So here's what just happened.

I guess I might seem calm, but only because I'm typing this out so slowly. Inside, though, I feel like I'm being slowly dismantled.

I don't know if I'll ever touch Kyle again, or hear his voice in my ear, or make plans with him, or laugh with him, or fall to sleep in his arms.

A few minutes ago, the cop burst into the room. He just suddenly flung the door open. He didn't even tell me to cuff myself. He was disheveled; he seemed to have just woken up, and it was pretty clear that he'd accidentally fallen asleep last night without having meant to let Kyle stay in my room for so long.

So he was already generally irritated and pissed off. Then he saw that the tub was full—I'd forgotten to drain it—and he noticed that Kyle was clean and no longer smelling of gasoline. He seemed to have deduced right away that we'd been in the bath together. To make matters worse, I'd crawled into the bed to lay beside Kyle while he slept. When the cop had burst in, we were under the covers together.

"You disgust me," the cop said, glaring at me.

He grabbed Kyle by the wrist, wrenching him awake, and with a single heave pulled him out of the room. Kyle tried to fight back, but after suffering so badly from hypothermia, he was too weak. I tried to leap after him, but my legs got tangled in the duvet, and my balance is so shaky anyway that I fell to the floor.

Kyle called out to me, but the cop tried to cover his mouth. Kyle said something through the cop's hand. It sounded something like, "sustenance," but that didn't make any sense, and his voice was so muffled I couldn't make anything else out.

Then the cop pulled Kyle out of the room, slammed the door closed, locked it, and left me alone in silence. For a brief moment, I felt fleetingly thankful that the cop hadn't bothered to use the fishing line around Kyle's neck this time.

Then, a minute later, that faint sense of relief collapsed when I heard the house's front door swing open and bang against the porch wall.

The cop dragged Kyle, naked once again, across the driveway. He'd already cuffed one of Kyle's wrists, and Kyle tried to stand, but he couldn't, and as the cop dragged him, Kyle's flailing legs left a rough trail in the pristine snow. The snow was coming down so heavily that by the time the cop dragged Kyle all the way to the pine tree and latched him to it, I could barely see him at all.

I couldn't believe the cop was really doing this. But if the freezing rain hadn't stopped him last night, why would the snowfall stop him now? He was furious, and beyond all reason.

The cop marched up and stood below my window.

"Now that I know just how fast you can write," he said evenly, "lets get this over with. No more stalling. You know how this works, Bailey. Part 13. Sooner the better. Kyle's waiting."

"You'll kill him," I screamed. "You're insane! It's freaking snowing!"

"He'll live." The cop stepped inside and slammed the door.

I tried to call out to Kyle, but the snow in the air was so thick that it muted my voice as if I were trying to yell through a thick wall of styrofoam. If Kyle was trying to say anything to me, I couldn't hear him, either.

I sat at the computer. I hurried to open a new post, my hands shaking and feeling like wooden spoons.

I sobbed.

I didn't write anything. I couldn't. It was futile. Now that my symptoms were coming on strong, and I could barely open my hands, there was no way I'd be able to type half as fast as I did last night. The cop had insisted that Kyle would live, but I knew he was wrong. There was no way that Kyle would survive in this kind of weather for even a couple of hours, especially now that he was only just recovering from last night's bout of severe hypothermia.

The cop had given me an impossible task. In the time it would take me to write a full part, Kyle would die.

It was as simple as that.

I know you're wondering why I'm spending so much time posting this update while Kyle's outside freezing.

Well, here's why.

It's because I've made a major decision. Probably the most difficult of my life.

I'm not going to write Part 13. Not like this, anyway. Not today.

I'm going to do something else instead.

See, the thing is, I finally realized what Kyle was trying to say to me when the cop had dragged him out of the room.

I'd thought it had sounded like "sustenance." But of course that wasn't what he'd said. After the cop had stormed back inside, leaving Kyle to freeze, I realized what he must have said.

Mrs. Terrence.

