"Why did you and Jesse take a detour?" Madison asked.

"He wanted to find a frog." I said stiffly.

"Why?"

"I don't know." I said. "He found a toad and told me that they drink by absorbing the liquid through their skin."

"That is quite the fact." Madison said as though she were a tired kindergarten teacher. "Is that all the detour was for?"

"Yes." I fibbed.

"Thank you, that's all we needed you for." She said, leaving with Benjamin in tow. I was alone for several minutes until Owens came back and unlocked my handcuffs from the table.

"Am I going home now?" I asked.

"No." He said with a shake of his head, bringing me into a different room and latching my right hand onto a chair. "Wait here for a little while."

I looked around and saw Jesse the the corner. His wrists were reddened in his own handcuffs and he didn't look to be sleeping of his own accord.

"What happened to him?" I asked Owens.

"I don't know." He said before leaving.

The room was eerily silent aside from Jesse's labored breathing. He obviously wasn't going to die, but it was still worrying.

"They took you too?" I heard him say.

"Looks like it." I said.

"Did they hurt you?" He asked, sitting up in his seat.

"No," I said with a shake of my head.

"Good." He said.

"Hey, do you want to get lunch after this?" I asked jokingly.

"Sure." Jesse smiled.

"That doesn't hurt, does it?" I asked, eyeing the marks on his wrists.

"Not really." Jesse as he stared at the door. It looked painful. After a dreadfully long period of silence, an officer removed Jesse from the room. Owens came in just moments later to take me.

"You are going to one more room, then you can go." He said, leading me to one other room. The contents of the room looked like something you would see in a newly abandoned hospital; it had a small machine with cords sticking out of it and various other medical equipment. "Have a seat." I sat down next to the machine and noticed that Weber, Benjamin Thomas, and two other adults in unwrinkled uniforms were behind a sheet of glass in the room, observing me as though I were an animal in the zoo. There was a black woman with a nametag that read Alice Langdon and a ginger man with a nametag that read Connor Irvine. I could nearly hear my heart pounding in my ears.

"This isn't going to hurt." Owens assured me, sticking two of the cords to me, one on my neck and the other on my left wrist. He then left.

"Good morning, Whitney." Alice Langdon said through the microphone. "My name is Dr. Langdon, but you're a minor, so you are allowed to call me Allie."

"Hi." I said.

"Whitney, this is kind of like a polygraph. This version of the test, however, is completely exact." Allie said. Polygraphs are not a guarantee of conviction, so the FBI must have come up with sure-fire test and have not handed it to county authorities yet. "We are going to ask you a series of questions."

I nodded.

"What is your middle name?" She asked.

"Lydia." I said. Conner leaned over and whispered something to Ally. He looked like the kind of person I would have been friends with. I liked how he looked up at her and maintained eye-contact instead of eyeing the floor. (Interjecting. I want you to look up a TikTok video that says "I'm sorry for turning you on, it wasn't my intention that you got turned on." That is what Connor's eyes are doing. That isn't a sexual look, by the way, I wrote him to be either asexual or gay.)

"Very good. We're off to a great start." She smiled, though it did not reach her eyes despite her positive, teacher-like demeanor. "What is your little sister's full name?"

"Charlotte Jeanne Fisher."

"When did you meet Jesse Tuck?" She asked. Everybody in that tiny room behind the glass was staring holes into a monitor in front of them.

"I met him on the first day of school," I said, "he was reading a book by the gate and we had our first few classes together.

"Tell us about that football game."

"All my friends were off with somebody else, so it was just Jesse and I. He brought a ton of glowsticks, so after putting some on, we went to his locker inside one of the buildings. While we were in there, the lights went out and these people with guns came in. Jesse made it so that I had an opportunity to get out, so I did, then I called the police.

"That's quite the story." Allie said. "Why did you and Jesse take a detour during your hike last week?"

"To find a frog." I said calmly. Following the questions, I had to swear never to tell a single soul about this whole affair, even Jesse. Owens reentered the room.

"Okay, this is going to hurt a little bit." Owens said before pulling the sticker things off. I had no reaction to the instant of pain, just watched a fat drop of blood well up on my wrist and feel it drip down the side of my neck. "It's time for you to go back home."

Relief washed over me when we went back outside. It was getting dark; I've been here all day and I don't even know how long Jesse's been here.

"Can you please take these off?" I asked, holding my hands out to him. He nodded and unlatched the metal cuffs. As it turned out, my handcuffs marked me just as they had marked Jesse, leaving raw, angry-looking divots in my wrists.

When I returned home, I repetitively assured my mother that they were looking for a different Whitney Fisher and had found the wrong one.