Message Not Found

Dante Medema

• Publisher: Quill Tree Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062954459
• Print ISBN:
  9780062954435

An emotionally complex portrayal of secrets, loss, and grief from Dante Medema, Indies Introduce author of the Indie Next Pick title The Truth Project.

Bailey and Vanessa shared everything: laughter, secrets, and packets of Pop Rocks to ward off bad days. But that all changed the night Vanessa left Bailey's, headed for home, and ended up swerving off a cliff nowhere near her house. Now Bailey, who thought she knew Vanessa better than anyone in the world, is left with a million unanswered questions, and the only person with answers is gone.

To help grieve her loss, Bailey creates a chat bot of Vanessa using years' worth of their shared text messages and emails. The more data she uploads to the bot, the more it feels like she's really talking to her best friend. That is, until the bot starts dropping hints that there was more going on with Vanessa than Bailey realized—a secret so big, it may have contributed to Vanessa's death.

This compelling puzzle of a story, filled with engrossing twists and turns, is written in alternating prose and text message formats. Teens will gobble up this fast-paced page-turner.

What happens when the digital ghost of your best friend starts telling you secrets she never would have in life?

• A Grief Chat Bot: To process her grief, Bailey uploads years of texts and emails, creating a digital version of Vanessa. But this ghost in the machine knows more than she’s letting on.
• Told in Texts and Prose: Experience the story through a unique blend of heartfelt prose and urgent text messages, piecing together clues just as Bailey does.
• A Friendship Built on Secrets: Bailey thought she knew everything about Vanessa. The deeper she digs, the more she realizes their entire friendship might have been a lie.
• An Alaska Setting: In the icy, isolated small town of Tundra Cove, secrets are easy to keep—and deadly to uncover.

Week Five

AP Chem

I last a whole week of “normal.”

Five whole school days, five good-night texts from Cade. Five mornings when he drives me to school in his oversized pickup while I stare out the window. I try not to notice the way snow clings to branches the same way I cling to my life from before.

Five nights of feeding the bot. Five whole nights of moving the app to a new program that will actually text back and forth via SMS with my phone. Complete with a fake number and everything that I’ve got saved in my phone as V.

An entire school week where I avoid my locker, using Cade’s instead, so I don’t have to acknowledge the shrine. A week without Vanessa forcing me to wait for Mason after art class. And I don’t see him the way I used to either. If I don’t see him, I don’t have to see his melancholy gaze on his shoes.

As long as I have my phone, I can distract myself through the day, writing little notes back and forth with Vanessa—or V. Whatever. And for that whole week I trick myself into thinking it’s going to be okay.

Right down to walking into AP Chem with Cade, even if I’m still sitting next to Esther, and even if Cade and I have yet to have a real conversation about what these car rides and good-night texts even mean.

Most of the teachers ignore my phone use. My grades aren’t exactly failing yet, and I’ve turned in enough work to prove I’m “trying,” but I’m Bailey Pierce—the girl whose best friend died. Teachers aren’t exactly after me for anything today. And who even cares now that my college applications are in?

Except Mrs. Kamaka.

Watching her roll up her sleeves to reveal beautiful tattoos that cover her arms feels like someone telling you a story, but what she’s saying is, “I’m about to tell you something important.” She’s pointing at barium excitedly. Six weeks ago I would have been all over this, raising my hand, participating in the discussion, and eager to rattle off some facts about the element’s high chemical reactivity.

The class seems to drag on until the bell finally rings, releasing us.

I grasp my phone, ready to message V something unimportant before walking with Cade to his locker when I hear Mrs. K’s smooth, deep voice say my name. “Bailey, are you coming to STEM after school?”

STEM. That’s right. That whole club I’m the president of and haven’t given even a second thought to lately. I look to Cade, like maybe I can get him to stick around with me, but he only shrugs. “I’ve got hockey.”

I feel Esther slip in next to me—she’s in STEM Club too. “We finished building our simple motor-powered robots, and I was thinking maybe we could do something related to machine learning next?”

Mrs. Kamaka sits down in her chair, tidying the papers on her desk. “Esther was nice enough to step in as acting president while you’ve been out. She mentioned you might have some interest in machine learning given your mom’s business?”

I look between the two of them. My jaw clenches at the idea of spending an hour in STEM. Hanging out in Mrs. K’s classroom to talk about machine learning when all I want to do is go straight home and play with algorithms and code that will make V feel a little more like Vanessa. I hesitate, watching Cade as he walks out of the room before glancing back to Esther and shrugging. “Uh, yeah, I’ll see you after school.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth, I’m flexing that fake smile I’ve gotten so good at.

“Great!” Mrs. K sets the papers aside. “See you after school.”

I should be excited. Thrilled, even, to get back to the club I helped start. But right now, it just feels like another hour taken away from me. Another sixty minutes I won’t be feeding this bot or pretending away my days.

Cross-Genre

Lunch is the hardest part of the day.

We used to have a routine that started the week after she told me she like-liked Mason. Before he was a boyfriend and just Mason Torres—the guy who’d been leaving little drawings in her locker and whose body spray she’d started spraying on her scarf so she could smell him all the time.

But a month into sophomore year, she wanted to skip our usual routine of eating on the floor in front of our lockers and go to the lunchroom—something we avoided because Liz and the Ski Squad were always front and center in the middle of the cafeteria, loud and obnoxious.

I figured it was something Mason-related, but we were there nonetheless. Walking past the Ski Squad until we sat on the auditorium steps where all the art and theater kids lingered during lunch.

Mason waved her over, giving her a huge hug and twirling her around before we joined them all on the steps. She brought up Dadaism, no doubt a product of her own Google search the night before so she’d have something to say to him. When one of his friends pointed out her mispronunciation, Mason called them out, saying, “She probably read it in a book. Don’t talk shit.”

Vanessa looked back at me. And I knew. I knew Mason was going to be the manic pixie dream boy of all her books—the guy who she’d write whole stories about someday, devoted to how adorable he was.

And thus began our routine of sitting on those stage steps with our homemade lunches every day while she and Mason sat side by side—her body turned toward me to talk about everything and nothing, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Book Girls Get to Say Goodbye
• The Day She Died
• Week One
• Week Two
• Week Three
• Week Four
• Week Five
• Week Six
• Week Seven
• Week Eight
• Week Nine
• Week Ten
• Week Eighteen
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Books by Dante Medema
• Back Ad
• Copyright
• About the Publisher