Watching from the kitchen window when Jackie came home from school, Megan took notes on everything her big sister did, and what she did was really strange.
Jackie, who always came in, said hi to Trebuchet (or used to), and then went to her room to do her homework, went instead to the backyard. She made a beeline for The Wall and started picking up different rocks at the base of the fence and shaking them. She had a very serious look on her face, like she was searching for something important. After a minute, Jackie picked up a large, off-color rock, shook it, and smiled. She looked around, like she wanted to make sure no one was watching, and carried the rock back into the house.
When Jackie walked through the door from the backyard, hiding the rock under her shirt, she didn’t even notice Megan skulking behind the ficus tree in the dining room. She bounded up the stairs, went right into the bathroom, and closed the door. Megan crept to the door just in time to hear the shower curtain move, like Jackie was taking a shower.
Recording every last detail in her notebook, Megan retreated to the hallway outside Jackie’s room and waited. It was a full five minutes before Jackie showed up.
“Hey,” she said to Megan.
“Hey,” Megan said back. “What are you up to?” She tried to sound casual but could tell by the look on Jackie’s face that it hadn’t worked.
“Nothing.” With that, Jackie went into her bedroom and shut the door.
Megan sprang up and ran to the bathroom. There was no sign of the rock anywhere. Just some cut-up cardboard in the garbage can. She added it to her notes and went back to her own room, where she sat on her bed and tried to figure out what her sister was doing. After a while, her attention drifted, and she dozed off, dreaming about how famous she would become. She didn’t think her notes revealed anything terribly clever or insightful, so she never gave them to Ethan.
Later that night, as the family sat gathered around Jared’s makeshift hospital bed to watch Life and Death, Megan could scarcely contain her anxiety. With the rest of the family on strike, the entire episode revolved around her—her day at school, her wardrobe, and her feelings about her father’s illness. Other than Jared’s momentary and inexplicable bout of blindness, which was teased in every commercial break and held for the end of the show, this was Megan’s hour.
She had hoped Ethan was right, that her mother would see how good it was for Megan to participate, but those hopes were dashed at the first commercial break when no one in her family so much as looked at her. “Mom?” Megan asked. But Deirdre didn’t respond.
By the second commercial break, Jared had fallen asleep. During the third commercial break, Jackie had left the room shaking her head.
By the time it ended, only Megan and her mother were watching.
When the last of the credits scrolled off the screen and faded into a commercial break, Deirdre used the remote to turn the television off. She choked back a sob, said, “It’s okay, honey, I forgive you,” and left the room, too.
“Forgive me?” Megan said out loud, her only company her sleeping father. Her voice tried to sound confused, but her heart was thoroughly ashamed. Megan used the TiVo to roll the show back to the beginning and watched it again in its entirety, never moving from her father’s side. By the time it was over, she thought she might throw up.
***
Max couldn’t believe it. The plan had worked perfectly. Deirdre had retrieved Jackie’s confiscated cell phone on the way out of the house—“If she’s not allowed to use it, at least let me try to get my money back,” she had told Andersona—and dropped it off at school per Jackie’s instructions. Jackie gave the phone to Jason Sanderson, who tucked it inside a cardboard rock he “borrowed” from the school’s drama department. That night, while all of America, including everyone in the Stone household, was watching Life and Death, Jason rode his bike to Jackie’s house and threw the rock over the seven-foot-high fence into the backyard. Jackie retrieved it the next day.
Now Max was looking at fifteen minutes of brand-new footage. He was giddy.
With the crew on strict orders to stop Jackie from filming, capturing footage had become much more difficult, but the assembled group in Azeroth anticipated this. The guild counted among its members two East Coast television editors—one worked at Lifetime, the other at TLC. Using a floor plan of the Stone household provided by Jackie, the two editors analyzed five episodes of Life and Death, noting camera angles and edits. They used the information to identify what they believed were enough blind spots for Jackie to remain hidden while filming.
The footage wasn’t as good or explosive as the earlier episodes, and it was all taken in a relatively short window of time, but it was enough for Max to work with. The real magic was in the voice-over.
Jackie and Max wrote it together, and she recorded it while she was in the computer lab at school. It was a poignant plea from Jackie to the American viewing public to let her father die with dignity: