Leaving the music room and the unhappy thoughts behind, (or trying to at least!), I finished walking down the hall. It made a left-hand turn and, oh boy, it was finally at an end! These freaking halls were so long! There was a dresser with a lamp on it that I flicked on almost automatically and a door at the end of the hallway.

First, I tried the door.

Locked?! You've got to be kidding me!

I didn't know where it led, but its placement made me think of a basement. Where else would this lead? Well, a closet, I guess. The fact of the matter was, I wasn't finding out without a key. And, of course, the house key didn't work. Trying not to get into the bad habit of sighing in frustration all the time, I began to turn back to the dresser, but then paused as I saw a wastebasket tucked away in the corner. It had a balled up piece of paper in it.

Well, why not?

My heart skipped a beat when I read it.

Katie,

Please, whatever you've found,
don't tell mom and dad.
The attic

It was all scribbled out. Sam had written this...maybe even a few hours ago. Okay, something had to be behind this door. I needed to find a key...but I was at a dead end! At least, as far as I could tell, there was nowhere left for me to go...on the first floor. Ugh, I didn't want to go back upstairs. It was even creepier up there for some reason.

I turned back and then decided to check out the dresser and move on. I found another note from Sam on top of it, also written tonight, asking me to please tell our parents sorry for the missing stuff. Missing stuff? I suddenly thought of the SNES attachments. Well, it was certainly missing. Why the heck would she take an SNES without the attachments?

I shuffled through the drawers and found a big bonus in the bottom one. First, there was some writing between Sam and this other girl, who was apparently named Lonnie. Huh, Lonnie Desoto. Interesting name. Basically, Sam was asking this girl if she wanted to come check out the mansion and apparently Lonnie was totally down for it. She'd even done a little Street Fighter drawing of two hands throwing a Hadoken…

Okay, yeah, so maybe I was into Street Fighter, too. So sue me.

More importantly, I found another journal. Jackpot!

Oct. 3, 1994

"Best-Laid Plans"

So you know what they say about the best-laid plans of
mice and men. Yeah, turns out it applies to Street
Fighter, too. At least, I worked up the courage to walk
into the 7-11 and ask for a turn, but all that practice at
home did not exactly translate in the wild.

So after I was finished getting my butt kicked, I
followed them outside while they smoked, and that
was when SHE asked me if I was "that Psycho House
girl." But then, she said she's always wanted to see the
Psycho House.

Her name's Lonnie. She's coming over tomorrow.

That made me happy, at least. Sam had definitely made a friend. Based on what I'd read, this Lonnie girl definitely sounded up Sam's alley. Dressing punk, smoking, playing Street Fighter...yep, Sam Friend Material to be sure.

Tucking the journal away in my pocket, I began making my way back through the house. This time, when I got up to the second story landing, I flipped on a little lamp perched on a dresser there. Searching it over, I only found one thing...but it was cool!

It was a newspaper clipping about a controlled burn happening at Flintlock National Park and apparently mom was the one running the show! I thought that was really neat and grinned as I read over it.

Moving back into the hallway, I glanced at the endtable where I'd found mom's planner. I hadn't noticed it the first time, but there was a drawer there. Figuring I might as well be thorough, I opened it and rooted around. All I found was a personnel transfer form. I guess they were sending someone else over to help with the burn way back then and mom was supposed to judge them. Oh man, I felt bad for whoever it was.

Mom did not judge lightly.

She had very high standards.

It was part of why she and Sam clashed so often. I closed the drawer and moved on, setting my sights on a bookshelf pushed up against the left side of the hall. Nothing on it but books, although...I found something in a little cabinet beneath it. A cassette tape case with Bratmobile, Pottymouth and For Sam scrawled on it.

Folded up inside the empty cassette case, I found another journal.

I was on a hot streak!

Oct. 4, 1994

"Hanging Out With Girls"

It's weird hanging out with girls. Daniel was around
ever since I was little, and other girls...I dunno. But
being around Lonnie is like...instantly just right. I gave
her the grand Psycho House tour, and took my revenge
on Super Nintendo, and it was like, I dunno, I finally
found someone I feel normal around.

I drove her home and she gave me this tape and said
"you have GOT to listen to this." I haven't stopped
playing it since.

