Title: Hang in There, Baby

Summary: It's 14 years later, and Charlie is nearly 16 years old. When she stumbles upon a box in the attic of videos from a girl claiming to be her big sister, Charlie wants to get to the bottom of it. Who is this mysterious Teddy, and why does no one want to tell her about Teddy?

Rating: T

Warnings: Depression, attempted suicide (non explicit), mild cussing in strong situations, paranoia.

A/N: I'm actually stuck here. I have the next chapter planned out and everything, but I'm stuck for the interlude. Any ideas, anyone? What would YOU like to see? Thank you to the 80 reviewers, 3, 779 reads, 39 favorites and 55 alerts.

That's out, so...onward, ho!

The next morning, I rolled out of bed after five and a half hours of sleep and packed up my school stuff. Today was Tuesday. That meant early morning yearbook stuff.

Instead of hitching a ride with Gabe (who was still sleeping, by the way), I grabbed my bike and pedaled to school. At eight-fifteen, I was in the yearbook room, picking through the photos and finishing up the layout for the art club's pages.

I was working with Mr. Sampson, the yearbook director. Donny, the senior editor, was someone completely different. Anyway, I was getting approval on a page design, which I'd pulled up on my computer screen.

"Hey, Mr. S, was there something twelve or so years ago with arsonists, like in high school?" I placed a nice picture of a lonely hallway, the lockers covered in paint handprints. The art club had done it, saying that the plain red lockers we had were too plain. The floor had paint drips everywhere, but it was still beautiful. The far wall, at the end of the hallway, had two doors set in it, but the art club had painted right over them, with a giant mural in five sections. Top right was seniors, bottom right, freshmen. Top left, juniors and bottom left was sophomores (isn't that such a weird word?). In the middle, they'd painted the school mascot, a grey wolf, and a saying.

"Forever united, forever we stand. Forever divided, forever we fall." I personally think they could've been more creative and done something like "Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today."

But anyway, Mr. Sampson looked thoughtful. "I think so. There was a national scandal, in Denver. Some girl died, but the culprits were caught. As far as I know, the girl got out on parole last year. The guy is still incarcerated, I think. But I might be wrong. Why the sudden interest?" He grabbed the mouse and selected my graphic headliner. "Does this look right to you?"

"Not really. What if we did it in blue, and maybe more artsy like. Block font isn't exactly the best for art club. How about that graffiti headliner we found last week?"

Mr. Sampson nodded. "I like the way you think, Duncan. Why don't you get on that, before school starts? We've got a good 45 minutes, don't waste them." I nodded and selected the headliner, deleting the text and starting to fix the headliner. Donny Evans dropped into the seat next to me and took a critical look over the page.

"Nice job, freshman." He said approvingly. "I like the layout. A bit unorthodox, but it came out real nice. Keep it up!" Within five seconds, he was gone. It was kind of annoying.

Don't get me wrong, Donny is awesome, but he doesn't have a grasp on either the concept of time or the concept of personal space. Seriously, the guy has burst into the girls bathroom enough times, screeching about some layout or other that people have started to call him gay.

Well, he is gay, but only yearbook and lit mag people know that. Most newspaper kids are out of the loop. Shh…don't tell anyone, his boyfriend might get mad...'cause see, AJ's not out of the closet yet and he's still in denial, even though everyone knows that he and Donny are…you know what, I'm getting off track, and on the off chance that anyone I actually know sees this, I'm going to just stop right there.

So I finished my art club layout and pulled up google once more. I found the article, and then googled "Roxy Baker arsonry."

I found blog after blog about Roxy Baker, about how she had been abused as a child and didn't really understand what she was doing wrong. A lot of it was hate comments, about how it was horrible that she killed that girl (and I admit, I was pretty upset because "that girl" happened to be the sister I'd never know because of her) and how she didn't deserve to live and all and they should've just executed her, and it did kind of make me feel upset—she didn't deserve to live. A life for a life—and hers should be the price.

The most recent was a news article about how she'd been released from prison and was now attending college in Trenton, New Jersey. She was apparently very sweet and honestly regretful of what she'd done. Pete White, however, was still in prison, sentenced for life. He'd been declared mentally unstable and apparently, he'd roped his best friend into starting a fire and there was a lot of confusion about how she was even friends with him.

After searching the internet for a while, I now knew several things.

I had an older sister, who is dead.

She'd been killed in a fire, a case of arsonry.

The culprits were Roxy Baker and Pete White.

Pete White was declared legally insane and is now heavily medicated.

Roxy Baker had been released from jail, so long as she reported to a police station once daily.

Roxy Baker was attending college in Trenton, New Jersey.

Trenton is about five hours from Concord.

Tris has his driver's license, AND a car.

I now have weekend plans. ROAD TRIP!

Road trip is cancelled. Mom and Dad would be too suspicious.

Today was kind of normal, for once, which made it abnormal in the fact that it was normal because normality doesn't really exist in my abnormal life, so somehow, abnormality became normality, therefore making normality abnormal.

If I confused you, I'll be very proud of myself.

