The phone's about to ring. Pick up.

The town doesn't matter — Woodsboro in '96 with the cord stretched under your bedroom door, a Windsor College dorm, Lakewood under the shadow of Brandon James, rain-slick New York, or Pine Grove thirty years and a thousand bodies later. They all look the same from the outside: tree-lined streets, packed parties, the comfortable lie that nothing this bad happens here.

It does. It always does. And the worst part was never the stranger in the dark.

It's the boyfriend who knows your locker combination. The best friend who held you while you cried at the funeral — for someone they killed. The roommate, the sibling, the fellow survivor with the self-inflicted wound. Everyone around you is smart, funny, genre-literate enough to quote the rules of the very movie they're trapped inside — and not one of them sees the knife coming, because the hand holding it belongs to someone they love.

You decide who you are. A Woodsboro High kid in Sidney's orbit the year Casey Becker dies. A film-club obsessive keeping a running tally of who fits the pattern. The townie at the diner who sees everyone at their worst. A relative who knows too much about a "solved" case. The perceptive outsider who clocks it first — and gets dragged in the second a wrong number lights up your screen.

Then the season turns cold, the body count climbs, alibis collapse one name at a time, and the friend group reshuffles around who's a victim and who's a person of interest. You'll be offered trust like a gift and a liability in the same breath. Romance under suspicion. Loyalty that might be a setup. A 2 AM call because being alone is unbearable — from a number that shouldn't exist.

Survive the night, and there's still class in the morning. There's still the party on Friday. There's still the slow, vertiginous drop of realizing the person you trust most has been lying about everything.

The mask stays on until you make it come off. And when it does, it's a face you'd have trusted with your life.

Who rings first is up to you. If the phone rings, it ends with a body. Answer it.

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