I felt a big smile on my lips. Although Sam seemed to do okay making friends, she never really seemed to make like...friend friends. Like best friends, you know? Friends you told secrets to and spent the night with and hung out like all the time with. It sounded like Sam had finally found this friend. But that smile was replaced slowly by a frown. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like that mysterious voice on the answering machine...was Lonnie. Who else would be calling up, crying, begging for Sam?

I was beginning to get a clearer view of the picture...but I was still missing a lot. I needed more pieces of the puzzle.

This time, I walked up to Sam's room with the full intent to search it. Pushing open the door, I looked around for a light switch-button. When I didn't find one, I glanced up and saw that, what the heck?!, Sam's room didn't come with an overhead light! Well, no way I could use this room. Luckily, there was a floor lamp right next to me, and I clicked it on. Sam's TV was on, showing the multicolored bars of a lost signal.

Sam's room was packed, a potential treasure trove.

The wall to my right was taken up by a dresser, a TV stand, and a bookshelf/sliding door cabinet combination. Dead ahead was a closet door, partially open, sporting a colorful poster of some kind. Then, for some reason, she had a locker, right next to the closet door. Further into the room, pushed up against a slanting wall with two windows, was her bed. Opposite that, back around the door I'd pushed open to get in here, was her workstation: a desk and shelves.

Sam's room was a mess.

I decided to start with the dresser. Nothing there but a cassette for the cassette player perched atop the dresser and a lot of clothes. I moved on to the TV stand, finding a piece of paper tucked up beneath it. I thought it might be something cool, but it just turned out to be Chun Li moves. The only interesting things were more cables that were supposed to be plugged into an SNES and an SNES game called Adventurous: The Cat – Returns.

That just left the cabinet-shelf. There were just a bunch of books on the bottom, but slapped up over the sliding doors were two of those whacky designs you're suppose to go cross-eyed at and you'll see something. I did and, after a little while, managed to see something for both of them. The one on the bottom just went kind of 3D, but the one on top had a heart hidden in the middle. Huh. There were just two SNES cartridges left in the vast empty space behind the sliding doors. Nothing else at all. I studied them.

The first one was a top-down space shooter I vaguely remembered called Super Spitfire. Cause, of course, almost like everything on the SNES was called Super. The other one was a lot more memorable. It was a kind of Zelda clone, an adventure game called Journey of Crystal. I'd remembered liking it but Sam had totally obsessed over it back when we were in our early teens. She played it only about a million times. It was about a woman warrior, (super rare, it seemed, almost all the video games I came across were about guys), on an adventure to rescue her father in a dangerous land of fantastic creatures and dark magic.

If Sam was really gone...why hadn't she taken it?

I put them back and moved on to the closet. The poster she'd put up was of a music-fest from last year where a bunch of bands I didn't recognize were playing. It was called Sonic Boom '94. Definitely the kind of thing Sam would go to. Poking around the boxes and piles of stuff on the floor, I found a few interesting things. The first was a board game called Got Your Number! It looked like a knock-off of that other game, Dream Phone, they released a few years ago. I also found Sam's old binder from like fourth grade.

It had a penguin in a Hawaiian shirt and it was so bright and colorful. I'd always wondered why she'd had it then, now I wondered why she'd kept it.

Then I found something really interesting.

It was a few pages of typed text, stapled together, hidden inside of a cabinet at the back of the closet. It was a rewrite of her old second grade story, and it was...actually pretty good. She must have written this very recently. It was about three pages worth of text featuring Captain Allegra and her daring First Mate, trying to infiltrate some old king's labyrinth. It ended on a cliffhanger. It was...kind of compelling.

I wanted to read more.

Huh! So maybe Sam was following in dad's footsteps after all? Or, actually, hopefully not. Hopefully Sam had more success and luck than dad had. I left the closet and noticed a pile of pillows on the floor, in front of the TV. A piece of paper peeked out from beneath it. It was another cute little note between Sam and Lonnie in school. Apparently Lonnie was pretty good at drawing. She'd scrawled a cat on a motorcycle, driving beneath the hot desert sun. Man, they were sure a pair. Lonnie with her drawing, Sam with her photography and writing.

Made me kind of jealous. I could hardly doodle. Actually, I didn't even really have any creative skills in my body, I think. Just academic ones. For some reason, I was good at school. Like...it just came naturally to me. I never had a problem finishing homework or understanding assignments, I never got in trouble with the teachers. I'll admit it, I was basically a Straight A student. A lot of people thought that meant I loved high school.

