On Friday, May 30, 2014, Anissa hugged her dad goodbye and said she loved him, which surprised Bill, because Anissa didn’t usually say or do things like that.
“Is something going on?” he asked.
“I feel like I don’t express my love for you enough,” Anissa said, and Bill accepted her response because it was true.
He later told the police that he had noticed Anissa acted sillier around Morgan, but otherwise he felt there was nothing significant about their interactions.
Later, around 7:00 A.M., Anissa and Morgan’s bus slowed to a halt outside Horning Middle School, a bland institutional building surrounded by yellow daffodils, and deposited the girls on Wolf Road, where a sign, donated by the student council of 2001–2002, hailed the school as a place “where success is a tradition.”
Inside, school colors were on full display, from the black-and-yellow laminate cafeteria tables to the black-and-yellow-striped concrete walls of the gymnasium. The girls proceeded to their respective green lockers. Classes started at 7:30 A.M. Morgan took a math test and did poorly on it. Anissa embarked on a field trip with her FLIGHT class to talk to her third grade “buddy” about the difference between right and wrong.
In FLIGHT (facilitating learning through integration, guidance, high expectations, and technology), she was studying PBI (positive behavior intervention), helping younger students at the nearby elementary school make good decisions and stay out of trouble. Earlier that year, Anissa had confided in another girl in FLIGHT that she had found a way to become a proxy of Slenderman, saying, “You have to kill one of your friends.” The other girl, identified in court by her initials, K.N., would later testify, “And when I looked at her like, ‘What are you talking about?’ She was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not you’—and I was kind of like, confused? But I didn’t think she actually was like, gonna do it because she didn’t seem like that kind of person.” (K.N.’s twin, S.N., later told Mrs. Jackson what Anissa had said, without consequence.)
At lunch, Anissa spoke to her FLIGHT teacher, Krista Krauter about the preservation of the pangolin, a scaly species of anteater endangered by poaching and deforestation. Mrs. Krauter told the police that Anissa “wanted the world to be a good place.”
Meanwhile, in Mrs. Weidenbaum’s class, Morgan and Bella were learning about Aztec and Inca mines.
When the last bell rang at 2:36 P.M., Morgan and Bella returned to Mrs. Weidenbaum’s classroom to help stack chairs. Both girls seemed eager to spend time with their favorite teacher, who had recently returned from maternity leave—an absence that Bella and Morgan had coped with in very different ways, each according to her personality. While Bella had managed her emotions by emailing Mrs. Weidenbaum to tattle on the other children in their class for being “naughty” and not following the substitute teacher’s directions, Morgan had joked that Mrs. Weidenbaum was actually in Russia, planning to bomb the United States.
As Mrs. Weidenbaum hugged them goodbye and watched them disappear into the hallway, all she could think was how happy the two friends seemed.
While Bella went home to pack her overnight bag, Morgan and Anissa bounded off the bus to unit K, where Anissa lived with her dad. As Morgan waited, Anissa searched her condo for what she later, to police, referred to as, “like, memories and stuff,” to bring with them to Slender Mansion.
“We’ll probably be spending the rest of our lives there,” she said. “You know how distant family members and friends fade away with time.”
After riffling through various mementos, Anissa settled on a photo of herself with her siblings and a photo of her mother, Kristi, looking annoyed in a parking lot. Before departing for Morgan’s condo, she opened her LG cell phone, which had a picture of her cat, Tiger, on its home screen, and turned it to airplane mode. Anissa was Tiger’s favorite person in the household, and in the months to come, he would spend a lot of time nosing around her empty bedroom, searching for her.
Anissa left the cell phone in her bedroom for her parents to find. Her goodbye letter to her parents was written inside, in the notes application. In 2014, phones would not have been able to run a GPS map. Anissa and Morgan couldn’t google their way to Slender Mansion in real time. They would need to trust in Slenderman, and let him guide them north.
Though slightly smaller than Anissa’s condo, Morgan’s was also more modern, with a Jacuzzi tub in one of the two bathrooms. There were three levels, with two small rooms on each floor, and a basement, where Morgan went online to study Slenderman.
Both girls were likely too young to notice the idiosyncrasies of the Geysers’ home decor, but an adult visitor to unit J might have observed that it had no mirrors, aside from the one in the bathroom. This was done on purpose; Matt dreaded his reflection. But for now, neither he nor Morgan knew how much they shared in common.
After entering the condo, Morgan and Anissa climbed two flights of stairs to Morgan’s bedroom. Sun shone through the windows onto light blue walls. Sheets hung from the side of Morgan’s loft bed, turning the space underneath into a tent. Inside, Thor, Loki, and Morgan’s gerbil, Tulip, squeaked in their respective cages. Morgan recalled how Thor had once peed on Anissa, and Morgan had joked, “Good boy,” while Anissa yelled, “This idiot fuckin’ guinea pig fuckin’ peed on me! So fuck you, guinea pig!” (“She has a very foul mouth,” Morgan later said.)
Anissa stashed the photos she’d taken from her house in a black-and-white canvas purse that Morgan used for dress-up, which they were using as a getaway bag. In it, the girls also packed:
1. Maxi pads with wrappers decorated with neon hearts and stars.
2. Halls lozenges for Anissa, who suffered from hay fever.
3. Matches, which Morgan had hidden in her closet for weeks, disguised in wrapping paper, with “Merry Christmas to Mommy and Daddy” scrawled on top so that her parents would not open it.
4. Granola bars.
5. Two reusable water bottles.
6. Two of Morgan’s photo albums, which included pictures of her family, her cats, and Ferris wheels, with an index card slipped in the back, written on by Dianna: “Grandpa & Grandma Niesen House, Summer, 2009. We sure had fun! Can’t wait for next summer☺ We love you Morgan!”
Summers spent at Bob and Dianna’s house had been special to Morgan. She remembered laying down quilts with square pieces that reminded her of a tiled dance floor, putting on music, and building what she later called “a little disco ball thing that spun,” so that she and her younger cousins could have a dance party. Prior to discovering Slenderman, she had enjoyed her “big sister” role in the family. Years later, she would snap her fingers to signify the sudden change in herself, saying, “I went from the best to the worst”—snap—”like that.”
After packing their getaway bag, Morgan and Anissa bounded down the gray shag-carpeted stairs. In the kitchen, Matt made them an after-school snack. Anissa was a new enough friend that when the police arrived to question Matt and Angie the next morning, neither would be able to remember Anissa’s last name.
But despite not knowing her for very long, Matt already felt wary of Anissa. His many tattoos included two human skulls and a symbol for “chaos” on his shoulder—and perhaps because of this, Anissa had once thought it might be fine to use the word “fuck” around him, to which Matt had responded, “We don’t use that language here.”
Anissa tried once more to win Matt over, joking, “Well, my dad lets me do and say whatever I want.”
“In my house, I’m the dad you listen to,” Matt said.
He wanted to like Anissa; after all, she was just a kid, and his daughter had only one other friend. But Bella was a hard act to follow, just a good, bighearted, pure little person.