Morgan crept toward Bella with a strange look on her face and pounced like a cat.
The next thing Bella knew, the flowers she had picked were crushed underneath her, and her cheek was pressed into the dirt. Morgan was straddling her.
Bella yelled the same thing at Morgan that she’d yelled at Anissa: “Ow! I can’t breathe!” Then, “Get off me!”
But Morgan wouldn’t move. “I’m sorry,” Morgan said. “I have to do this because it’s the only way to save my life. Someone from Creepypasta is stalking me.”
Bella seriously doubted that. After all, Morgan had already lied to her about the toilet vandalism. But she didn’t have time to argue.
From across the clearing, Anissa watched as Morgan went “stab crazy,” plunging the knife in and out of Bella’s body so many times that Bella’s screaming stopped making sense. She should be dead already, Anissa thought.
“I thought it was like a video game—five seconds of something withering then it disappears,” Anissa later reiterated several times, as if repeating the idea might make it true, and she could finally reset the console. “I didn’t know that it would take so long for someone to go.”
In movies, people died within a few excruciating seconds of being attacked. They leaned against brick walls and stared up at the sky with vacant eyes, then sighed and slept forever. But in real life, Bella kept sobbing and screaming, which was the one thing Anissa couldn’t handle.
“That’s enough!” Anissa shouted.
Morgan rose to her feet. Her coat was covered in blood. She waited to feel something. She had just stabbed her best friend in the back—seventeen times if Morgan had counted correctly (she hadn’t; the number was higher). But to her surprise, Morgan felt no remorse. Instead, she later told the police, “All I heard was screaming.”
Below her, Bella writhed, her aspirational T-shirt saturated with blood, the words “love,” “hope,” and “justice” fading in red.
“Help me,” she begged Morgan. “Why did you do that? I can’t breathe!” Bella cried and screamed. “I trusted you, I hate you all!”
Anissa watched in horror as Bella somehow managed to stand, “wobbling around,” as Anissa described it, “holding on to trees.”
“I hate you,” Bella said again. She blinked, her gaze unfocused. “Get help.” After a while, she murmured, “I can’t see.”
“I had to do it,” Morgan insisted lamely, eager to make Bella understand. “Someone from Creepypasta is stalking me.”
Bella’s face flashed with anger.
“I doubt it,” she said.
Bella’s attitude angered Morgan. She shoved Bella to the ground. “Not joking!”
“I hate you,” Bella said. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
“She said it over and over and over and over again,” Morgan later recalled.
Anissa wanted the yelling to stop. She took Bella by the arm and led her deeper into the forest. “Home is this way,” she lied.
At first, Bella pushed Anissa away. Blood smeared Anissa’s shirt.
“Lay down,” Anissa encouraged her. “Be quiet. You will lose blood slower that way.” (“I lied,” she later confessed to police. “I didn’t want attention being drawn.”)
But Bella wanted to believe Anissa. She stopped screaming for help. She lay down quietly. She kept crying, but Anissa noticed that her eyes were no longer producing tears.
Morgan brushed past Anissa and knelt by Bella. She tried to clean the largest wound on Bella’s leg with part of a large leaf.
“Don’t touch me,” Bella seethed.
Later, when it came time for Anissa to explain to the police why Morgan, who had just stabbed Bella, might try to administer some kind of first aid—no matter how childish—Anissa would become very quiet. “Because before this,” Anissa said, her tone a mix of embarrassment and envy, “Bella was Morgan’s best friend.”
Anissa motioned for Morgan to follow her out of the woods, promising, “We’re going to get you help.”
Bella believed them.
Morgan and Anissa backed away from her at an angle. When they were out of sight, they sprinted through the forest. Twigs left scratches on their chins and necks. When they reached Big Bend Road, the sun hit their faces.
Morgan turned to Anissa. “I thought you would chicken out.”
Anissa was stung. “I stood by you the whole time.”
They considered running down the main road as fast as they could. But Morgan was covered in blood, and as Anissa had written in her Spanish notebook, “No me gusta correr”—“I do not like to run.”