorted a line of cocaine off a woman’s body.

“Yo, it’s been 30 minutes. I’m gonna go check on Blake,” Michael said.

“Mmmm-kay,” Samantha said.

Michael went up the stairs, where the only sound was running water.

“Hey bro, you good?” Michael said as he knocked. No response. He knocked again three more times. “Blake, you in there?” Just water. He creaked the door open. His friend’s corpse laid on the un-mopped floor, his chest cavity wide open as the contents of it adorned the walls. The shower curtain rod was missing, but Michael found it—sticking out of his chest.

“Michael, the great deceiver,” Billy said. “Your words made nobody talk to Billy anymore. Now nobody will talk to Michael either.”

“f-f-f-f-uck… you,” he said.

It was the first time he ever had the courage to curse at Billy, even after all the perfect opportunities, like when Billy lit a one-hitter full of weed inside the dorm and nearly got them caught by the RA. Unlike Blake, Michael always had the feeling Billy was going to do something with those weapons of his. But like Blake, Billy always felt a protective instinct over Michael and didn’t think he was going to be on the receiving end of them.

“He’s not gonna hurt me, so not my problem,” Michael told himself when Billy first showed off his knives.

Billy watched him stumble through the hallway, his blood leaving a trail over the rug like an oversaturated garbage bag as he held onto the pipe killing him. The man tumbled down the stairs, with the rod knocking out support bars on the railing along the way. The girls leapt off the couch as they heard him fall. They all screamed and flailed their arms downward as they saw his impaled body before them at the bottom of the steps.

The killer ran down the stairs, knife in hand, with a tunnel vision isolating his target like a bull careening toward a red flag. Billy grabbed Cheryl’s throat as he bumrushed her into the wall and stabbed her in the shoulder.

“We’re gonna be together now, Cheryl,” he whispered as he stared directly into her irises.

Cheryl remembered when his pupils dilated right before he tightened his fists and stormed out of her dorm. He had enough practice with talking to women to charm his way into her dorm but stumbled with the rest of the steps. It was from that moment she realized why his roommates wanted to be away from him. She came across plenty of suspicious men on the streets of New York City where she grew up, but they never did anything like that after being declined a kiss.

She opened her mouth wide enough as she yelled that her uvula flicked saliva across his face. Monique then shattered the lava lamp across Billy’s head and covered it with wax and glass. As he hunched over, Samantha followed up with a baseball bat on the back of his head like the swing of an axe. He twitched and writhed on the ground while he lost control of his nervous system.

“We need to get this knife out of you,” Monique said. The Ka-Bar had pinned her to the wall, which Samantha ripped out before Cheryl slid down to the floor and sat there crying.

Sometime later, the police arrived and carried out the boyfriends in body bags, while the girls each held Cheryl’s hands as the ambulance took off with them.

“I had no idea guys, I’m so sorry,” Cheryl said as the tears drizzled down her face, lying in the gurney.

“This is not your fault,” Monique said.

“When he stormed out of my dorm, Michael and Blake told me everything. We thought he was crazy, not dangerous. I feel awful for not reporting him, and this is all my fault.”

“Honey, we all knew,” Samantha said. “We all underestimated him. But we dealt with him, and he’s gone. Michael and Blake would want us to move on and mourn them, not focus on their killer.”

They then exchanged their happiest memories with their fallen boyfriends as the ambulance drove.

Billy was in an ambulance of his own, handcuffed to the gurney. Nobody knew just how much cognitive function he had left, but one thing was for certain: he still remembered Cheryl, as he had a perfect sketch of her on the wall next to his bed in the institution that he kissed every night.