The Psycho from Sophomore Year

Chapter 1

Everyone has a story of someone in their past whom they expect to see on the nightly news. That steroid fused father who got thrown out of his kid’s soccer game. The moronic prankster who sent out an anonymous bomb threat just to cut class. That ex who could never quite give up. For me, it’s exponential. Every time I hear a tragedy on the news, whether it be a shooting or a kidnapping or some other horror, a small voice in the back of my head creeps up, from a whisper to a crescendo… What if? What if it’s him?

The one who scares me most is the psycho from sophomore year.

The guy’s name was TJ Mallick. We went to the same high school in central Jersey and even had a few of the same classes through freshman year without incident. He wasn’t exactly popular, but he wasn’t some total outcast either. He sort of hovered around the edges of our social groups like a weird little moon. He’d sit with us for lunch every once in a while, or end up at the same basement party when someone’s parents were away, but he never seemed fully *there* in the way everyone else was. Not shy. Not awkward. Just… off. Like he was always studying the room for some lesson only he could understand.

If you met him for five minutes you probably would have thought he was harmless. Tall, skinny, dark hair, sharp features, one of those faces that looked more serious than it should have at sixteen. Teachers liked him because he spoke well when he felt like speaking. Girls liked the mystery for about ten minutes. Guys mostly tolerated him because he was around and occasionally funny. The problem was that nothing about TJ’s personality stayed still for very long. He could be charming one hour and radiate such awful contempt the next that it made your skin tighten.

I know that sounds dramatic. It *is* dramatic. But if you’d met him, you’d understand. There are people who make everyone around them feel smaller just by deciding to focus. TJ had that gift. You always felt, at least a little, like prey.

Things started going bad in sophomore year after our friend group got bigger. We had this loose little cluster of kids who orbited one another through class, lunch, and weekends: me, Danny, Melissa, Rachel, two different Kyles, occasionally my then-girlfriend Erin, and whoever else happened to be around. TJ slipped in and out of that group like he had every right to. Nobody voted on it. He just appeared and stayed.

At first, the weirdness felt manageable. Little things. He’d know private details nobody remembered telling him. He’d show up places uninvited and laugh it off when we looked surprised. Once, Melissa made an offhand joke at lunch about wanting a blue lighter because hers kept disappearing. Two days later TJ handed her one in homeroom and said, “*Problem solved.*” She asked where he got it. He said, “*Your kitchen drawer.*” Then he smiled because he thought it was funny. We all laughed too, because high school trains you to turn discomfort into a punchline if you want to survive.

But the behavior escalated.

He started calling girls from blocked numbers late at night and breathing into the phone until they hung up. When confronted, he’d act offended and hurt that anyone would even think of him. He left notes in lockers. Not love notes. More like little riddles or observations that made it clear he’d been paying attention from too close. Erin got one after she told him to stop staring at her in chemistry. *Green sweater. Third period. Don’t wear it if you don’t want to be remembered.* She showed it to me in the hallway with shaking hands. The paper smelled faintly like bleach.

We went to the vice principal together. He asked all the usual questions: Did anyone *see* TJ place the note? Had he made any direct threats? Did Erin maybe have other boys bothering her too? It was that same dance adults do when a problem is still small enough to doubt and therefore easier to ignore. The school pulled TJ into the office. He came out twenty minutes later grinning like he’d been complimented.

“*Guess they like my handwriting,*” he told me on the way to sixth period.

I shoved him into a locker. Hard. He only laughed.

That should have been the moment I cut him off completely. It wasn’t. Nobody really did. Again, I wish I had some noble explanation, but the truth is that we were kids. We wanted to believe the problem would get bored and wander off. We wanted to believe adults would step in before things got truly dangerous. Most of all, I think we wanted to believe the dark little current running through TJ was all an act. A style. A need for attention. Anything smaller than what it turned out to be.

The first time I saw the mask slip was at Danny’s house one Friday night in late October. His parents had gone to Atlantic City for the weekend, so naturally fifteen half-drunk teenagers decided the best use of the empty basement was to turn it into a social experiment fueled by cheap beer and somebody’s older brother’s stolen vodka. I was down there with Erin and a bunch of the usual faces. Music loud. Lights low. The whole suburban circus. TJ arrived around ten without anyone remembering inviting him.

