Projection (17 page)

Nick laughed. “I already know what it’s like to be Connor. It’s like walking around in a fog of stupidity all the time.”

Ariel laughed, too. She grabbed the back of his neck with both of her hands and pulled his face down toward hers,
kissing him hard.

It was almost eleven
o’clock when Ariel climbed back into the front seat of Nick’s car. But she couldn’t go home. She had to go to Jessica’s house.

“I left a book there,” she lied. “I need it for a paper I’m writing.”

Nick glanced anxiously at his watch. He couldn’t be late for his own eleven o’clock curfew or else his dad would make him sit out a practice.

“You don’t have to wait for me,” Ariel assured him. “Jessica can take me home. I don’t want you to be late.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “It’s fine.”

Still, minutes later, as she stood on Jessica’s porch, Nick sat in his idling car, waiting until Ariel was let inside.
Does he have to be such a gentleman?
she wondered impatiently. She waved him away, holding up her phone to indicate that she was texting Jessica to come downstairs, rather than ringing the doorbell, and that it might be a few minutes. When he finally left, Ariel waited another minute, then tiptoed away from Jessica’s front door and began the three block walk to Gretchen’s house. She sent Gretchen a text as she approached her family’s long, gated driveway.

Can u come outside? I need 2 talk 2 u. It’s imprtnt.

A few moments later, the black, wrought-iron gate swung open. Gretchen appeared barefoot in the driveway, wearing loose white pajama shorts and a white tank top. The path lights lining the driveway lit her from below, casting an eerie glow all around her. Ariel couldn’t help thinking that she looked like a ghost.

“I didn’t want to wake up your dad by ringing the bell,”
Ariel explained.

Gretchen didn’t say anything. She crossed her arms in front of her stomach.

“Um, I wanted to talk to you about, you know.”

Gretchen still said nothing.

Ariel pressed on. “I’m assuming Jessica told you that I know. About everything.”

“Jessica told me.” She looked Ariel up and down, scrutinizing every inch of her. Ariel sighed.

“Look, if you don’t want to talk to me, I understand, okay? I just came here to tell you that I’m sorry about what happened that summer. I’m sorry, and I went to Jessica because I wanted to help you. That’s it.” Ariel turned around and started walking back down the driveway. Clearly, things with Gretchen were more complicated than they were with Jessica.

“Jessica also told me you steal things.”

Ariel stopped walking. Slowly, she turned back around. “Yeah. So what? Are you going to turn me in?”

Gretchen shook her head. “No. I’m not going to turn you in.” She walked closer to Ariel until there were only a few feet between them. “I didn’t want her to tell you, you know. I thought she was crazy to trust you. But she swore you were different now. That you were dying of guilt.” She paused. “If you felt so guilty, then why weren’t you nice to me when I showed up at school?”

“I wanted to be!” Ariel pleaded. A dog barked from inside the house next door, and she lowered her voice to a frantic whisper. “Jessica told me not to talk to you. But I couldn’t do it anymore. That’s why I went to see her today. She must have told you that.”

“She told me. She had this idea to test you. If you stuck up
for me, then you passed.”

“And I did! I did stick up for you! I told her that I couldn’t stand seeing you that way anymore. I told her that I wanted to help you.”

Gretchen arched an eyebrow. “Took you long enough.”

Ariel raised her arms up in defeat. She felt tears spring to her eyes. She was about to turn around and walk away again, but Gretchen reached out and put a hand on her arm.

“It was the stealing that made me believe her about you. People who can afford to buy stuff only steal if they want to get caught.”

Ariel looked at the ground. She felt exposed and raw, and she could feel her cheeks turning red. She was glad for the darkness. “That’s exactly what my therapist says,” she muttered.

For the first time since the eighth grade, Ariel saw Gretchen smile.

Gretchen led Ariel around
to the backyard and stretched out on one of the lounge chairs around the pool. Ariel sat beside her.

“What’s it like?” Ariel asked, suddenly.

“It’s weird,” Gretchen answered, knowing exactly what Ariel was referring to. “All of your calibrations are thrown off. You get used to a certain way of walking, of talking, you have an unconscious sense of where your arms and legs end, of how tall you are. And then, suddenly, it’s all different, and you’re, like, hyperaware of things you never even noticed before. The first time I was Jessica I almost tripped a hundred times because I wasn’t used to having legs that long. But mostly, the weirdest thing is that you forget you’re the other person. Because your thoughts are still yours, you
know? So you’ll be talking to someone, and you’ll start to refer to yourself, and you really have to force yourself to call yourself by your name instead of saying ‘me.’ Do you know what I mean?”

Ariel nodded, even though in truth she had no idea what Gretchen
truly
meant. But she had an inkling. “Like that day, at the Club. You were Jessica, but you were still talking like yourself. I always thought that conversation was so strange. Now I know why.”

Gretchen didn’t reply, and Ariel sensed that maybe she shouldn’t have brought that up quite so soon. She quickly steered the conversation in a different direction.

“Are you still in the Oculus Society?” she asked.

“Technically, I’m a member for life.” Gretchen snorted. “But no, I don’t go to meetings or events anymore, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s too hard to be around all of those happy mothers and daughters. And besides, the whole thing kind of fell apart anyway.”

“What do you mean? A lot of the girls at school are still members, and it seems like they have parties every other week.”

“They do. I mean, they still exist. It’s just … it kind of lost its purpose.” She gave Ariel a sharp look. “I thought Jessica explained this to you.”

Ariel felt like she’d suddenly been put on the defensive. Instinctively, she held her hands out. “She explained to me that the Oculus Society guarded the secret, and that it’s been passed down since the early years of the Roman Empire. She explained about that guy, Plotinus, and Jemima—”

“
Gem-ee-na
,” Gretchen corrected.

