Dawne eats her way through dinner paying no attention to the world around her.  Only her brother really notices her absence from the conversations.
“What’s going on, sis? You seem distracted,” he asks her after dinner.
“Oh, it's nothing.  I was just thinking about Faith,” she says hoping she won’t have to lie.  Faith was always the one to come up with a clever lie to get them out of trouble.  Thinking about Faith and lying reminds her of when the two of them became friends.
It obviously started with a lie. It also started with arch enemies, like all perfect friendships.
The two girls had met in kindergarden and decided the moment they saw each other that they were going to hate each other.  Neither of them remembered why, but it just kind of happened that way.  One day on the playground their unreasoned hate was unleashed.  It started with name calling, but quickly escalated when Faith sent her little five year old fist flying and punched Dawne in the face.  Dawne, never being one to show much restraint, did the first thing that came into her mind and punched Faith back, and it would have continued that way had a teacher not intervened.  Faith immediately pulled an excuse out of thin air. 
“We were just fake fighting.  We want to be stunt doubles when we grow up,” Faith had said.  The teacher, not believing this, turned to Dawne.
“Yeah, I’m gonna be famous!” Dawne added.  This excuse didn’t fly at all, and they ended up in the office.  After that Faith’s lies got a lot better, and they had been friends ever since.
“Dawne?” her brother says snapping her back to the present.
“What?” She asks.
“I said, I’m sure they’ll find Faith, don’t worry,” her brother says sounding reasonably annoyed for having to repeat himself. 
Later in her room she stares at the journal.  She hasn’t opened it yet because of dinner.  Now that she finally has the chance to she isn’t sure she wants to open the journal.  What if in the journal is Faith’s location? Then she would finally have to decide.  Swallowing her fear she unlocks it and lets it fall open on her lap.  Paging through the journal Dawne finds that the first page is the only one to hold writing.  She turns to the first page to find that the writing isn’t even English.  It's just some weird symbols. 
I always knew I was the dumb one in this friendship, she thinks.  To spite her negativity she is on her computer in a second researching code upon code trying to find the one her friend used.  She still hasn’t found the code by the time her parents tell her lights out, and by midnight she is ready to give up.  Then she finds a website that describes how a thing called frequency analytics can be used to break almost any written code.  It takes her hours, but she finally manages to decipher the first two words of the code.  These two words are the key to the rest, and she is done.  The code says, go to the ghost tree.  Even though she cracks the code, she still has no idea of what it means. Dawne decides to save that until she actually gets some sleep.
Although she only got a hour of sleep, Dawne manages to sneak enough coffee to be able to pull off the facade of alertness.  She doesn’t let herself waste anymore time sleeping, although she dearly wants to.  Dawne knows she only has today and tomorrow to find an unknown number of clues.  She focuses all of her attention on the clue at hand.  What is the ghost tree? she thinks.  Then it dawns on her like the sun rising for the first time in months after an arctic winter.  She must have been to tired to remember the night before, but now jacked up on caffeine she remembers the tree between her and Faith’s house that made eerie creaking noises whenever the wind blew hard enough.  Faith had discovered it one windy autumn, and the two of them had always disagreed whether to call it the haunted tree or the ghost tree.  That old tree holds the next clue, and Dawne knows it.
It takes a bit to convince her parents to let her go out into the woods, but Dawne manages just fine.  Once she was out of the house, Dawne runs along the faint, almost unnoticeable trails she and Faith had made until she reaches the ghost tree.  Getting there was no problem, but finding the clue is another matter.  Dawne knows Faith wouldn’t have left the clue out for anybody to see, so she climbs up to her crazy friend’s favorite perch.  Seeing nothing and realizing that the clue was meant for her, Dawne climbs over to her own favorite spot.  It takes her a moment, but she notices that most of the trees in front of her have carvings on them.  When she moves to see more, the carvings line up to form a clue.  The clue says para then it shows three dice and an arrow pointing up.  It takes her a minute to catch on to it’s meaning.  The three dice and para means paradise, and the arrow makes the statement mean above paradise, she thinks.  Dawne knows exactly where that was, and she also for some reason knows that that is where Faith is going to be.  The only thing left was to decide whether or not to go.  Yet, she also knows the answer to that too.  Through this whole process Dawne has learned Faith truly knew her better than anyone else.  Dawne has also realized that she misses Faith more than she would miss her family.  She knows that she will never forgive herself if she doesn’t go to Faith, so that’s what she decides to do. 
As soon as she gets back home, she quickly packs up everything she will need, which isn’t much.  That night as soon as everyone else falls asleep she sneaks out of her room, and out of the house.  The sun is rising when she hears the gurgle of the river that the duo had named paradise, yet that is not all Dawne hears.  The faint barking of dogs and stomping of heavy feet mar the beautiful sound of Paradise.  In a heartbeat Dawne is running before her brain can even consciously register that it is the police trying to track her down.  Once she understands the parameters of the situation, she quickly changes direction away from the hill where Faith wanted to meet her.  While Dawne doesn’t want to get caught, she wants even less for her friend to get caught.  Remembering back to what she knows about tracking dogs, she recognizes that she can’t outrun them and that they aren’t likely to lose her scent if she stays on the ground.  With this knowledge Dawne makes a bold decision, and she scampers up the nearest tree.  Normally this would have ultimately ended with the person being caught, but Dawne is a bit smarter than  your average person.  She knows that her scent trail will lead to the tree, but if she can get far enough away from the tree before she goes back down, her trail will have too far of a gap for the dog to find it again.  Dawne jumps to the closest tree and just barely makes it, and then she jumps to the next, and the next until she is about 20 yards away.  She jumps down and keeps running. 
It’s about noon when she stops, exhausted.  Dawne is sure she lost the police, but she isn’t sure where she is or how to get back to Paradise.  Praying she has a good sense of direction, Dawne back tracks to the best of her ability.  The sun has set by the time she finds a river, but even in the dark she can tell that it’s Paradise.  Even Dawne’s exhaustion is not enough to keep her from climbing up the hill next to the river.  As the clearing on top of the hill comes into view, so does the fact that nobody is there.  Faith must have left already, Dawne thinks completely devastated.  About to cry, she looks up at the stars and relizes that just because Faith isn’t here doesn’t mean she can’t find her.  I got this far didn’t I, she thinks.