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They’re not coming back, she thought, they aren’t bringing any help. All her blood was going to leak out of her, and she was going to die.
She never thought about killing herself, not even after she heard that Lana had tried, more than once.
There’s a sense of unreality to everything that happens online. In real life, with her in front of them, they will realize how impossible it is.
The year she graduated from high school, Sage granted an interview to one of those hour-long network news programs.
Whoa so she survived like the girl in the RL story. I assumed that was where this book deviated. Honestly I had always kinda assumed the girl from the Slender Man stabbings had died too until I looked it up.
“I know it sounds weird, but I think I would thank them. I mean, they did this awful thing, but up until then, I had just been sort of stumbling through my life. I didn’t have any direction. And since then, I know that every moment is a gift.
Maddie told her lawyers that she was sorry the minute after it happened, that after the stabbing she felt sick to her stomach, but that was untrue. After the stabbing, she felt a strange euphoria, a sense of having transgressed the most basic of human taboos. She felt powerful.
One minute Sage was dead; the next she was alive. But all that Maddie thought and all she said was, “Does this mean I can go home now?”
Lol typical child response though
The “not criminally responsible” plea meant that you had lost your ability to discriminate between right and wrong. That was not the case. Though within their delusion their decisions made a kind of sense, they both knew that killing was wrong and that Sage was an innocent.
she had been deluded, and in her delusion she’d chosen evil.
A pair of dark eyes peers back at her. Lana’s eyes. For a moment, Maddie can’t speak. Her voice emerges with a squeak: “Marc?”
I was NOT expecting this!
“I’m Follower_in_the_Distance. Well, I’m all of them actually.”
It's ironic because I originally had thought that maybe Follower_in_the_Distance had been his sister somehow hiding her identity but trying to contact Maddie.
“The site is real. But the private group talking about the next sacrifice—that was all me.”
Well that's a relief those bunch of loonies weren't real.
Marc is not here to hurt her. He’s here to assess whether or not she, the criminal, is still a threat. She’s not saving anyone; she never was.
There’s no trace of the speech impediment he had as a kid, but there is something strangely formal about his speech. When he talks he doesn’t make eye contact, but it seems as if this may be a personal quirk, not directed at her specifically.
Perhaps Marc is on the spectrum.
I can either try to diminish the harm of what my sister did, or I can sit back and ignore it. I’d rather not ignore it.
She’s done it again, failed to see the clear line between the real and not-real.
There’s no heroic act that will redeem her. There’s only her guilt and its consequences, only her little life to sort out.
It’s one thing to atone and another to wallow in your suffering, waiting for a steady string of neighbors and acquaintances to hold you to account for the worst thing you’ve ever done. To stay is to be trapped in the past, and she needs to move forward; Gran understood that.
As she exits the waiting area into the dim parking garage to board the bus, just for a moment, she thinks she sees something out of the corner of her eye—a large shadow, someone watching her. She starts and turns her head but finds only empty air.
The only thing she is really sure about is that people are fundamentally unknowable, and therefore untrustworthy.
Sage wants a field where the answers are clear, where the diagnosis is right or wrong. She doesn’t want to have to wonder whether her patients are desperately ill or just evil.
The Time Before that day she hadn’t known who Maddie and Lana really were, hadn’t recognized her enemies.
the reason that her portraits are so popular with those who value them—the sense that she has captured some aspect of the sitter’s being.
Over the years, Lana has often been bullied by the other patients, an easy target because of both her diminutive size and her youth.
When she looks at this photo, it appears to Lana as if someone has replaced the family she once knew with these imposters.
Amira has already pulled Missy’s coat up around Lana’s shoulders, and she decides to accept it, the other woman’s coat, which is black.
Not a black coat again!
If the Followers had gone through with the sacrifice, she supposes she would have heard by now; they would have found a body. No, she corrects herself, if they had gone through with it, He’d be here now, in the flesh. Something happened. Something went wrong.
Wait what!?
Perhaps she should have told Maddie who she was when she had the chance, not hidden behind her role as WorshipHIM36. But it was too risky.
Omg so I was right in a way. She was behind one alias on that site, just not the one I originally thought. So is it safe to assume she didn't realize the other user was her brother? Since technically he was working against her.
He left her for years, just disappeared. Then one day last fall, at bedtime, after lights-out, He returned. This time she didn’t feel afraid.
By now, she has amassed a considerable group of Followers, of believers, whom she monitors and communicates with as often as she can.
So she's orchestrated everything because, of course, she's still as delusional as ever. Good thing her brother is aware of the site and is keeping an eye on it in case it leads to an actual premeditated murder.
