Revenge14 min read
The Recipe, the Twin, and the Message
ButterPicks11 views
"I saw a new video from Noah George."
The notification blinked on my phone like an invitation. I tapped it without thinking. I had followed Noah for years; his food videos were my quiet place. The screen opened to a dim basement instead of his usual airy kitchen. A young man in white gloves stood under a low lamp, the light washing his cheekbones into marble. He held a slab of pale meat to his nose and breathed in like someone smelling victory.
"Today I'm making crispy pork belly," his caption had said.
He smiled. The way he cut the meat, the slow clean movements—something in the rhythm made my skin crawl. His laugh, low and strange, slipped out of his throat. He plated the fried pieces, raised them delicately, and ate with an odd reverence.
The comments filled with dark jokes. I scrolled through them fast.
"Is this a cooking show or forensic class?"
"Am I the meal or the critic here?"
"If he stops uploading, someone call the cops."
"Bro, police are already outside. Come clean?"
People joked, then moved on. It was a show. It was content. I tried to laugh along as I always had with Noah. But in that dim light Noah looked different—hungry in a way that wasn't about taste.
My name is Indiana English. I am a comic artist. I draw alone in a small apartment, where the light from my window is mostly company. My mother, Dawn Schreiber, fusses at me for not leaving the room enough. She set up this first blind date partly to annoy me, partly to hope I would stop living with my pencils and my scribbles.
"Meet him. One time. Just obey your mother," she had said, shoving a coat at me.
So I went to a café that smelled of sugar and steam. I waited at table nine. There were a few people scattered, but one backlit silhouette caught my eye—thin, clean, a profile that stopped me the moment he turned.
"It's you, right? Indiana?" he asked.
His voice was the voice I knew from sleep, the one that narrated my mornings. It was Noah George's voice.
We talked like old friends. He said he climbed mountains at four a.m. and fed stray cats and woke up to cook. He was gentle where the internet had made him bright. He said, "You draw? That's brave."
I didn't tell him I was an old fan. I listened and blushed and pretended I wasn't memorizing the way his mouth bent when he said "pasta." He walked me home. Once, his fingers brushed the side of my neck. A tremor passed through me so raw I hated how stupid and vivid it felt. Later I lay in bed and thought: the world had become safer because of his small kindnesses.
A week later, I dug up old comments of his from years earlier. There it was—Noah writing, "They made me order crawfish and now I'm swollen from an allergy. Ugh." He had once been allergic. My face turned cold.
That night I dreamed the faucet bled red. I woke up and went to the bathroom. For a second the water was dark and thick, then normal. My hands shook, but I told myself I was tired. Noah and I texted often. He was tender and small, and he sent lunch to my door sometimes. He would write, "Midday surprise," and I'd get a box that smelled like home. In the boxes he'd slip jokes like paper charms.
"Don't get arrested for cooking too real," he joked one evening, and then with half a grin said softly, "If I'm ever in trouble, would you help me?"
There was a dangerous warmth that could bloom wherever he set it.
We were almost careless with our happiness. He called me "Indie" in a way I liked. "Indie," he would say in text, "come over. I made stew." He would pinch my cheek like a father, like a pet, like a lover. I loved how he wrapped his arms like a small anchor around my waist on the subway. The world organized into manageable pieces when he was near.
But he had one thing—the darkest part—that nobody spoke about. He liked to scare me. Sometimes he would pretend something terrible had happened on his videos. He enjoyed the shock of our reactions. I laughed nervously at first. It was a little game. He would sometimes say, "I know you hate spiders, so I put a fake one in your bag." But the pranks shifted, and the laughs shrank.
One night he left his phone on the table and I glanced at his pinned messages. There was a chat name—"R." Noah had two pinned chats: one with me, one with "R." A black crow avatar and the word "RUE" were there. He said casually when I asked once, "That's just a friend. Don't be jealous."
The next day he suggested we climb the winter peak of YuFeng. He tied our scarves and made a race of us. On the summit, with the wind chewing at our hats, he leaned against the railing and told me, "Bad kids get punished."
I thought he was joking. He said, "If you don't laugh, you will be punished," with a stage whisper. Then someone shoved me from behind.
The world became a falling photograph. Air ripped at my lungs. For a few seconds I saw the sky break like glass. I hit a slope and rolled, my breath gone. Then black.
I woke with fever and bone ache. Noah moved into the downstairs living room, "for a few nights," he said. He said, "Just to make sure you're okay."
At night I would hear chopping from the kitchen—thin, steady strokes. Once I crept down the stairs and saw a square of light under his kitchen door. I held my breath, pressed my palm to the newel. He was there, gloved and steady, chopping something on the cutting board. The sound was ridiculous—always the same.
"You okay?" I asked, when he turned.
"I make ribs for tomorrow," he said. His smile was too precise. "Sleep."
