Chapter 1

My twin brother is dead.

That's when my parents remembered they had a crazy older brother locked away, and hauled me out of the mental hospital.

They're keeping his death a secret, hiding his body at home.

I'm supposed to be him, go to school, pretend everything's normal.

And make everyone who messed with him pay the price.

Even his precious sweetheart, the head cheerleader, will be begging for mercy before I'm through.

...

1.

My little brother offed himself.

Mom and Dad yanked me out of the nuthouse after ten years.

In the car, Mom, bless her heart, poured out everything he'd been going through.

Back at the house, there was a chest freezer sitting in the living room.

My brother was inside.

Ten years vanished, he was still as handsome as I remembered, eyes closed like he was just asleep.

But he was covered in bruises and marks that shouldn't have been there.

Purple welts all over, old and new, and ugly cigarette burns hidden under his clothes.

His phone was buzzing like crazy on the table.

I used his face to unlock it, and a million notifications flooded the screen.

The newest messages caught my eye.

"Hey, Jake, you think you can just ditch class?"

"Don't forget I got those pics of you with Brittany. Guess what Ashley would think if she saw them."

"Better show your face tomorrow, or you'll regret it!"

And then there was a video.

I tapped it.

It showed some crummy motel room, dark and grimy.

My brother was pinned down on the bed while a bunch of guys forced him to kiss this seriously overweight woman.

His school uniform was ripped to shreds, barely covering him, and the air was filled with sick laughter.

Mom and Dad were holding my hands tight, they wanted me to make them pay.

They drove me to school the next morning.

At the classroom door, wearing his stained-up clothes, I scanned the room.

The teacher frowned when he saw me and pointed to the desk next to the trash can.

"Miller, you actually dared to skip class? You think you're too good for school? Looks like that trash can is where you belong."

I ignored the stares and went to my desk.

My brother always kept a diary.

Sure enough, I found a beat-up notebook in the desk.

Filled with his fear and hopelessness, but also with the name of a girl he was secretly in love with, Ashley.

Every time her name came up, he got bullied even worse.

Until finally, he wrote down something she said to him:

"Even when life sucks, we gotta have the courage to start over."

Sounded like kind words on the surface, but to someone like my brother, who was getting his ass kicked every day, it meant something different.

After reading the whole diary, I realized this wasn't just your average bullying situation.

Someone was pulling the strings, pushing him to his breaking point.