Not much of note happen, and I had homework, as per usual, but I still got the videos out of the attic.

I couldn't watch them until about ten at night, since school ended at 3:47 and lit mag went until five. Then I had to help with dinner (never, ever, EVER let Gabe anywhere near flour, sugar, glass bottles, sharp cooking implements, hot food and/or raw meat.) and do homework, including a massive, eight page paper for my history class. And three worksheets for science. And two textbook assignments for Geometry. Did I mention the memorization project for Spanish?

But anyway, I sprawled out on my bed in my jammies and popped the first CD into my laptop.

A menu came up, with girly handwriting across the top. Good Luck, Charlie! It read, complete with a heart over the I and a curlie-cue on the end of the "e" on my name.

There were seven boxes on the screen, labeled Day 1 through Day 7.

I clicked on the first one, and a teenage girl was looking weirdly into the camera. "Hey, is this thing working? Hello? Oh. The red light is blinking, so I think it's working." She leaned back and reclined in her swivel chair. She was wearing skinny jeans (SO 2009, btw. Krista would have a heart attack) and a graphic tee. She propped her feet up by the camera, and I saw the edge of a pair of battered converse.

"Soo…Um, hey, Charlie! Obviously, it's your older sister, Teddy, and this is my video diary for you. Every night, I'm going to recap the day, and we'll go from there. Hopefully, I'll have advice for you. As you probably know, I'm fourteen, and you're all of six hours old. You're really quite ugly right now, Charlie, especially since you're all red and wrinkly and…well, you'll probably be really glad that there are no pictures of you when you're older. PJ and Gabe are, of course, bummed, since they need blackmail on you.

"This is gonna help you survive our…special family, and hopefully this'll go for a while. Right now…well, Mom's really tired and Dad's kinda stressed, naturally so it's just me, PJ and Gabe." Teddy leaned close to the camera and whispered, "Gabe's planning your demise, and he's really not happy about not being the youngest anymore. I'd be careful, Charlie. Cross your fingers that he's crazy about you when you're older." Teddy leaned back and stretched lazily in her spinning chair.

"You know, that'll be my first piece of advice. Stay on Gabe's good side. He's wicked evil and can probably make you really, really miserable. Have you seen his diabolical planning table? The thing has like, blueprints and other assorted junk. He's too smart to be nine. He should be in like, sixth grade already, but he's still in third. Not exactly the best situation, though. If you piss him off…well, good luck, Charlie! I've yet to meet anyone come out unscathed from Gabe's wrath."

"TEDDY!" someone off camera yelled. The voice sounded kind of like Mom's, just a lot more tired and less upset. "GET DOWN HERE AND HELP ME WITH CHARLIE!" A baby's wail rose up, and Teddy rolled her eyes.

"I gotta go now, Charlie, but I'll see you in a couple minutes. I think, when you're seeing this, if I'm not there, if you could call the future me, that'd be great. I'll answer any questions you have about these diaries, but maybe you'll want to go through all of them and then call. Be warned—I intend to do this for the next couple of years, at least.

"So…I guess to close, love, Teddy!" As Teddy leaned forward to shut off the camera, a very pissed off voice yelled, "TEDDY! GET DOWN HERE!"

I laughed and clicked on the next one.

Once again, Teddy was sprawled out in her swivel chair, but she was wearing a completely different outfit, black leggings, a long purple tunic top and black cardigan style vest. Her hair was pulled back with a black headband, and had on a pair of black, plastic-framed glasses.

"Hey, Charlie. Yeah, yeah, my face isn't on. My contacts were bugging me so I had to wear these. So today was kind of interesting. You cried a lot, Gabe tried assassination attempt one, PJ used you as an excuse not to do homework. Have you heard Relient K's Must've Done Something Right? We should get jerseys, 'cause we make a good team," she sang, actually pretty well. "But yours would look better than mine, 'cause you're outta my league. And I know that's it's so cliché…" she trailed off. "Awesome song, by the way. Don't know why I mentioned it, but I did. I'm probably just dopey from lack of sleep. I don't really have anything to talk about, other than Mrs. Thiessian gave tons of homework, which thankfully, I finished…" she yawned.

"It's about eleven at night, and I've gotta get up kinda early tomorrow, even though it's totally a Saturday. Damn you, Dad, for making me go to that how to be a better big sister convention. Charlie, I love you, but here's my advice for the day. If Dad tries to send you to a convention, well…good luck, Charlie! You'll need it. And if you're watching this at night, you'd better go to bed. Mom flips if anyone is awake after curfew, which is in fifteen. I'd recommend turning out the light, Charlie. Well, that's about it, so…g'night, Charlie! Love, Teddy."

I giggled, and shut down the laptop. I tucked Teddy's shoebox under my bed, where Mom wouldn't find it. Gabe might, but he'd probably miss it entirely.

Then, I turned out the light and went to sleep early, for once.

Reviewer's Question: What do YOU want as the next interlude? Do you think the story is keeping the characters in character? Do you think I should never write ever again? C'mon, people, help a girl out!

Sylver