Morning smelled like broth. He put a bowl of yam and ribs in front of me. He said, "It will make you feel better."
I pushed my spoon around. The soup tasted normal, bland-safe and warm. He watched me like a man who measured his food by how I inhaled. After a spoonful, the world tilted. I found a note folded in the wrapper: "Indie, did you like the spicy noodles?" My stomach dropped.
"Are you okay?" Noah asked, when he saw my face.
I lied. "I hate waste. It's delicious." I wanted to be grateful. I wanted to be normal with him.
For a month we lived in ordinary ways. He cooked and filmed, I drew and ate, our small orbit circling. But there were empty pockets in him that I couldn't fill. He checked his messages the way a man checks a wound. He fidgeted when his phone buzzed. I started to follow him sometimes when he left at night. The paranoia felt shameful and thrilling. Once I took his home key from his coat while we slept and slipped out into the cold.
I tracked him to a building not far from ours. He went inside and vanished for a long time. Finally he came out, and I followed him into the same building, slipping into an unlocked door that led to a storage room he said never to open. The air inside hit my face sharp as paint thinner. The smell of formalin and metal flooded me.
I found a body.
It was under a green tarp but not fully covered. A man lay with his mouth open, the skin pale and gray, the face—my brain could not stitch that face to anything but the vlogger I had loved online. He looked like Noah. I slapped the cloth away without thinking. The flesh was carved, gone in patches. The sight sucked the blood from my legs. I reeled back, fingers numb.
"You're so disobedient," a voice said.
Julian was in the doorway as if he'd been carved from the shadows. He smiled like a prize fisherman.
"You shouldn't have looked," he said.
I tried to move, tried to scream, felt nothing. He was not Noah. He was too thin and too cold, but his face matched the videos I had watched for years. The man on the floor was either a twin or a mask. My world tilted.
He chained me in the same room the way a butcher ties meat. He said, "Now you will be my present."
My phone had been left in the bathroom; by some fluke I retrieved it. I messaged anyone I could find. Jaelyn Meyer, one of my long-time readers, was the first to reply. "Call police," she wrote. I typed a location and sent it. Then I was dragged back, gagged with tape.
Julian spoke to me like a patient professor. "You liked his old videos, didn't you? You said you loved the softer ones, before he got..." He rubbed his face. "Before the world ate him up."
"Why are you doing this?" I forced out. My throat hurt.
"Because he had what I wanted," Julian said. "He had light. He had the sun. I was always in his shadow. He called me cold. He wanted everything to be about him. So I made sure he couldn't take that from me again."
I laughed, helpless. He told me about a brother relationship that had been proof and poison. He spoke about cameras and followers and a wound that had never healed. The story unraveled in bits—mothers gone, attention stolen, a growing hunger to be seen that ate everything.
The third night, the tape on my mouth came off for a moment. I tasted air like a freed animal. He brought me to the kitchen and pointed to the dismembered figure.
"Do you know what it's like to replace someone wholly? To put on a face and walk into the sunlight? You were always watching him. You thought you knew him. This is close enough." He barely breathed.
I felt the floor of sanity slide. Somehow I managed to whisper one word, "Report."
He laughed, a sound like a saw.
That night, something happened I had not expected. The apartment filled with lights and angry voices. "Police! Put your hands in the air!" A loudspeaker boomed.
Julian froze with a knife at my throat. He stared at me like he'd seen a ghost. In the loud confusion a figure shoved forward and I heard a girl's voice yell, "This way! He's inside!"
Those words were from Jaelyn. She had gone to the police after my message. She stood under the doorway, shaking but pushing through the officers. When the light hit her face I could see she had been crying.
I wanted to cry too, but the shock made me still.
The arrest was chaotic. Julian lunged, then froze, then screamed, then wrapped his arms around my throat like a man who wanted to pull all meaning into himself even as the world took him away. The officers pried him loose. He looked at me with a smile that was too wide for his face.
"No!" he kept saying. "You can't take him away! He is mine!"
They cuffed him. He began to laugh until his sound broke into a sob. The camera phones of the neighborhood were already recording. Someone shouted, "You were the one with the food videos!" Others mouthed at me, "Are you okay?" I could not answer. The hands on my wrists were rough. An officer cut my chains.
Later, at the station steps, a press pack had gathered. Flash bulbs stung. Someone shoved a microphone.
"Indiana! Can you tell us what happened?" a reporter shouted.
"Noah—" I started.
"Noah is gone," Julian screamed from the van. "Noah is gone because of you! Because of all of you!" He thrashed, eyes wild.
But that night was only the beginning. The story spread like oil on water. People called him a monster; they called him a liar; they called him brave for admitting his sickness on camera. Yet when the footage of the storage room leaked, a new tide of horror rolled in. People watched Julian's face while they watched the body and saw the two as the same.
