Emily shows me her signed permission slip and says, “Tell them they can only film my good side,” and I’m not entirely sure she’s joking.

Two weeks from now, I’ll be followed by a camera crew, and the weirdness of that is starting to sink in.

“My mom took some convincing,” Emily says. “She’s worried I’ll get a stalker.”

“If anyone’s going to get a stalker, it will be Jess,” Hanna says.

“No one’s getting a stalker,” I say, although the thought of it makes me feel cold inside.

I imagine quitting, calling Adrian and saying I’ve changed my mind. But I’ve been doing that all my life—hiding by doing nothing.

It’s my turn to seek.

Chapter 18

Ads for my channel start streaming online, and by the end of the week, my Instagram follower count has gone through the roof.

Below a picture of me, taken specially for the show, it says:

The Eye: Hunting the Magpie Man

Can she catch the killer? Subscribe here to find out.

This is actually happening. It’s what I wanted, but the nerves come anyway. Every image of me on screen, every notification, stings in a way I can’t describe.

I reach for Mom’s bathrobe and search for her smell. It’s long gone but it still helps.

“I’m doing this for you,” I whisper, then I imagine how the others feel.

Ella, Ryan, Lucas, and Sonia have ads of their own. But this is a competition I have to win. Mom’s story is too important to be lost after a month.

I google Ryan’s brother, the one who went into that museum and shot twenty-seven people before blowing himself up. How do you deal with something like that, when someone you love turns out to be a monster?

I search Lucas’s Wikipedia page and watch old clips of his show on YouTube. He looks like every other little kid on TV, and I wonder how much money he made and if once you have a taste of celebrity, you hate the taste of everything else.

Then I Facebook-stalk Ella, and there’s no sign of a boyfriend, and I wonder which part is the lie—the pregnancy or the cause.

And finally I search for Sonia and can’t find her anywhere. She doesn’t have any social media accounts, and she’s nowhere on Google, and I wonder why they chose her.

Chapter 19

The night before we go live, there’s a rehearsal, which seems strange to me, because isn’t this supposed to be spontaneous?

But the director, Danny, who I have never met before, says, “We want your introduction to be perfect. We don’t want anything going wrong in the very first scene.”