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fuck that. im hooked. we hung out for a good long time the day before yesturday, just laughing about crazy people and in general getting to know each other. then, deanna and i went to grab a sandwich at the same cafe and i bumped into the most beautiful black man i have ever seen. he said he’d see me when i come back from germany. eheheheh and our waiter, nerti, from albania, hung out with us a bit and talked politics.

After paying a deposit and signing the lease, Amanda went to Berlin, and Deanna went home to Seattle. But after a few days at the Bundestag, things went wrong. Amanda walked out on her internship, leaving her uncle in the awkward situation of explaining why his American niece gave up such a hard-to-get opportunity. Her MySpace page on September 15, 2007, offers little real explanation:

i was in the way and they didnt need me there anyway. i called in the next morning and that was that. then i walked, and walked and walked and walked. all over berlin, for two whole days. it was great. i was supposed to pick up a bus on friday, so i spent wednesday and thursday wandering around berlin, seeing things, meeting people, drinking a glass of wine in a park near my apartment every night. fantastic. then i got back home to hamburg and found out i was in trouble with my uncle who ahd landed me the job at the bundestag in the first place. aparently he had to go to a lot of trouble to get me my spot there and everyone was confused as to what had happened to me. so i talked to him today and explain ed the mess, but not before freaking out and crying a little becaue i was afraid i made my uncle look bad in front of these very importan people. oops. to say the least.

Meanwhile, Meredith Kercher was planning her own Perugian adventure. As part of the ERASMUS program, she had more structure to her academic life and a built-in network of friends, but she had chosen to live on her own, instead of with a sponsor family or in a supervised dormitory. She, too, went to Perugia in late August looking for a place to live. She called a couple of places before finding the notice that Filomena had hung up the same day she met Amanda. Meredith, called “Mez” by close friends, already spoke good Italian and wanted to live in the community to hone her language skills. She moved into one of the back bedrooms before Amanda Knox returned from Germany.

The two Anglophone girls were instant friends. They spent a lot of time together in the first weeks and often stayed up late chatting about their lives and loves. But they were in different programs at different schools, so their circles began to diverge once Meredith started classes. She attended the ERASMUS orientation events and parties; Amanda found it hard to meet people. Meredith tried to include her housemate in gatherings with her new British friends, but Amanda didn’t fit in. They were put off by her loud voice and the way she always tried to be the center of attention. In the middle of a conversation, she would start singing at the top of her voice. The British girls were a far cry from her Seattle crowd, and Amanda seemed rough and crude to them. She spent a lot of time at Internet cafés and playing her guitar on the tiny terrace. She also realized she didn’t have enough money to carry her through the semester, so she started looking for work. Within a few days, she found a job at Le Chic, a funky reggae bar owned by Congolese immigrant Patrick Lumumba, forty-four.

Within a month, the relationship that began so warmly between two girls far from home had soured into the sort of chronic, low-level irritation that often afflicts roommates. The mystery that has riveted two continents since November 2, 2007—when Meredith’s slashed and battered body was found in their shared flat—was how and why the relationship deteriorated rapidly to the point of extreme violence. How is it possible that two well-brought-up young women became parties to such a grisly crime? What actually