I don’t like being sneaky. It makes me feel bad but I know my mom would freak out if she found out I was talking to a stranger online. My mom is so happy that I actually have two friends that she has stopped asking me a thousand questions about school and who I sit by at lunch. She even lets me go over to Jordyn’s house once in a while, but I can’t go to the bar and only if Jordyn’s grandma is there.

She still hasn’t let me go over to Violet’s house. When I ask her why, she just makes a dumb excuse even though we both know it’s because of the neighborhood that Violet lives in and the fact that Violet’s mom hasn’t lived here for a hundred years.

My mom wouldn’t be so happy if she knew how Jordyn has been acting toward me lately. Jordyn has been so impatient. Everything I do is stupid or dumb or I’m being a baby. I never know what she’s going to be like when I get to school. Honestly, it’s exhausting.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night because I suddenly remembered that I didn’t erase the history on the computer. If my mom or dad checked, they would know that I’ve been on the DarkestDoor website and I’d be dead and grounded from the computer forever and I’d never be able to talk to JW again. I had to sneak past my mom and dad’s room and Kendall’s room and get downstairs to the computer room and I swear the floor creaked with every step I took.

It only took me a few seconds to clear the computer’s history but then I started thinking about what Joseph said about looking into what happened to Rachel Farmer. First, I went to Mr. Dover’s class website where he lists all the homework assignments. If someone walked in on me I could at least say that I had forgotten to do an assignment and was working on it because it was due the next day.

I even started writing an email to Mr. Dover with a question about the bibliography we had to write for our project so I could show my mom or dad if they walked in.

Then I opened another window and typed “Rachel Farmer” in the search bar. A ton of results popped up, so I added “Pitch, Iowa” and “1991” and hit Return. That narrowed the results down to just a few pages so I clicked on the first link that brought up a newspaper article about Rachel. It said that Rachel disappeared one evening after an argument with her mom. The police thought she had run away and was asking anyone with information to contact them.