He didn’t drink much. That stood out. He just watched everybody else do it.

At one point, Melissa and Rachel started teasing one of the Kyles about a crush. Normal party nonsense. TJ sat on the arm of the couch and watched Melissa laugh. Really watched her. The expression on his face changed so subtly that I don’t think anyone else caught it. One second he looked bored. The next he looked furious. Not at anything specific. At *joy.* At the fact that everyone around him seemed to know how to have it.

He stood up and walked into the kitchen without a word.

About five minutes later we heard glass break upstairs.

The music cut. Everyone froze. Danny and I went up first, figuring one of the idiots had dropped a bottle. We found TJ standing perfectly still in the kitchen surrounded by shattered glass and tomato sauce. A full lasagna dish had hit the floor. Danny’s mother’s best casserole tray. Red sauce and noodles all over the tile. TJ’s hands were clenched at his sides so tight his knuckles looked bloodless.

“Dude,” Danny said, “what the hell?”

TJ looked at the mess and then at us like he had just woken up somewhere strange. “*It slipped.*”

“You weren’t even eating.”

“*I said it slipped.*”

Something in his voice made me take a step back. It wasn’t volume. He barely raised it. It was the total absence of shame. He didn’t care that he had been caught lying. Didn’t care that he was standing in the middle of somebody else’s home at a party he invited himself to, having just smashed a family heirloom for no clear reason. There was no embarrassment in him at all. Just annoyance that he had to keep pretending.

Danny told him to leave. TJ stared at him for a long second and then smiled. “*Sure.*” He looked at me on the way out. “*You’re smart. You should stop bringing her around people like this.*”

I knew immediately he meant Erin.

The next Monday, our guidance counselor pulled three of us out of class separately: me, Danny, and Melissa. We got the same careful questions from three different adults about whether we thought TJ might be struggling at home. Whether he had ever talked about hurting himself. Whether he’d seemed *fixated* on anyone. That last word stood out because, by then, we all knew exactly who he was fixated on.

Rachel.

Rachel was the kind of girl everybody noticed in high school because she made it look easy. Smart without trying too hard, pretty without the whole performance some people weaponize, funny enough to fit anywhere. She had dated one of the Kyles briefly the year before and moved through life with the kind of casual confidence that made insecure people itch. TJ had tried to attach himself to her once freshman year. She cut it off fast, politely at first, then less politely when he refused to hear it.

At some point during sophomore year, that rejection calcified into something else.

He started collecting things. I know how that sounds. I wish I meant it metaphorically. But Rachel found a little pile of her stuff hidden behind the radiator in the theater hallway: a scrunchie, two pens, a photocopied math worksheet with her name on it, and one of those tiny wallet photos from freshman orientation. Nobody could prove TJ put it there. Nobody needed to.

She stopped staying after school. Her parents started picking her up at the curb instead of letting her walk home with us. She laughed about it in public because sometimes girls are forced to make predators feel manageable just to get through the day. In private, she cried in Erin’s car and admitted she had started checking under her bed before sleep.

That was around when the animal thing happened.

Rachel’s family had a rabbit. Little white one named Milo that she adored in the way only a sophomore girl can adore a tiny stupid pet. One morning she came to school pale and empty-eyed and did not speak for first period. By lunch, everyone knew. Somebody had gotten into the backyard during the night, opened the hutch, and left Milo hanging from the fence by a strip of blue ribbon.

Rachel threw up in the guidance office. The cops came. Her father called the school demanding names. TJ spent the day in class looking almost luminous with calm. He even asked me in English if Rachel was alright.

“Go fuck yourself,” I told him.

He tilted his head. “*That seems disproportionate.*”

There are moments from that year I still replay and try to assign meaning to. Why didn’t I hit him right there? Why didn’t we all? Why didn’t the school expel him after the rabbit? Why didn’t the cops park outside his house? But adults need evidence and teenagers need permission and evil flourishes beautifully in the gap between those two things.

Then winter formal happened.

Rachel didn’t want to go. Her friends convinced her it would be good to be around people, to do something normal. She brought two girlfriends and spent most of the dance near the bleachers under the basketball banners, visibly miserable but trying. I was there with Erin. Danny was there with a girl from another school. Half the grade was there, basically everyone except TJ.

