When Buffy gets home from the Bronze, Dawn is already asleep. The next morning, Joyce drops off Dawn at school first, as always.

While Buffy reassembles with her new friends in the library, Dawn is meeting a new friend at school, Shannon, who also lives in her same neighborhood.

Later, when her mom picks her from school, Joyce gets a call on her car phone from Principal Flutie, informing her that Buffy left school grounds without permission. Dawn knows this means Buffy is going to be in trouble and like any little sister who enjoys hearing their older sibling get in trouble, she later eavesdrops just outside of Buffy’s room and hears Joyce grounding her.

She runs off before her mom can see listening her outside of the room, but soon comes back to keep listening. This is why we don’t ever see her. Dawn hears Buffy opening a chest and shuffling things around inside. She hears the window open, which Dawn recognizes as the sound of Buffy sneaking out.

Once she hears Buffy go through the window, she sneaks inside Buffy’s room for some younger sister snooping. She sees the blue chest on the floor and opens it. Because Buffy didn’t put the fake top back in the chest before she closed it, Dawn sees an unreasonable amount of garlic, a gigantic container of communion wafers, crosses, and holy water. This confirms for Dawn that she has the weirdest sister on the planet. She ends the episode eating dinner with a stressed out Joyce before running off to her room to make another entry in the “Dawnmeister Chronicles,” while listening to the sound Joyce’s parenting cassette tapes playing in the background from downstairs.

In the morning, Dawn gets in the car with Joyce and Buffy so Joyce can drive them both to school. We know that Dawn gets dropped off first because when we see Joyce dropping off Buffy, there’s no one else in the car.

Buffy and Dawn have just moved to Sunnydale. Starting a new school in the middle of the year is always hard in a new place, but to make matters worse, Dawn’s mom and dad have just recently split, which made 10-year-old Dawn cry for a whole week. Undoubtedly, the move from LA to Sunnydale—several hours away from her dad—would drum up upsetting feelings from the divorce. So, when Dawn gets home from school, she goes straight to her room and straight into updating the Dawnmeister Chronicles—her diary that she’s been keeping for the last 3 years, which is why we don’t see her when Buffy and her mom have a conversation about going to the Bronze.