The party kicked off at Skateland, where the neon marquee regularly malfunctioned, so that it read just SKAT or ATE. In the carpeted lobby, an employee greeted Matt and the girls through a hole in the Plexiglas. For a few dollars more than the usual entry fee of ten dollars per skater, economical party packages included ice cream, a name announcement, a song dedication, table decorations, and birthday balloons. But birthday upgrades required a minimum of eight skaters, and Morgan did not have enough friends to qualify.
Inside, kids skated between banquet-sized picnic tables, tripping over each other in their haste to patronize the flashing arcade games. Tickets could be exchanged at the Fun Shop, a prize counter that displayed fluffy dice and inflatable emojis. Girls with braces on their teeth sat still under the arms of awkward boyfriends, waiting to “slow skate,” a part of the night when the DJ turned down the lights and switched to love songs, so that aspiring couples could stumble shyly onto the rink, holding hands, and practice the art of liking each other.
At the rental counter, Morgan, Anissa, and Bella were offered a choice between rollerblades (preferred by boys because they looked like hockey skates) and classic blond leather lace-ups with a toe stop and orange wheels (feminine throwbacks to a time when poodle skirts were big). The three girls opted for the latter and hobbled to the rink giggling, while Matt watched from one of the picnic tables, where other people’s birthday balloons swung from foil-wrapped weights anchored between half-demolished cakes. Morgan was smiling that night. But there were dark crescents under her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately.
Suddenly, a Skateland employee exploded onto the rink, making a quick show of athletic prowess with a few big, backward figure eights, before spinning to a toe-stop and announcing that races were about to begin. As of that month, Morgan, Anissa, and Bella all qualified for the girls twelve and older race. But Morgan decided “races are lame,” and so they skated to the sidelines.
Later, back home, Morgan opened her birthday presents. Anissa gave her a Star Trek mug. Bella gave her a stuffed banana, a Nerf gun, and gummy bear–print duct tape.
When Anissa saw the duct tape, she shot Morgan a look that Morgan later described to the police as “OOOOOOH-EEEEE!”
After talking about it for months, Anissa had decided that she wanted to stab Bella in the neck after duct-taping her mouth shut. Unfortunately, Anissa had forgotten to bring duct tape—but that no longer mattered, since Bella had brought along her own.
Before bedtime, the girls crowded in front of the Geyser family’s Dell computer to play The Sims, a video game that allowed users to create characters, put them in houses, and make them interact, like a virtual dollhouse. Morgan made a Sims family with lots of cats, a character named Bitch the Clown, and a businessman, whose name would be forgotten. She positioned Bitch and the businessman so they could “WooHoo,” Sims lingo for sex. Morgan and Anissa had both seen WooHoo before—it was pretty chaste—but they seemed surprised when it actually worked, because they didn’t know that gay sex was possible on The Sims.
Bella felt left out. When Morgan started talking about starving the Sims characters and setting the Sims’ house on fire with the cats inside, Bella, who loved cats, decided she wasn’t having any fun and went upstairs to sleep. In Morgan’s bedroom, she changed into her purple nightshirt and climbed into Morgan’s loft bed, positioning herself as she usually did, with her back to the nearest window, so that Jeff the Killer couldn’t kill her. After a while, she decided that she didn’t want to be alone. So she grabbed her tablet, climbed back down the wooden ladder, and scampered downstairs to be nearer to Morgan, the girl who was, for better or worse, still her best friend.
Bella watched Morgan and Anissa play The Sims until Morgan decided it was time for bed. They went upstairs, squeezed into the twin-sized loft bed, and snacked on cheese puffs that Morgan’s mom, Angie, would later find scattered in the sheets. Anissa punched in the password on her iPad: ALEXANDRITE, an allusion to her middle name, Alexandria, and the name of a purple gemstone thought to bring luck, love, and self-esteem. The three girls played on their respective devices in the dark. Morgan’s gerbil and guinea pigs, Tulip, Thor, and Loki, rustled in their cages below. Bella lay down with her stuffed animal cat.
Anissa yawned. She had planned to use the gummy bear–print duct tape and stab Bella as soon as Bella fell asleep. But Anissa had also spent most of that evening skating in circles as fast as she could. She was tired.
When Anissa told Morgan she felt too “tired and sleepy” from roller-skating to kill anyone, part of Morgan wanted to say, “I told you so.” She had learned to predict Anissa’s mood swings. Anissa had been hyper all night, so of course she was crashing. Morgan set an alarm on her Kindle for 2:00 A.M. and promised to wake Anissa then to do “the deed.”
As Anissa stretched out head-to-toe with Bella in the loft bed, Morgan climbed down the ladder and pushed through the sheets she’d hung. She burrowed deep into the pile of blankets waiting for her on the carpet. Since discovering Slenderman, she had slept this way: in a makeshift fort underneath her loft bed. It felt safer to be next to her pets at night, though it annoyed her that they seemed to forget who she was on a regular basis, screaming in terror whenever she approached. “You crazy bastards, shut the fuck up!” she said. (Anissa wasn’t the only one who liked to swear.)
At 1:30 A.M., thirty minutes before Morgan’s alarm was set to ring, Anissa woke in the dark, feeling restless. She found Morgan wide-awake under the loft bed, gripped by another bout of insomnia. As far as Anissa was concerned, it was time to grab “the cracker” and do “it” and proceed “up north” for their “camping trip.” But Morgan knew that in order to get “up north,” they would need to walk three hundred miles, an exodus that required great stamina—something Anissa, who later described herself to the police as “not very athletic,” lacked even under the best of circumstances.
Morgan urged Anissa to go back to bed and get some more rest, promising to wake her at the agreed-upon time. So Anissa climbed back into bed with Bella—and when a sleeping Bella accidentally kicked her in the face, Anissa kicked back.
As Bella and Anissa slept, Morgan plugged her headphones into the Kindle and scrolled through her music library. Her favorite band, Owl City, sang a song about lying awake and missing someone you loved. By then Morgan had resigned herself to killing Bella in “whichever way would be the most logical.” (“If there’s any logic in killing people,” she later mused, “which I don’t think there is, actually.”) But as Morgan lay awake anticipating “the deed,” she likely anticipated missing Bella, too; once they moved in with Slenderman, they could never come back. She and Bella would never have sleepovers again. They would never hold hands.
Morgan decided not to wake Anissa as planned. She deleted the alarm set on her Kindle. Later she would tell police, “I wanted to give her at least one more morning … I wanted to see if I could put it off forever.”