Or so we thought.

Halfway through the night Rachel went to the bathroom and didn’t come back.

At first nobody panicked. Dances are chaos. Lines form. People drift. But after ten minutes Erin went looking. Then Melissa. Then a teacher. Then the principal cut the music.

They found Rachel outside near the faculty parking lot, barefoot in the snow, crying so hard she couldn’t breathe. Somebody had locked her in a maintenance closet off the girls’ bathroom and whispered through the door for nearly fifteen minutes before the janitor happened to pass by and hear her kicking. She told us later she recognized TJ’s voice immediately. He kept saying the same thing over and over.

*I just want to know what you sound like when there’s no one left to impress.*

That line still lives in me.

The school finally suspended him after that. Five days. Five beautiful, pathetic days. When he came back, the administration gave a little speech to faculty about increased vigilance and student safety. They changed nothing that mattered. No escort. No permanent separation. No expulsion. TJ returned to the halls carrying a notebook and a grin.

That was when I started thinking he might kill somebody.

Not as a joke. Not as an exaggeration. As a genuine possibility.

I kept that thought mostly to myself because what kind of sixteen-year-old says that out loud without sounding dramatic? But I know I wasn’t the only one. Erin admitted years later that she began checking the local paper every morning expecting to see one of our names. Rachel transferred schools before junior year and never looked back. Danny’s parents banned TJ from the house. Melissa started carrying pepper spray in her backpack. Little by little, everybody adjusted around the problem instead of solving it.

Then spring came. Then summer. Then junior year. TJ disappeared for a while after another “family issue” took him out of state. By senior year he was mostly a ghost people referenced in tense tones and cautionary stories to younger siblings. I thought maybe life had moved on. I thought maybe he’d burned out or gotten locked up or swallowed by some other scene far away from us.

Then last week, my phone buzzed with a news alert about a woman found dead in Monmouth County after reporting a stalker with a blocked number.

And that little voice in my head came right back.

What if?

I’m posting this because I made the mistake of Googling TJ out of equal parts fear and curiosity. I found almost nothing recent. But I did find a property record tied to his family name less than twenty minutes from where I live now. Same county. Same goddamn state.

So if anyone from central Jersey remembers the psycho from sophomore year, and if any of this rings a bell, I’d really like to know one thing.

Did he ever stop?

Chapter 2

Thank you everyone for your patience.

[If you haven't already, you may want to start here](http://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/187x5v/the_true_story_of_the_psycho_from_sophomore_year/)

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I stood there in utter disbelief, staring at TJ for what must have been a full minute. He didn't say a word. There was a glassy look in his eyes, one of cold indifference. He looked down at me from the porch like I was a mouse caught in his trap.

Finally, I stepped forward. Cautiously, I watched his reflection dance in the security door. I looked for signs of movement in the house. I held my phone at the ready. But it really was just him. He looked older. Much older. The sharp boyish angles of sophomore year had hardened into something gaunt and almost skeletal. His hairline had retreated a bit. New lines cut into his face. But the eyes hadn't changed. Those awful, patient eyes remained exactly the same.

“*You look terrible,*” he said.

There’s a strange thing that happens when a fear from your youth suddenly steps back into your life. All the adult years in between disappear. I was thirty-two years old standing on that walkway, but my body felt sixteen again. My pulse pounded. My mouth dried up. My brain started reaching wildly for exits.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

He smiled a little. “*You came here.*”

He had me there.

The house itself sat at the end of a dead little road cut between newer development and a strip of neglected woods. I’d found the address through a property record tied to his mother’s maiden name. The place looked mostly abandoned from the outside. Weeds choked the front walk. One upstairs window had been boarded. The mailbox hung open and empty. I had expected to maybe knock once, confirm nobody lived there, and leave feeling silly. Instead I found the nightmare itself waiting on the porch like he had known the exact minute I’d arrive.

I should have left right then. I know that. But all those years of unfinished dread and teenage helplessness fused into something uglier. Anger, maybe. Curiosity. Some stupid need to finally confront the thing that had hovered over all our lives. So instead of getting back in my car like a sane man, I climbed the last step and looked TJ straight in the face.

“Did you kill that woman?”

