Spoilers are not tagged on the Tearjerker page - please proceed with caution.
- Chess and Farrah's murders.
- Farrah resolves to give up her reliance on alcohol just before Riley kills her.
- Clark's murder is also horrible - particularly because it was entirely accidental and came about only because Reese panicked.
- Chess' backstory - she was supposed to go to the Olympics until she hurt her knee and became addicted to painkillers whilst she recovered. Then she dropped Farrah during the last competition and the team went viral. She's so ashamed of struggling to come off the painkillers that she can't even be honest with Kate, her best friend, about the fact that she's struggling.
- FARRAH. She struggles with alcohol, wants to be a good sister but can't seem to make her step-sister see her as more than a nuisance, seems to be hated by basically every member of the team, and when she manages to connect with Reese an Innocently Insensitive comment dropped entirely without malice causes her to leave her. The horrible thing is that - underneath her problems - she really does seem like a sweet Nice Girl.
- All of Before the Breakdown - Chess flat-out says that she hates herself and that she doesn't believe she can get better. Farrah admits to believing herself to be a "stupid, loser girl".
- The other girls also chime in with the pressures they face - everything from testing well, to being self-conscious about their weight.
- Just everything about Kate.
- She's clearly got some abandonment issues to deal with and isn't handling the idea of Chess going away to college well.
- When she finds out Chess is taking painkillers again, she tells her that she had one person left who believed in her (implying that she no longer does), and storms inside. This is the last time they speak and Chess is murdered one musical number later. Made worse by the fact that Chess had told her earlier in the scene that she had to believe her if she said she was fine and the complete look of betrayal on Kate's face when she finds out this was a lie.
- She's the one who finds Chess' body and - when the others come out, having heard her scream - she begs them to get help until Cairo points out that Chess is already dead.
- After Chess is murdered, Kate is angry and determined that whoever killed her won't get away with it and the team won't just move on like nothing has happened. She's clearly struggling a lot.
- During Defense, Cairo heavily implies that she's the person who looks the most suspicious and that the murders would get pinned on her. Of all the girls, she's the most upset in Act II about them framing Mattie. She admits she went along with it because her best friend had just been killed and she was scared.
- At least three times, somebody accuses her of the murders: just before Defense, when Cairo points out that she was fighting with Chess all night, was the last person to see her, and had a fight with Farrah; in IDK, when Cairo suggests she and Chess had a lover's spat; then again in IDK when Annleigh accuses her of killing Chess to stop her from leaving. That's three times she gets accused of murdering her own best friend.
- When Clark and Farrah are found together, it is suggested to Annleigh that he was cheating on her with Farrah. Specifically, that he was cheating on her because Annleigh wanted to wait until marriage. This isn't true, but Reese, who was there and knows that, doesn't correct the assumption because she's scared of the consequences.
- Annleigh reacts to the deaths of Farrah and Clark by trying to convince herself that they deserved what they got, even though she can't quite seem to bring herself to believe it.
- Move On - Kate and Annleigh sing about how everyone is telling them they need to move on whilst the ghosts of their loved ones urge them to do so. The song covers feelings of futility, denial, and finally acceptance that they have to move forwards carrying the memories of those they lost with them.
- Mattie getting framed for the murders and sent to juvie. Made worse by the fact that Cairo had gotten her drunk earlier in the evening and it was only because she was blacked out that she was unable to say definitively that she hadn't committed the murders.
- How desperate Cairo is to prove to Riley that she needs her - to the point of framing Mattie for murder and convincing all her terrified teammates to go along with it.
- And let's not forget that Cairo was scared too. At the end, Riley outright tells her that her suggestion that they frame Mattie helped her get away with her crimes. Cairo admits that she will be regretting that for the rest of her life.
- Just the fact that the girls are all considered accessories to the murders of their friends - including Kate in Chess' murder and Annleigh in Clark and Farrah's. At the end of the day, it was a bad decision by a group of terrified teenagers - Cairo included - and it will follow them for the rest of their lives.
- Reese is a phenomenal dancer and only seems to have been rejected as a cheerleader because of her weight, despite her desperation to make it onto the team. She's also been bullied since second grade.
- Eva just wants to have a better education, and instead, she gets thrown into a murder mystery and even, at one point, accused of murder.
