Synopsis  

17 year-old Stacy was found wrapped in a shower curtain, in her school’s flower bed, having last been seen alone at tennis practice. Marlon West, her classmate, is accused of her murder, based on the evidence of Stacy’s hair in his shower and sink drains. However, on the stand it is his 12 year-old sister, Hannah, who confesses to the crime.

What is known is that there were fake ‘out of order’ signs in the girls’ locker room, and the only non-labeled showerhead was packed with sodium, so that it exploded when Stacy used it. The explosion was big enough to cut Stacy, and she grabbed the shower curtain and ran off. In her panic, she fell down a flight of stairs and cracked her head open. The body was dragged to the flower bed, and Stacy’s car was left outside her boyfriend house, Scott Baird.

In an earlier confessional, Marlon explained that he hated Stacy, though everyone else at the school adored her. Hannah also disliked Stacy, mostly because Stacy harassed Hannah, who threw off the grading curve. Stacy pranked Hannah a couple times, before enlisting Scott to encourage Hannah to come to the Spring Formal and give her a dress from Stacy. At the dance, wearing the dress, the words ‘FLAT’ and ‘Rainbow Party!’ were written in ink that only showed up under the black light of the dance. Pictures were taken and Hannah was embarrassed on [www.myspace.com MySpace].

The blood found on Hannah’s shirt was her own, but the soil matched the flower garden. Nick and Sara explore the house while Sofia talks to the parents. The parents obviously prefer Hannah, to the point they ignore her brother. The siblings share the bathroom where Stacy’s hair was found, and while Marlon’s room has no evidence, Hannah’s has her award winning science fair project on elemental sodium.

While Hannah’s prints are on the shower curtain, Scott’s bloody prints are found on the car. The bloody prints were left over from Scott and Stacy’s first sexual experience; he’d wiped his hands under the seat.

Using Warrick’s wife’s niece, he Nick and Sara test the crime and determine it’s most likely the siblings committed it together, as Stacy would be too heavy for Hannah to drag. But Hannah claims to have used a cart to move the body, while Marlon sticks to his story. A pizza order to the West house at 9 P.M. (Stacy’s time of death), exonerates one of the two, but the delivery boy can’t remember which one answered the door.

The DA goes ahead with prosecuting Marlon, as Nick and Ecklie think he did it, and only Sara thinks it was Hannah. Marlon is found not guilty, and when he’s checked out of jail, Hannah and Sara talk. Sara’s worried about what will happen to Hannah, and Hannah says that no one cares about Marlon and how she can write a book about all this. Then she marvels at how people can see things that were never there, and confides to Sara: ‘I didn’t kill Stacy, Marlon did.’

Review  

Sara, a smart girl and the odd one out at her school, sympathizes with Hannah, and in the end, is played by the child genius.

Notes  

• While Sara is the only one of the team who believes that Hannah is the killer, she still lets the little girl ‘play’ her.

Quotes  

Sara: (reading what was written on Hannah’s dress) Rainbow party?
Nick: Yeah, it’s a party game where the boys get the girls to wear different colored lip sticks while they have oral sex. The boy with the most colors wins. It’s supposed to be trendy.
Sara: So much for spin the bottle.