He laughed softly. “*You drove all this way to ask me about someone you don't know?*”

“Answer the question.”

“*No.*” He paused. “*Not her.*”

There are sentences that seem to enter the body through the skin rather than the ears. That was one of them. He watched it hit me. He enjoyed the hit. I took an involuntary step backward and my heel caught the top stair.

“Relax,” he said. “*If I wanted to hurt you, I would have invited you in.*”

The front door behind him stood open a crack. Cold, stale air breathed out from the house. Something sweet and rotten lurked beneath it. My mind returned at once to Rachel’s rabbit. The maintenance closet. Erin’s note. Every little sign that we had all failed to take seriously enough.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

He shrugged. “*Around. Places that don't ask as many questions.*”

It occurred to me then that I still had my phone. I could have called the cops. I could have started recording. I could have done any number of adult, rational things. Instead I kept talking to him like the dumbest man alive.

“Why me?”

That finally made him tilt his head with genuine interest. “*Because you came back.*” He leaned one shoulder against the door frame. “*Most people don't. Most people are lucky enough to blur me over time. But not you. You kept me. I always wondered what that felt like from your side.*”

I should tell you that TJ had always spoken that way. Calm. Clinical. Like a researcher discussing rot in a petri dish. As kids, that tone made adults underestimate him because he never sounded wild. He sounded thoughtful. Reasonable, even. It was the content that betrayed him, the little fissures in the mask. They widened now.

“People still talk about you,” I said.

“*Do they?*”

“Rachel remembers. Erin remembers. Melissa, Danny, all of us.”

Something dark crossed his face at Rachel’s name. Not guilt. Offense.

“*Rachel performed fear very well,*” he said.

My fists clenched without permission. “You locked her in a closet.”

“*Temporarily.*” He smiled again. “*She always needed an audience.*”

I don’t remember deciding to swing. I only remember the sharp crack of my fist against his jaw and the immediate agony in my hand. TJ staggered once, more from surprise than force. For a hopeful second I thought maybe adulthood had turned him fragile. Then he straightened and laughed.

Actually laughed.

“*There he is,*” he said. “*I was starting to think you got boring.*”

He hit me once in the stomach and drove every bit of air from my lungs. I folded. He grabbed the back of my neck and shoved me through the front door.

The house was worse inside.

No furniture in the living room except a folding chair and a card table covered in newspaper clippings. The walls were stained yellow with age and neglect. The smell I’d caught outside came from somewhere deeper in the house. Not exactly decomposition. More like spoiled meat left near a heater too long. Every window had been covered from inside with blankets or foil except one narrow strip in the kitchen that let in a little late afternoon light.

TJ kicked the door shut behind us and locked it.

“Get up,” he said.

I did, mostly because I had no choice.

The table drew my eye next. Clippings from years of local crimes. Missing women. Break-ins. Stalking complaints. Obituaries. Some had circles or notes in the margins. One had Rachel’s name handwritten across the top even though the article itself had nothing to do with her. Beside it sat a stack of old school photos and printouts from social media. Mine was near the top. Erin. Melissa. Danny. Rachel. So many faces from sophomore year peered up at me from the cheap table like evidence collected by a patient little spider.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

TJ followed my gaze. “*Memory is a hobby.*”

“You’re sick.”

He shrugged. “*I was. Then I got organized.*”

The police would later ask why I didn’t run when I saw the table. That's the sort of question only makes sense to people who haven’t been in a room with their oldest fear suddenly breathing inches away. I did run, just not then. First I made the second stupid decision of the day.

I looked toward the hall where the smell was strongest and asked, “Who else is here?”

TJ’s expression changed. The answer mattered to him.

“*No one you know,*” he said.

That was enough.

I bolted for the kitchen and grabbed the biggest thing I saw, which turned out to be a rusted fire poker propped beside the old radiator. TJ lunged after me. I swung wild and clipped his shoulder. He cursed. I swung again and this time caught the side of his head hard enough to open skin. He stumbled into the counter, leaving a long wet smear there, and I took off toward the back of the house.

The hallway was narrow and dark. Three doors on the left, one at the end. The smell got unbearable by the second door. I heard movement from behind it. Not footsteps. More like dragging.

Then came a sound I’ll never really be rid of.

