Page 37

Pullman, Washington

I had nothing left to live for but revenge…

I lived in a college town full of young, attractive students who partied and had sex all the time and I didn’t get to experience any of it.

No one invited me to any parties, and in all the times i went out by myself to Isla Vista, none of the beautiful blonde girls showed any interest in having sex with me.

Not one girl. These are crimes that cannot go unpunished.

The more I thought about all these injustices that were dealt to me, the more eager I became for revenge. It’s all I had left.

Months later, the people physically closest to Bryan—the members of his cohort—look for the smallest clue as to why it all went down. There will likely be a trial at which they hope to find answers, but this, or something like it, is what they speculate happened sometime that August:

Bryan goes for an evening drive.

He drives and drives in the dark.

He drives when he can’t sleep. When he needs to clear his head. And when the nightmares and visual snow recur, which they are doing now.

Tap, tap, tap. He’s back in the basement and on Tapatalk, the online message board, back when he was a teenager.

I feel myself slipping away… It is as if the ringing in my ears and the fuzz in my vision is simply all of the demons in my head mocking me. I fall asleep, but I wake up quickly to bloody screams. Is any of this here? Am I brain damaged? NO?! Then why am I like this?

Bryan has no one to share his hopelessness with, even if he could find the words to do it. The others don’t seem to want to hang out. He knows the cohort gathers on weekends for a beer. No one has invited him to join them.

Just like Elliot Rodger, who swung between two college communities—one in Santa Barbara and the other eleven miles away in Isla Vista—Bryan has one other option to find a Stacy willing to date him: Moscow, Idaho. Across the state border.

He parks the car in town and heads to a place he’s read about online: the Mad Greek. They serve vegan pizza.

As soon as he walks inside, he notices the blond waitress.

With her long hair and sphinxlike blue eyes, she would definitely be marked as a Stacy by the incels.

She’s the epitome of the women who turned down Elliot Rodger. Her name is Maddie, like Elliot’s childhood friend Maddy, who grew into someone who ignored Rodger.

Will she notice Bryan?

She comes over to ask what he’d like.

He knows what he’d like.

Her.