In Case You Missed It

Gr 7 Up—Sammy Wallach is a goal-oriented teen who has monumental plans for the end of her junior year in high school. Lie to her parents and sneak out to the city to see her favorite band? Check. Finally get the boy of her dreams to ask her to prom? Check. Rock her driver's ed test? Check. Everything is falling into place, until her world comes crashing down right before her eyes. The bank her father runs is attacked by hackers who have an activist agenda and steal everything in her family's private cloud network, including Sammy's journal. As a result, her entire digital life—emails, texts, and photos—is exposed for everyone to see and read. Now Sammy's best friends aren't speaking to her because of things that she wrote. The boy of her dreams thinks she is desperate instead of flirty. As if that weren't bad enough, her parents find out all of the lies that she has been telling to get her way. But Sammy soon learns that she is not the only one in her family who has been keeping secrets, and that realization turns out to be more painful than the lies that she so desperately tried to keep hidden. This work may spark some interesting conversations on Internet safety and the ramifications of anonymous digital posting.