After the arrest the legal machinery began. But I could not let this end only in a jail transfer. I wanted the world to see the whole chain—how fame had fed into madness, how someone who posed as warm could hide a rot. I insisted on a public hearing because public shame in our age happens in gorgeous, slow-motion waves: news comments, social feeds, trending topics. The law would decide guilt, but the town would need to watch the fall.
On the day of the hearing, the courthouse courtyard overflowed. A crowd gathered—neighbors, Noah's fans, strangers attracted by the morbid magnet. "Justice for Noah," some chanted. "Monster," others hissed. Cameras clustered like hungry birds.
I sat at the front, my hands still tremored. Jaelyn sat behind me, pale as a sheet. "You did the right thing," she whispered. "You saved me too."
"No," I said. "You saved me."
The prosecutor led Julian out. He was in handcuffs but wore the same blank stare he wore whenever he made a video. The judges sat like granite. Reporters raised microphones like torches. The crowd's volume pressed in, a sea of expectation.
"Julian Karim," the prosecutor began, "we are here to consider both the criminal acts and the social damage you have caused. You took a life. You disguised yourself as a public man. You broke trust."
The prosecutor played clips. I watched myself on screen, small and laughing in scenes I had forgotten. The first clip was of the old vlogger's gentle kitchen. The second clip cut to Julian's dark basement videos. The contrast was suffocating. The courthouse murmured.
Then the real public punishment began—not the courtroom sentence, but the revealing ritual the modern world executes with its voices. People stood and spoke. A neighbor whose son followed Noah said, "I used to trust him." A food critic who had once praised the vlogger told how he believed the wrong face. Jaelyn read a long message she had written months ago, a testimony about obsession and the danger of looking but not seeing.
"How could you?" an elderly woman cried, then added, "I fed him once when he was cold. He smiled at me."
Julian's expression changed. At first a curled lip of arrogance. Then his jaw tightened. The crowd's faces were no longer a blur; they were mirrors, reflecting him back in hundred different ways. He had expected the world to punish him with its silence, with whispers, not with verdicts and names called in public.
Someone in the crowd shouted, "You are a liar!" Another called, "Traitor to trust!"
Julian's breathing jerked. His smile twitched, then dropped. He tried to speak. "They don't understand," he said hoarsely. "He—he stole me. He always—"
"No," a woman yelled. "You stole him."
He staggered like a man stepping back from a ledge. The change in him was visible: a confident predator turned suddenly a raw thing. He denied, he sputtered, then the denial collapsed into pleading.
"Stop," he whispered. "Stop, please."
Phones clicked. People recorded. "Are you sorry?" a reporter demanded.
Julian's eyes slid to me. For a broken second there was something like regret, then the mask of entitlement snapped back into place because he'd convinced himself of a narrative for so long. "I wanted to be seen," he said to the microphones, voice cracking with a desperate kind of pride. "I wanted to be real."
A woman stepped forward, held a small photo—Noah in an old market, laughing. "This is who he was," she said. "You killed him. You stole him with your lies."
The crowd began to chant again, but this time it was more precise: "Tell the truth!" "No more masks!" Their anger was a chorus. The press circled like wolves. The officers kept Julian between them, but for the first time he was not the one in charge of the room. Every accusation landed like a small hammer.
He tried bargaining. "If you let me speak, I can explain," he urged. "I can show you—"
"Why did you film him?" a man shouted. "Why did you show his death?"
Julian's voice cracked into sobs. "Because it was mine," he said. "Because I wanted people to look at me."
The crowd's reaction was a mix of disgust and pity. Some began to spit words I am ashamed to remember. Others wept openly. A group formed to block his movement and recorded him like a hunt. One university student stepped forward and read a statement about mental illness and responsibility. The statements ranged from cold fury to painful, raw empathy. The hardest thing I watched was Julian shrink in the public sight: the same hands that filmed last week's recipes now clutched at air while people unpicked his story out loud.
Jaelyn stood up then. Her voice trembled. "I followed him online for years," she said. "I thought love could fix things. I was angry he didn't look at me. I told the police because some things are bigger than grief or hunger. I did what I had to do. I called because I couldn't watch another person be erased." She pointed at Julian. "You are the one who made him a mask."
That was the second fall—the fan's confession. The crowd turned. Some hissed at Jaelyn, some applauded. She had been a helper, but her devotion was part of a dangerous ecology of obsession. The public now watched her with the same furious hunger. She had saved me, but her worship had fed him. She trembled, and then the crowd looked back to Julian.
When Julian tried again to shape his story, his words were eaten by the press pack, by witness accounts, by the weight of his own admissions. The public punishment was not a single blow but a thousand small cuts—an unraveling in front of people who once clicked "follow" and smiled at his tags. The social media feeds that afternoon were a chorus of snapshots and witness statements, threaded with the tag: #NoahRemembered.
