"It's so surreal. A week ago, [Gabbie] was alive with hopes and dreams and plans. And now...she's gone..."
— Joanna Morgan, who's eventually revealed to be Gabbie's lover
This story is about the murder of the would-be Homecoming queen, the quest to find the truth, and the impact her death has on her friends and family. Needless to say, there are some upsetting moments.
- First and foremost, the murder of Gabbie Navarro. Everyone is upset, especially her twin brother Donovan. When Blake starts digging for clues and presses him for more information, Donovan snaps at them to leave him and what remains of his grieving family alone.
- A few years prior to the start of the story, Blake's older sister Perdita went out one night and never came back. The flashback scene shows how the rest of the family became more worried as time passed. Two months after her disappearance, the missing posters are taken down, as Blake is distraught that everyone else is moving on even as their sister's disappearance continues to haunt them.
- In Chapter 4, Stevie mentions that she was an accident and she knows it and that she feels her parents are more loving towards her younger sister on the basis that her conception was planned.
- In Chapter 5, Tyler mentions that the track team set him up in a Deadly Prank that triggered a girl's epilepsy and sent her to hospital. He was almost expelled for something that wasn't his fault, not to mention the guilt he carried with him afterwards.
- Chapter 8 is a Tear Jerker all the way through.
- Blake and their friends discover that Gabbie was having an affair with her teacher, Mr. Lewis, and their relationship started before Gabbie turned 18. Their reactions are a mixture of shock, anger, disgust, and betrayal, especially since Lewis was such a nice teacher.
- Worse, later in the chapter, it's revealed that they planned to elope, and that Mr. Lewis' parents knew about the relationship and essentially disowned him until he broke it off.
- Tyler reveals that he has dyslexia, he struggles with his studies and thinks people view him as "someone who can't even put words in the right order". Mr. Lewis helped him cope with his disability, so to discover that the guy committed institutional sexual assault must have been one hell of a Broken Pedestal.
- The most upsetting scene, however, is when Stevie confesses to Blake why she hates Brett Morris so much; he nearly sexually assaulted her when she was a freshman. Stevie went to a party, drank something that made her feel dizzy, and Brett took her to his car to drive her home...only to climb on top of her and start kissing her against her will, even after she told him to stop. The only reason it didn't go any further was because Brett's girlfriend arrived on the scene. Unfortunately, Brett lied and said that Stevie came on to him, and she believed him. Not only did people take Brett's word over Stevie's, the poor girl lost her reputation over the incident, since everyone believed that Stevie was a homewrecker. Stevie eventually decided not to report Brett, believing that nobody will punish him for "a few kisses" (on top of her already-soured reputation), despite the ordeal being so much worse than that.
- Chapter 10 is another bombshell. Mr Lewis, who was arrested for supposedly having an inappropriate relationship with a student, is revealed to be innocent, meaning that Blake got him arrested for nothing. But here's where it gets worse: the love letter found in Chapter 8 wasn't to Mr Lewis, but to a girl named Joanna, Gabbie's secret girlfriend. It's revealed that Joanna and Gabbie were in a secret relationship that they couldn't expose because Joanna's parents were so homophobic that they sent her to conversion therapy when she was twelve. If they ever found out about the relationship, they'd send her back there, prompting Joanna to hide not just her relationship, but everything about herself. It got to the point that Gabbie and Joanna planned to elope when they were both 18, and Mr Lewis (who turns out to be gay himself) helped them, hence the necklace he bought for Gabbie and the love letter in his office, but Gabbie's murder turned everything upside down, and Blake only made it worse by getting Mr Lewis arrested. Joanna's situation by the end of the chapter is heartbreaking; she only had two people in her life, one's dead, the other's in jail, and she can't do anything about it without ruining her own life.
- Chapter 11 has Mr Lewis thankfully proven innocent, but at the cost of Joanna having to out herself. Her parents unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, disowned her and kicked her out of the house, with the only saving grace being that she didn't have to go back to conversion therapy (which Blake calls "The bleakest silver lining I've ever heard").
