Kyle and I are thinking about going to Appaloosa Plains to visit Kayleigh and to watch her compete in this show-jumping competition there. Ever since she and AJ broke up she went back home and went back to doing what she loves best. It sucks that my brother broke her heart, but she's trying to pick up the pieces as best she can. Psst - I wanted them to be together.
But anyway, back to my sister. Mom and Dad had to come to campus because she'd been arrested for spray-painting on the walls of one of the buildings on campus. They brought in her therapist and a counselor. And the next day there was a closed-door meeting with just them, the counselor, and the university president. Which left me with Sierra.
So Sierra and I were having a grand sisterly time at Barnstormer's, eating pizzas and lasagna and pretty much being sisters, and out of the blue she drops this bombshell:
"Sage, I did hack into the computers at Fort Starch."
Now, I had heard that she was accused of hacking into their network, but I wasn't sure if she would actually be capable of it. To hear these things out of my little sister's mouth was just jarring.
"What? You did what? You hacked into the computers? Why, Sierra?" I asked with disbelief. "Why'd you do it?"
Sierra gave me this Cheshire-cat grin. She was completely unrepentant. "I wanted to see if I could. It wasn't hard at all to do."
"Sierra, do you realize that's a classified military network?"
"So," Sierra replied as she shrugged her massive shoulders.
"Do you realize you've just admitted to a federal offense? You could go to jail for a long time for doing what you've admitted to doing."
"I'm doing them a service," she reasoned, laughing. "If a teenage girl can get in, it's not that secure."
While I ate my vegetarian lasagna, I grappled with the idea of my little sister being a hacker. It's difficult to believe anything Sierra says because she tells so many tall tales and she'll lie like it's nothing. But it's hard for me not to at least consider that she might have actually done this. I don't know what she is capable of anymore. And that frightens me.
It just seems like the older Sierra gets, the stranger her behavior gets. Even when she was little, she was doing stuff that made me shake my head. We can't chalk it up anymore to just teen angst and rebellion. And she pretty much doesn't give a darn.
There's a part of me that's like, wow, she's really fearless. I wish I could be that way. But there's another part of me that says, there's something really wrong here.
Sierra claims to have been abducted by aliens while we were living in Moonlight Falls. And then there are all the shenanigans in college. Now she claims to have hacked into Fort Starch's computers.
Unlike my brother AJ, who hated Fort Starch with every fiber of his being, Sierra LOVED it. She was like a kid in a candy store with all the electronic toys she got to play with. The day she got there, she posted a pic of herself on social media making a bomb. She loved all the physical exercise, the regimented schedule, and, apparently, hacking into their computers. She even got a nickname while she was there - "Sierra the Terror."
I also grappled with the idea of notifying Mom and Dad. She's my sister and I love her. But she's admitted to a crime.
What should I do?
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