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go to. But I don’t want to talk.
    The halls are quiet, and most of the classroom doors are closed. A couple of kids glance through the few that are open as we go by, but their faces are expressionless. Maybe they’re the only ones in school who don’t know what happened. Or maybe they don’t care.
    Ms. LaPointe ushers me into her tiny office and closes the door. She pulls down the blinds on the window that looks out into the main office.
    â€œNow, then,” she says when we are both seated. “What do you want to do about this situation, Addie?”
    What do I want to do?
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI know about the video,” she says. “I also know that someone— I don’t know who or how—got hold of the school email list and sent the link to everyone on it.”
    Everyone in the whole school got the same link I did? I feel like throwing up.
    â€œSo even though the incident—”
    Incident—that’s school language for what happened to me. It’s a nice, neutral word.
    â€œâ€”didn’t take place on school property, we can still notify the police about our computer system being hacked. We can get them to investigate. When they find out who did it, we can lay charges against that person—or persons.”
    â€œFor hacking the school computer,” I say. It’s not a question. I’m just trying to understand how the school computer system and what happened to it is more important than what happened to me.
    â€œI think you should talk to the police about the incident, Addie. Maybe with your parents.”
    My parents still have no idea what’s going on.
    â€œI’m not a lawyer. What I do know about the law is pretty much confined to what happens here at school. But there may be some charge that you can press, something that you can do. That is, if you want to.”
    Maybe I read too much into her expression and the tone of her voice, but it seems to me Ms. LaPointe knows more than she’s letting on. She knows there’s no law against the kind of practical joke that was played on me. I wasn’t physically hurt. I wasn’t actually kidnapped. I wasn’t forcibly confined—the door in the cellar turned out not to be locked. It was all just good fun—for the jokers.
    I look at Ms. LaPointe’s desk, not at Ms. LaPointe, and think about what to do. Some people would probably have laughed at the joke along with everyone else and then moved on. But a person like that would have to believe that he or she was the target of a truly funny practical joke—no harm, no foul. I don’t believe that. I wish I did. I wish I could shrug the whole thing off. But I keep thinking that someone—more than one someone— planned and executed a so-called joke that was intended not only to scare me to death but also to create an online video to show to everyone in my school. Someone wanted everyone to laugh at me. And laughter isn’t always funny. Sometimes it cuts like a knife.
    I stand up. I say, “I’m going home.” I leave without stopping at my locker. When I get home, I crawl into bed. I’m still in bed when my mother gets back from the church, but she doesn’t know I’m there. She doesn’t find out until suppertime, when she’s worried about me and comes into my room to look at my calendar to see if I have any after-school events. By then, so they tell me, I’ve cried myself out, I have no appetite, and all I see is darkness.

Chapter Six
    It turns out Ms. LaPointe called my parents that night. It turns out my parents then watched the video and called the police. It turns out the police told them that no law had been broken, but that they were making every effort to ascertain (cop talk) whether the school computer system had been hacked. If so, they said they would pursue the perpetrator with the full force of the law.
    â€œI can’t believe they’re