The first time I came across the letters BS in Vera’s journal, I thought it stood for bullshit. I’d never heard her swear, but by age fifteen I imagined the arsenal of swear words at her disposal. But only after I pored over the entries and dissected them did I realize BS was a person, a friend in the beginning, an enemy by the end. Was BS capable of hurting Vera? At first glance it seemed unlikely. The more I rearranged and analyzed the parts, the more likely it became.

Top priority: find out who BS is.

Based on the sheer number of mentions of this elusive BS, clearly it was someone important in Vera’s life. BS showed up on almost every page toward the end. I thought I had known all of Vera’s school friends, but apparently not. Someone not from school? And if not, where had they met?

It couldn’t be someone online. She knew better. I had jackhammered the perils of catfishing into her skull from the day we handed Vera her cell phone: be alert, be wary, trust no one. That fifteen-year-old girl you met on Snapchat who plays the clarinet, loves biology, and attends private school? In reality she’s a fifty-year-old orthodontist who lives in his mother’s basement and collects used retainers from his victims. Don’t trust anyone to be who they say they are, I repeated again and again.

Ironically, in all the times I flashed this Warning: Danger Ahead at her, I never once considered myself the danger. But I was not the good person I thought I was. And Vera had found that out.

For weeks I scoured social media, wondering where my caring daughter was within the apathetic online persona she had created, and how BS fit into her life. I had lost track of the various apps that Vera used, and without her phone, I’d never be able to find out. Instagram. Snapchat. TikTok. The ones I did know about weren’t helpful. There were just too many variables to narrow my search down to two initials. That wasn’t including the apps I didn’t know about. With new ones hitting the market every day, I had no idea what was in with the cool kids. The fact that I used that old-lady phrasing—what’s in with the cool kids—showed just how little I knew about the modern teen or their social media hideouts.

School was the first logical place I could imagine Vera befriending someone, so I’d start by digging into her latest yearbook. I shivered at the thought of going into the room where we kept them. The creepy library, with its original built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcase that wrapped the entire way around the room. It could have been magical, if not for the past entombed in that room.