- The narrator is at a new school called Rothborne, which is a boarding school; it's his junior year of high school.
- He hopes coming here will put a lot of weird stuff that happened in his hometown of Steepleton behind him; he doesn't want to think about that stuff, and he had a hard time at the beginning of the year. But now that he has friends it's okay.
- His roommate, Cartright, isn't too bad, but he thinks it's hard to have a roommate if you can't sleep well because of nightmares and things.
- Our narrator has a ponytail with stuff like a feather and shell dangling from it, which the girls bother him about, wondering why he won't just cut his hair and look normal; the guys pretty much just accept him, though.
- A week earlier, Leo from down the hall barges into his room; the narrator thinks he is weird, and possibly gay, based on the way he stares at guys.
- When Leo barges in without knocking on the door, the narrator clicks off of his computer screen so that he doesn't see a letter he's writing that holds his secrets about Steepleton.
- Leo pokes around and asks him questions and is basically really nosy, but the narrator, named Torey, doesn't want to talk to him.
- Then Leo says Torey plays the guitar well, and the narrator begins thinking about how weird it is that at his new school the kids and music teacher think he's so good, but back home in Steepleton, nobody cared that he played guitar.
- We learn that Torey can also play football and baseball, and that his parents are an engineer and a lawyer.
- Leo wants to touch his guitar, but Torey feels uncomfortable about this and has a flashback to someone with a bloody nose grinning, which he seems to think about once a week.
- Then Torey thinks about how much people around Rothborne didn't like Leo, thinking he must be gay, which apparently is okay, but only if a person's out about it. Judgey, right? Anyway, Torey considers whether he himself might be gay.
- Challenging Torey, Leo asks what he was doing in the room before he came in, so Torey challenges him right back, telling this dude that he is nosey.
- Leo says that people think he's weird, but they shouldn't use that word because everyone is weird at their age.
- Considering whether he is gay or not, Torey realizes that what actually bothers him about Leo is the fact that he reminds him of Chris Creed, a guy he'd known his whole life and punched in sixth grade.
- It hits him that the feelings he is having have nothing to do with sex, but instead are all about wanting so badly to find Chris, so he tells himself that Leo is not Chris.
- Things get seriously uncomfortable and dark as Torey wishes he could lose his memory so he wouldn't be so afraid of someone asking him if he really fell on a dead body in the woods.
- Leo reaches over and tries to pull up the page on the computer screen that Torey was looking at, and Torey tells him that he needs to knock before barging in and not ask questions if it seems like the person doesn't want to talk.
- Leo gets offended and acts like he hasn't done anything wrong, but Torey doesn't let him off the hook—he tells him to stop lying to himself about it being okay to be different, and that it is not okay to bother people.
- Leo leaves and Torey thinks that he isn't even as bad as Chris was.
- Then he pulls up the page on his computer. It is a letter and an attachment called Creed.doc.
- The email he is about to send is kind of ambiguous and basically says the attachment is about Chris Creed's disappearance.
- Torey considers whether to read his Creed.doc, since he hasn't read it in since he wrote it a year ago.
- Recalling how his therapist, Dr. Fahdi, told him to write it all down to help feel better, Torey thinks that writing it did get a load off his chest, but it didn't help him find peace. In order to do that, he had to leave Steepleton and all the people watching him.
- We learn that this document has been sent out eighty times, although we don't know to whom.
- After pausing and not sending the email, but thinking about what it says about the whole bizarre mess that surrounded Chris Creed's disappearance—like that there was no evidence—he finally decides to send it.