At 9:45 AM, he hefts his bookbag over his shoulder and heads out the door. Anna hasn’t responded since last night, and he’s starting to get very worried. Is she okay? Is she just mad at me? What if something happened? Oh God, what if—

His whirling thoughts of worst-case scenarios are interrupted by the ding of the elevator as it arrives on his floor. The door slides open and he enters, looking up at the last moment to find he isn’t alone. “Oh, hey Josh,” he mumbles.

His classmate cocks an eyebrow. “Wow, Wally, what’s got you looking so depressed?”

Blunt as always, but Wally doesn’t have time to be bothered by trivial things. “You didn’t happen to see Anna today, did you?”

Josh slaps him on the back and laughs. “Are you psychic or something? I just saw her this morning!” Wally breathed a sigh of relief as Josh continues. “It was kind of crazy, she got lost in Alder Park last night and didn’t get back until I ran into her this morning and walked her home. She seemed really out of it. Might be sick or something.”

A new wave of concern crashes over Wally. He reaches for the button for the second floor, but Josh intercepts. “Dude, you should let her rest. She looked exhausted, probably clonked out as we speak.”

Wally is annoyed at first; Anna is his best friend, after all. But he sees the logic in what Josh said, and resolves check on her in the afternoon. The two exit the elevator on the first floor and head to their physics lecture. Despite a fascinating talk about electromagnetic fields, Wally can’t seem to concentrate.

***

I awoke to the urgent ringing of Anna’s 9 AM alarm. Despite only having slept for a few hours, I felt well-rested and refreshed. Perhaps my body didn’t need as much sleep as the average human’s. I quickly turned off the alarm and checked the phone’s battery: 72%. Leaving it plugged in, I made my way to Anna’s desk and took a seat. Opening the laptop, I was greeted once again by the PIN prompt. The cursor blinked impatiently as I wracked my mind for ideas.

Recalling that it was common for humans to use important dates as passwords, I retrieved Anna’s wallet from the nightstand and pulled out her student ID. On the back, beneath her phone number and home address, her date of birth was printed: ‘May 4, 2000’. I typed ‘050400’ into the prompt and hit enter. Incorrect. ‘542000’. Incorrect. ‘05042000’. Incorrect, and I had four attempts left before I would be locked out for an hour. I stood up in frustration, returning the card and wallet to the nightstand.

I unplugged the phone and brought it with me to the desk. Surely something in this fount of knowledge could give me a clue. I opened the calendar in search of other important dates. After Anna’s, the next birthday was her younger brother’s: August 12th, 2009. I tried ‘081209’ and ‘08122009’, both incorrect. With only two tries left, I had to move on. The next date that seemed to have personal importance was marked ‘Wedding Anniversary’: February 26th, 1993. I entered ‘022693’ into the prompt and was greeted for the first time with a loading icon. Success!

Navigating her well-organized file directory, I found folder groups for school documents, vlogs, and other miscellaneous files. It seemed Anna had a small online following that watched videos she posted about her experiences in college. This would be immensely helpful for learning about her life, as well as how to emulate her mannerisms. After all, I needed to know enough about her to fill her place without rousing suspicion. However, it also extended the list of potential suspects to hundreds of anonymous individuals that knew who she was and possibly where she lived.

I spent much of the day watching her videos and browsing documents on her computer, becoming as familiar with her as I could. I practiced her patterns of speech and writing, and memorized any personal information I could find. I immersed myself in Anna’s life, starting with her family.

I learned that she doted on her younger brother, keeping a list of toys and games to get him for Christmas and birthdays. She was very close with her father, though he and her mother had divorced when Anna was only 10. She blamed her mother, who constantly put pressure on Anna to perform well in school and pursue a lucrative career path. But her mother was also the breadwinner of the family, while her father was financially unstable and barely able to support himself, let alone his two children. Her mother was granted custody, and Anna only kept in touch with her father through texts and phone calls. That, I realized, was why he didn’t appear in the pictures on her phone.

I learned that Anna loved nature and art. I came upon incredibly realistic digital paintings of bees landing on flowers and beetles dueling on leaves, many of which were based on pictures she took and sketches she made while hiking. Her passion for illustration delighted her father, a painter himself, but created tension with her mother. As Anna lamented in texts to her father, her mother refused to pay her tuition or support her education in any way unless she majored in a ‘worthy’ discipline. Medicine was off the table since Anna couldn’t stomach the sight of blood. So, despite wanting to become an entomologist, she majored in chemical engineering.

Finally, I learned that Anna always wore a special hairpin. It was a gift from her father, the last thing he gave her before they parted ways. The pin featured a four-petaled lavender blossom: Lunaria annua, the honesty flower. In every picture and every video of Anna, no matter when it was taken, where she was, or what she was doing, she wore that hairpin. And yet when I had found her body… it was gone.