"You're not going to murder me in the night, are you?" Emily asks.

"Haha. That's funny," I say.

Of course, I'm not going to murder her in the night. I need my laptop back first. That's the whole point of making friends with Emily Harper, author of the hugely successful novel Diary of an Octopus. So I could get into her apartment and take back what's mine.

Emily doesn't know who I really am. She thinks I'm her biggest fan, her new best friend who happens to need a place to stay for a few days. She doesn't realize the laptop she found-and took-from a busy airport almost two years ago, was mine.

I didn't care about the laptop, just what was on it: my diary.

The one I kept many years ago as a troubled thirteen-year-old girl with a vivid imagination and a flair for the dramatic. The diary Emily Harper has now published as her own.

She thinks it's a story about a schoolgirl's crush on her teacher, but she's wrong. It's a story about a murder. Two murders, if you count the hamster.

She thought it was okay to make a few changes and publish it under her own name, but she was wrong about that, too.

Because sometimes, truth is deadlier than fiction.