A woman trying to scream through too little mouth.

I hit the door with my shoulder. It gave on the second try.

The room beyond had once been a den. Somebody had stripped the carpet. Plastic sheeting covered the floor. A cot sat against one wall. Beside it, chained to an exposed pipe, was a woman maybe in her late twenties wearing one sock and a hospital gown under a winter coat. Bruises covered her face. Duct tape hung loose around one wrist where she’d apparently chewed through part of it. Her mouth was free, but one side of her jaw drooped strangely, maybe broken. She looked at me with the kind of frantic disbelief that only appears when rescue arrives from the least believable place possible.

“Help me,” she croaked.

Everything after that happened too fast to line up neatly.

TJ hit me from behind. We went down hard. The poker clanged away. He slammed my face into the subfloor once, twice, and told me in this furious little whisper that I had no right to *interrupt the process.* I got an elbow under me, rolled, and drove my knee into him with all the fear in my body. He lost his grip. The woman screamed again. Somewhere in the chaos my hand found the chain lock key hanging from a nail near the pipe. I threw it to her and yelled something incoherent that probably amounted to *run.*

She fumbled it twice. I kept TJ off her by dumb luck more than skill. He was stronger than he looked and mean in a way that made every movement feel premeditated. He didn’t flail. He selected pain. Thumb in the eye. Knuckle in the throat. He bit my shoulder at one point hard enough to tear fabric. Finally the woman got the lock open and staggered past us into the hall.

TJ made the mistake of going after her first.

I grabbed the poker and brought it down across the back of his knee. The sound it made still turns my stomach. He dropped with a howl. I hit him again in the ribs. Then I ran.

The woman had made it halfway to the front door by then. Blood marked the wall where she’d steadied herself. I got the deadbolt, got the chain, got the outer door open, and almost laughed from the wild relief of seeing daylight. Then TJ’s voice came from the hall behind us.

“*If you leave now, she dies before they find her.*”

I looked back.

He hadn’t gotten up. He had dragged himself to the card table instead. One hand rested calmly on a cordless phone. The other held a remote of some kind.

“*You noticed the smell,*” he said. “*You just didn’t ask enough questions.*”

The woman beside me started crying. “Please, please, no—”

There are moments in life when the whole world narrows down to one impossible choice. I knew what he meant before he said it. There was someone else in that house. Maybe more than one. Something rigged. Something hidden. I saw it in the relaxed confidence on his face. In the way he had stopped trying to physically keep us there. He no longer needed to.

Then the cordless phone rang.

Not the front yard. Not my cell. The phone in TJ’s hand. He looked at it, smiled, and answered.

“*Yes?*” He listened. “*No, I think this one finally understands consequences.*” He listened some more and then looked at me with open delight. “*It’s for you.*”

I don’t know what demon compelled me, but I stepped back inside and took the phone.

Rachel’s voice said, “*He still keeps trophies in the freezer.*”

Then the line went dead.

I dropped the phone and kicked the kitchen freezer open so hard the door nearly came off. Inside, beneath bags of ice and cheap frozen dinners, sat three labeled gallon bags.

I won’t describe them in detail.

I don’t need to.

You already know the cops found enough there to turn the whole house into a countywide circus for two straight weeks.

They arrested TJ in the den where I left him with a shattered knee and blood all down his shirt. He never resisted. Never shouted. Never denied anything. He only kept asking which one of us answered the phone.

The woman survived. Barely. She’d been taken from a rest stop thirty miles away two nights earlier after calling roadside assistance from a pay phone when her car broke down. That detail made every officer in the room go a little pale. Pay phone. Blocked numbers. Voices. The patterns from high school suddenly looked less like a psycho teenager acting out and more like rehearsal.

TJ has been in custody since.

The reason I’m posting again now is because yesterday I got a call from the county prosecutor’s office asking if I’d be willing to testify to his behavior back in sophomore year. Apparently he’s started giving interviews from jail. Apparently he wants people to know he was *misunderstood.* Apparently he claims the phone calls helped him *find the right girls.*

I asked the prosecutor what phone calls he meant.

She told me that during booking, TJ insisted on one special request before he would speak to anyone else.

He wanted access to a landline.

So no, to answer my own question from the first post, he never stopped.

He just got better at waiting.