She was the science teacher who Kyle used to TA for when I was a student in her class, just before I'd had to start staying home from school. In was actually in that class that Kyle and I had kind of made a connection. Mrs. Terrence was super popular because she used to do these kind of cheesy, elaborate "mythbuster" experiments. Her most famous was one where she used this voltage detector thing to prove that if you dropped a hair dryer into a bathtub while you were in the water, you would definitely die. Everybody thought it was awesome that she actually dropped a running hair dryer into a basin of water, but the point was that water could actually conduct a lethal amount of electricity.

I'm not sure what Kyle had tried to say to me besides "Mrs. Terrence," but obviously he was reminding me of her class for a reason.

He knew that he'd die out in the snow well before I could possibly finish Part 13. He also knew that one of the few things I had access to from my room was a bathtub.

We had one hope. One hope, and one hope only: I would have to figure out a way to kill the cop.

I didn't let myself think about the implications of what that meant—to actually end a human being's life. I just acted as quickly as possible.

My major practical problem was that I didn't have a hair dryer, or a radio, or anything else that would plug into the one outlet by the tub. The only piece of electronic equipment I had was this computer screen I'm typing on now, but its power cord runs out through the hole in the wall. I tried to pull it out, but it wouldn't budge. If I'd pulled any harder, in fact, I would have had to break it.

I tried not to let myself get too discouraged by this, because I was lucky to have a lot going for me. Not only did I have a readily-available bathtub, the cop had actually made it a daily habit to willingly get inside the filled tub.

On top of this, I even had a wall outlet that was positioned on the low baseboard just beside the tub's drain.

I tried to think. What would freaking Mrs. Terrence do? Why hadn't I paid closer attention in her class? All I could think of, really, was that if you put two wires into the water, one going in and one going out, the whole tub and any other metal touching it would carry the current.

I looked at the tub. It was a really old-fashioned bathtub. The whole faucet mechanism was metal . . . and so was the drain.

Using the small metal key ring attached to the handcuffs key as a kind of screwdriver, I removed the single screw that held the wall outlet's faceplate on. I basically had to pinch the key ring between my hands like I was praying or something and twist my whole body just to turn the screw one half a turn. Finally, though, I got the screw out. My whole body was sore and exhausted, but I didn't care, because I was able to pull out like two feet of electrical wiring from the hole in the baseboard before it went tight.

I ripped the outlet piece off the wires. Very carefully, I used my teeth to tear off some of one wire's plastic coating. I figured it was okay to touch one of the wires as long as I wasn't touching the other. Luckily, I was right.

I tied the exposed wire around the metal drain pipe under the tub. Then I bit off the plastic coating from the other wire and tied it around one of the metal pipes that lead toward the faucet.

I stepped back. The wires were totally hidden from the perspective of anyone sitting in the tub.

I honestly have no idea if this will work. 

But if what I think will happen happens, when anyone turns on the water it will make the current pass from the faucet, down the spilling water, into any water that's in the tub, and, finally, to the metal drain. That means that anyone who's actually sitting in the tub when the water turns should get a lethal jolt of electricity.

That's my hope, anyway.

But a lot of things can go wrong, even if I've got all the electrical stuff figured out right.

For this to work, first of all, the cop actually has to stop by for his gross eleven o-clock bathing ritual. I can't really count on this, because for the first time in a long time he actually didn't take a bath in here yesterday. He just put Kyle outside in the rain and didn't return until he brought him back into the room. I'm hoping this means he'll really be ready for his bath today after skipping yesterday, but it could also mean he's just giving up on the whole thing.

And beyond this, he always makes me bathe first. So I have to be super careful not to get in the water when the faucet's running. And, when the cop comes into the bathroom, he can't notice that I've taken apart the outlet behind the tub. And, he actually has to turn the water on when he's sitting in the tub . . . which he's never done before.

But I have a plan for making him do that.

Anyway, it's like ten minutes to eleven now, so I have to go. I can't even see Kyle because the snow's falling so thickly.

If this is my last post, I just want to say that you guys have been amazing. Seriously. Without all of your support through all of this, I don't think I could have made it this far. I wish I could say more to express how truly, truly grateful I am to all of you guys who are following me and reading this story.

But I have to go. The cop could knock on the door any minute now, and I can't leave this post on the screen. Just, sorry, I have to go. . . Bye.