It is now 2025, six months or so after Lauren’s last entries. A three-year-old resident, Amy Dunn, set a fire in her family’s garage, but the fire was put out quickly. To help combat the girl’s neglect, Lauren gets Cory to allow Amy to go to school, even though she’s young. Mrs. Sims’s cousins, Wardell Parrish and Rosalee Payne, have come by to get their inheritance: her house. However, Lauren doesn’t trust them.

Lauren, her father, her best friend Joanne Garfield, Curtis Talcott, and a few others go into the hills for target practice. Lauren explains that her father is the reason they pay so much attention to firearms. He carries a 9-millimeter pistol whenever he leaves the neighborhood. He and Cory also have other weapons, which they keep in good condition. He also pushes the neighborhood association members to keep weapons and to know how to use them, reminding them that the police “may be able to avenge you but they can’t protect you” (48). It has become a rite of passage for the teenagers in the area to learn to shoot.

During this trip into a canyon, Lauren encounters a feral dog.