Julian's face moved through stages: at first arrogant, then surprised, then furious, then incredulous, then reduced to pleading. He mouthed apologies that sounded like echoes. The crowd booed him, screamed, some even sobbed. "You killed what we loved," someone yelled.
I watched as the auditorium of the world judged him. I watched as pieces of my naive trust fell away. Yet among the ridiculers there were also those who tried to explain him—doctors, reporters, people who cautioned against cruelty in public punishment. The crowd's voices collided, messy as a storm.
In the end the court would do its work. But the public verdict was immediate and loud. Julian had been stripped of the mask that his brother's public had helped him wear. People who once liked his videos now posted long threads cataloguing his crimes. The restaurant where he'd filmed dates got months of bad press. The streaming platform suspended all accounts linked to him. "Unfollow," the feeds demanded, and people obliged.
Julian was dragged away in handcuffs under a rain of camera flashes and a chorus of voices that named him what he was. He screamed and laughed in the van until the sirens swallowed the sound. The garden of the courthouse smelled like wet fabric and old coffee. I felt hollow, but also strangely cleansed, as if exposing the rot had let me breathe.
Afterwards, in the quiet weeks, there were other confessions. Jaelyn's role came under scrutiny. People asked why she had not spoke earlier, or why she had encouraged certain videos. She was brought into interviews and her frantic, wounded face showed on screens. The public, which had wanted a single villain, found the story messier and more human. Some called for pity, others for scorn. The discourse became its own punishment—people remaking her image into traitor or martyr depending on what they needed.
In the courtyard, during the first public humiliation, I had seen two monsters and a world that raised them. The longer public punishment went on, the less the crowd sounded like judges and the more like a noisy jury with a thousand thumbs. The one who had harmed me most had been exposed and bound. The one who had once been my home no longer existed. And the person who had saved me—Jaelyn—sat in my kitchen later and held my hands with an apology that tasted like ash.
"I didn't mean for this to turn into…this," she said.
"You saved me," I kept saying, because it was true and because sometimes the world needs simple truths to stay upright.
Life after the arrest was not clean. I had nightmares, days when a smell could make me sick, or when a kitchen sound folded a memory into me. I drew again, but the lines were sharper, the pages more crowded. People asked me for interviews. I refused most. The work I did was to stitch a life together small and careful—like piecing a bowl from broken pottery with glue that can hold.
Once, months later, I passed a café and saw a man who looked like the vlogger from his old happy videos. He wore a hat and a scarf and he smiled at nothing. I wanted to go over, to touch that light like a familiar melody. But I kept walking.
There will be a court sentence. There will be articles. There will be people who say I was lucky, and others who say I should have seen earlier. All of that is true and false in equal measure.
On a thin autumn evening, I opened my mailbox and found an envelope. Inside was a small print—a still from an old video of Noah, where he laughed at a burnt custard and flung a spoon at the camera. On the back, someone had written, "Remember him. Don't forget to look up when the light is real."
I kept that picture in my sketchbook like a talisman. Sometimes I draw his hands—open, empty, ordinary. Sometimes I draw the face of Julian, but only to understand how someone could twist into that shape.
"Do you regret it?" my mother asked once, when I told her everything. She sat across from me with her tea.
"Every day," I said honestly. "But regret and action are not the same. I regret, and then I draw the thing that scared me until it becomes only a page."
The news cycles moved on. People found new outrages. Videos were made about the case; some told the truth, some sensationalized. But at night I slept better. I kept the picture and I kept drawing. I met people slowly. Once in a library I met a young woman—quiet, steady—who liked my penciled hands. We spoke about the shapes of shadows for hours. I told her one small piece of the story. She did not recoil.
Sometimes the past is a room with its door open. You can stand outside and shout into it and the voice returns like wind. You can also pick up your keys and walk into the world that keeps moving. The arrest, the punishment, the press—those were storms I did not ask for. But they cleared something.
I will not pretend it is over. There are legal dates and a heap of testimony. There will be a trial in which the court weighs guilt and intent. The public punishment was only the first, messy verdict. The law must do its work. But the crowd's attention, the live-shared yelling, the recorded faces—those are also part of the punishment. The man who took light from others tasted a little of the same bright heat he had wanted.
When the case closed—later, in small print—the record read like a blunt list of facts. But every once in a while I pull out that little photo of Noah laughing and I remember: there was a man who made small meals and small jokes, and there was a man who took his face and made it into a mask. The world will remember both, but I will keep one image only.
"I liked your old videos," I say sometimes, aloud, when I cook. "You used to make pumpkin bread and laugh at yourself. That was real."
Silence answers me. The oven hums. The smell of baking is enough, sometimes. Sometimes I feel the faint warmth of someone who taught me how to be seen again.
The End
— Thank you for reading —