Page 114 of The Bone Code

Her style, one of direct conversation with her fictional confidanteDi, evolved into a hodgepodge of kid lingo and texting abbreviations. Devolved?

Some acronyms I knew.BFF. TBH. OMG. YOLO. LMAO. WTF.

Others I hadn’t a clue.

Lacking a bubble-gummer to translate, I found a teen slang dictionary online.

MMD: Made my day.AFAIK: As far as I know.ROTFL: Rolling on the floor laughing.4YEO: For your eyes only.

Page by page, Harmony’s personality materialized through her words. She wrote:School is way basic. Read: boring.dm told me something that was totally cap. Read: untrue.st was flexing again today. Read: showing off.es went full on emo in the caf. Read: emotional/drama queen in the cafeteria.

Individuals were referenced by lowercase initials. Opening a Word document, I started a list.dm. st. es.

P911appeared a lot. Parent alert. I wondered. If Digger was taking no notice of his granddaughter, who was this hovering authority figure?

As my fluency in teenage-ese improved, the process went faster. I skimmed through days and weeks of typical adolescent angst.Is the hair too rad? Paps is such a dick!And the perennially popular:I think ak is into me!

But some of the anguish was not so typical. It was apparent that Harmony desperately missed her mother. Bonnie Bird’s name, the only one never abbreviated, appeared often.

Reference to MMM.com first occurred on March 4, 2017, during a stay at Amity House. Mention of the site continued at irregular intervals thereafter, interspersed with normal day-to-day chatter.

Occasionally, Harmony described her interactions with other visitors to MMM, the passages sometimes buoyant with hope, sometimes dark with despair. From time to time, she cited specific usernames:kerrydo. maplehope. safarisam. nowimfound.

maplehope? The Canadian girl?

maplehopebegan to appear regularly by late March. Harmonygave little detail, other than to write thatmaplehopewas also searching for her mother.

The script was small and cramped, the ink faded and smeary. By page forty, my eyes felt like gravel, and my frontal bone was thrumming.

The clock said 11:50.

Still no call from Ryan.

Given my remark to Vislosky about having free time that she didn’t have, no way I could quit.

I got up, downed two aspirin, then returned to the diary.

The initialslcfirst appeared on April 10, 2017. Harmony had gone offline withmaplehope, and they’d exchanged names.

lc?

Lena C.?

It took another fifty minutes. Then I sat bolt upright, the ocular gravel and headache forgotten.

May 14, 2017. Harmony andlchad been texting and emailing regularly for a month. Harmony devoted a full page to her new cyber-friend,lc.

Lena Chalamet.

“Holy shitballs!”

I froze, listening for signs that my outburst had awakened Anne. The house was silent.

As I read the brief passage, my pulse spiked.

Lena Chalamet told Harmony that she was eighteen years old. That she lived in Laval, a town not far from Montreal. Lena said that in 2002, when she was two years old, her mother, Mélanie, and her sister, Ella, vanished without a trace. Mélanie was thirty-two, and Ella was ten. Lena had dedicated her life to learning what happened to them.

On May 27, 2017, Harmony wrote that Lena’s passion was totallywig. Awesome. That she and Lena had made a pact to support each otherno matter what. That they’d sworn to maintain secrecyto the death.