“I’m not crazy.” John said to the rabbit. “And I won’t let you, or anyone else, convince me that I am.” He went to his bed, reaching under the mattress with a suspicious glance at the toy rabbit, suddenly feeling watched. He took out the notebook he had hidden there, and sat back on the bed, looking at its black-and-white cover. It was a plain composition notebook, the kind with a little place on the front for your name and class subject. John had left that blank, and now he traced the empty lines with his finger, not really wanting to open the book that had sat, untouched, beneath his mattress for nearly three months now.

At last he sighed and opened to the first page.

“I’m not crazy,” he spoke to the rabbit again. “I know what I saw.”

Charlie. He filled up the first page with nothing but facts and statistics, of which he knew embarrassingly few, he realized. He’d known Charlie’s father, but not her mother. Her brother was still a mystery. He didn’t even know if she’d been born in New Harmony, or if there was some other town before Fredbear’s, the diner they had discovered that first time they all returned to Freddy’s. He had painstakingly written out their shared history: childhood in Hurricane, then the tragedy at Freddy’s, then her father’s suicide. She had moved in with her aunt Jen after that. As he wrote that down, John realized that he had never known where Charlie and Jen lived. Close enough to Hurricane that she had driven rather than flown there for the dedication of Michael’s memorial scholarship, nearly two years ago, but it seemed odd that she had never even mentioned the name of the town where she now—and then—lived.