"The tragedy of life is not death ... but what we let die inside of us while we still live."
Adalynn Stanton is accepted into one of the highest competitive schools in her state, the Greenhouse Academy. At first, all she thinks she will have to do...
"If only you could see what's in my mind Then maybe you'll know why I'm never fine Can someone be proud of who I am and what I've become."
~ If Only by Caroline Dare
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And so, the ROP's first extended meeting was held with Daniel being chiefly in charge.
Emma's job was to hack into the school wifi system and find out what happened to Adalynn's laptop. Jackie's job was to keep tabs on the school cameras in the basement. Daniel, who was the closest to Judy out of them all, was to shadow his mother and find out as many details as he could. Alex and Adalynn were to investigate Eric. Hayley and Leo were to keep a close eye on Jason and find out as much information as they could about Marcus. They had already linked up Marcus, Judy and Jason ... now they just had to find where Ryan and Eric fit into the puzzle. They already knew that Judy was a co-worker of Ryan's and that Marcus knew Ryan from when she was a teenager at the Academy and obviously, if Eric was Mr Woods' best friend, he'd know Ryan ... but what about Jason? What was his deal? Was he just being payed to play along with everything or was he just a pawn, being Judy's eyes and ears?
That's what the ROP had to find out.
Their second job was to discover what happened to Brooke. As they looked through the thick volume that Daniel had produced from the library, Hayley chanced upon the chapter, 'The Process of Dehypnotision'. However, when she turned to the page number in the book, she was horrified to see that the entire chapter had been ripped out.
"No doubt Marcus has it with him ... unless he's destroyed it," Daniel said glumly.
"Can't we just look it up?" Jackie asked.
"No. They could've bugged our computer systems, especially if they've got their hands on Adi's laptop," Emma disagreed as she shook her head. "It's too risky. We need to find that missing chapter manually and we need to find it soon. But NO going on the web to search for it, got it?"
"Whose 'they'?" Adalynn demanded desperately. "Who the hell are we up against?"
"I dunno, but it's getting pretty frickin' serious," Daniel grumbled.
As they dispersed and prepared to gather info for the next meeting on the morrow, Adalynn hurried to catch up with Hayley.
"Hey," she called out as she fell into step beside her.
"Hey," Hayley replied.
"W-why are you helping us? You - you're not mad at me?"
Hayley swallowed before replying, "At first I was ... but - but then I realised that you and Jackie were very brave to keep looking into this. You're trying to help me and my family! I didn't see it like that up until now but I just wanted to thank you and say that I'm sorry for being such a jerk."
