I wasn’t able to save Tonya that summer, but I swore I’d work really hard to save other kids who were being ignored and abused. I wasn’t sure how I’d get there at first, but then I watched the Brown family use pastoral ministry to feed people in the neighborhood over the years. They visited sick and shut-in elders and offered resources to teens.

Stacia’s journal made me change my major from social work to the Master of Divinity program. I wanted to help inner-city youth and get resources out to rape victims. I began working with churches that had outreach programs in underserved communities and started to lean into my trauma from childhood.

I started talking about Stacia to my therapist and praying for her during church services. I’d gone through her journal backward and forward and knew enough about the Buchanans to write all their biographies. I read it often. Cried into it. The parts about Tonya were the worst to read. And the entries where Stacia talks about what she did when she ran off into the wild with her sisters and mourns for her brothers, Sweat and Quan, or questions whether she could ever give love to a child, made me cry too. It’s a book of tragedies, tales of that place that I convinced myself I’d forgotten. The words in that journal sprang up, like a pop-up book, each page a three-dimensional telling of events that a twelve-year-old shouldn’t hear about, definitely shouldn’t experience.

According to the journal, Stacia had never entered the system, but rather, moved into a loving home with her brother, his wife, and her younger siblings. Some days, I was happy for her. Other times, I felt like she should’ve suffered for her part in Tonya’s attack. I’ve been challenged over the years by Stacia, my relationship with God a hindrance in my natural inclination to hate her with my entire being.

I held on to that book while I watched Stacia squirm. She didn’t realize she’d given her journal to someone who lived over two thousand miles away. Maybe she figured she’d get it back whenever I returned to the store to confront her, but I planned to process what she’d given me, to think long and hard about what it meant.