So not true.

I didn't hate it exactly, but...well, even at a young age, I understood that I was good at school, at academic stuff, and it felt good to be good at something. So I went with it. It still got boring as heck sometimes.

I abandoned the note and moved to the locker, but it was, like the name implied, locked up tight. Why so many locks in this house?! I moved on to Sam's bed, which had an I Want To Believe UFO poster pinned at its foot, plus some boxes shoved between the wall and the bed, right next to a radiator...oh real smart, Sam! Burn the house down, why not? I turned on another lamp on her bedside table and spied a huge cloth with a jolly roger, (is that what it's called? it's like a pirate flag, the skull and two swords crossing beneath it), hung up over the head of her bed. There were markers and highlighters everywhere.

I couldn't help but break into a grin as I spied the only stuffed animal to survive from Sam's childhood. A stuffed green Stegosaurus called...Stelly? Steggy? Ugh, couldn't remember. I picked it up and turned it over, finding a tag with Steggy written on it. Steggy it was then. Standing there beside Sam's bed, I looked up at the two windows over it. I could just see the top of a tree and lightning momentarily lit up the night sky, showing me a lot of dark clouds and nothing else. How long would it rain like this?

Not that I minded the rain, I loved it, actually.

But it was making this whole situation ever creepier than it would have been otherwise.

Poking around the nightstand and beneath the bed revealed some magazines, and also a picture of a motorcycle with a note on it: This is the one me and my dad are building! Wanna go for a ride when it's done? Wow...Lonnie's dad was building a motorcycle, and she was helping? Totally badass. I also found a note that made me cringe. It was a sternly worded letter from a teacher about an assignment in metalworking class.

Apparently I'd missed the fact that the old family photo had a shiny new metal plaque. Sam had been assigned to make one and apparently she'd engraved Mom and Dad into it, and when they tried to make her put our parents actual names on it, she literally just crossed Mom and Dad out and wrote in the names. The teacher was less than thrilled with this reaction, but I could totally see why Sam did it. She hated that picture more than I did!

She was really self-conscious about her looks, something we kind of got into fights over. I couldn't help but think that if Sam thought she didn't look very good, and she was obviously better looking than me, then what the heck did that say about me?! Sam never called me ugly or anything like it, never even hinted at it, she really only had encouraging things to say, but it was hard to believe it. Even now, it would still be difficult to believe.

A lot of guys did want to go to bed with me, sure...but it kind of seemed like guys would go to bed with a lot of girls. I'd hardly run into any that actually wanted to date me, though. I didn't want to think about this anymore.

The bed was a bust, so I moved over to the last place in the room: her work area. The first thing I noticed was a crumpled up piece of paper in the wastebasket. This was becoming common. I grabbed it and smoothed it out.

It was a disciplinary referral from the high school. At first I thought it was for Sam, but then I realized it was for...Yolanda Desoto? Eh...jeez, no wonder she went by Lonnie. I felt sorry for her, stuck with a name like Yolanda. Apparently Lonnie had worn a shirt with a Pabst Blue Ribbon logo on it to school and they'd snagged her for it, telling her either to turn it inside out, change it, or be suspended for the rest of the day.

Apparently she'd gone with the nuclear option and chose suspension.

It was supposed to be signed by her dad, but here it was, in the trash. And this was back in October...Sam must have had to have thrown it away just recently. I wonder why. Well, no wonder they got along so well, it was a very Sam thing to do. Okay, maybe something Sam wished she could do. Sam and authority never got along.

The last thing I found, after poking around her desk and bookshelf, was a brochure for a Summer Pre-College Creative Writing Program with a sticky note on it. Sam: I think the creative writing track would be perfect for you. Mrs...something I couldn't read. Huh. If I were her, I would've taken it. But, if it was true and she was gone, obviously it was out of the question now. It seemed like the kind of thing Sam would've had a lot of fun doing.

I sighed, standing in the middle of her room, looking around. This was where she had spent a whole year almost, living here, sleeping here, hanging out with Lonnie here. Probably she spent at least some time grounded here.

But there were no clues here, no keys, no journals, just Sam's stuff.

I looked to the other door that led back out into that short hallway I'd seen earlier, the very first time I was up here, and decided to go for it.