“Right, Gemina. Anyway, she told me all of that. But she didn’t say anything about what the Oculus Society is
doing now.”

Gretchen sighed. She seemed annoyed with Jessica for leaving this task to her. “Did she tell you about the anklet?”

Ariel shook her head.

“The night my mother was murdered, she was wearing an anklet. It originally belonged to Gemina. Well, actually, it belonged to Gemina’s best friend, Amphiclea. But anyway, when they found her, the anklet was gone. The Oculus Society believes that you can’t project without it. They looked for it at first—they called my dad, they sent some people over to look through our yard—but they came up empty. So they stopped the tradition of projecting altogether. As far as the Oculus Society is concerned, their secret agenda died with my mother. Now they just do philanthropy. Now it’s just what people always believed it to be: a stupid social club for rich people who want to feel good about themselves, an after school activity that people put on their college applications.”

Ariel sucked in her breath. “So they don’t know that you and Jessica can project without the anklet?”

“No!” Gretchen glanced up at her house’s darkened windows. “And they can’t find out, either. That’s why it’s such a big secret. That’s why everyone needs to think that Jessica and I were making out for real on that video, that we were involved and that she dumped me and that I was heartbroken or whatever. It’s why I had to go away, and it’s why I have to pretend that I’m damaged goods now that I’m back.”

When Ariel didn’t respond, Gretchen stared hard at her.

“I don’t understand,” Ariel admitted after a moment. “Why can’t you tell them? Why not reinstate the tradition without the anklet?”

Gretchen lowered her voice so that Ariel could barely even
hear her. “Because if they find out, they’ll take me out of the loop. They all think I was institutionalized. They’ll say I’m unstable, and they’ll make Jessica project with someone else.” She frowned. “Probably her aunt.”

Ariel opened her mouth to speak, but then thought better of it.

“What?” Gretchen asked. “What were you going to say?”

Ariel couldn’t meet Gretchen’s eyes. She looked down at a piece of dirt on the lounge chair. “Were you really not in an institution? I mean, Jessica told me that you guys were at the same school and that you weren’t—you know—but I just …”

“You just really thought that I was?” Gretchen asked.

Ariel nodded, still looking at the dirt.

“Well, I wasn’t. I went to boarding school with Jessica in England.”

“But what about summers and Christmas? You must have had breaks. How is it that you never came home?”

“I didn’t want to be here, Ariel,” Gretchen said with a sigh. “Neither did Jess. And luckily my dad understood. Michelle was just grateful not to have Jess around. In the summers, we both went to sleepaway camps on the East Coast, and during Christmas, my dad came out and visited us.” She shrugged. “It really wasn’t all that hard to stay away.”

Ariel raised her eyebrows. “So did the two of you project a lot while you were away? Did you, like, walk around England in each other’s bodies?”

“No. There wasn’t any reason to do any of that over there.”

Ariel’s head was starting to throb. Once, when she was in fifth grade, she’d gone into a corn maze at a pumpkin patch, and she wasn’t able to find her way out. She’d turned into
every pathway, only to come upon dead end after dead end. This conversation was starting to make her feel exactly the same way.

“Then why do you need to do it here? What am I missing?”

Gretchen threw her hands up. “I need to find out who killed my mother!” The dog barked again, and she lowered her voice. “Nobody’s going to talk to me about it. Being Jessica is the best chance I have of finding the murderer.” Tears started rolling down her cheeks. “Does
that
make sense to you?”

Ariel swallowed. She’d been so focused on the guilt she was feeling over the video and so worried that Gretchen was going to tell people about what she’d done, she hadn’t even stopped to consider that Gretchen might be obsessing over something else entirely.
Way to be self-absorbed, Ariel
, she thought to herself. But then she had another thought, one that horrified her to her core.

“You don’t still think that I had something to do with that, do you?” she asked softly. She held her breath as she waited for the answer.

“No,” Gretchen said, wiping the tears away. “Of course not.”

Ariel exhaled. But her mind drifted to those texts that Gretchen used to send her, texts she still had stored in her phone just in case she ever needed to prove that Gretchen had started the whole thing between them.
It makes sense
, she thought with a shudder.
If she still thinks I killed her mother, that would explain why she wants me involved in this. What’s that saying? “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?” You can’t get much closer than taking over another person’s body
.

“If you don’t think I killed your mom, then why do you
and Jessica want to include me in this, Gretchen?” she asked.

Gretchen took in the blank look on Ariel’s face and sighed again. “There were three from the very beginning. When Plotinus taught Gemina how to project, he made her include Amphiclea. To be the witness.”

“The witness?”

“In case something went wrong, there had to be a third person who knew the truth and who would make sure that no matter what, the two who projected would be able to get back to their rightful bodies.”

Slowly the realization dawned on Ariel. “So you want me to be the witness.”

“Well, we want you to be
a
witness. The Oculus Society didn’t do it this way, but there’s no reason why Jessica can’t project with you, too. As long as one of us acts as the witness each time, it doesn’t matter whether it’s you or me.”

“But who was your witness before? Why can’t that person do it again?”

“We didn’t have one before. We were just messing around then, to see if it even worked. But now …” Ariel finished her thought. “Now that you’re investigating a murder.”

Gretchen’s lips closed into a thin line. “It seems like the smart thing to do.”

“But why me?” Ariel still didn’t understand why, of all people, they would choose to trust
her
with a secret this big.

“Well, to be honest, Ariel, we didn’t think that Jessica would actually become friends with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the idea was to blackmail you. You know, you keep our secret, we’ll keep yours? I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want anyone to know that you were the one who made that
video of us, right?”

The blood rushed out of Ariel’s head, making her feel momentarily dizzy.
They’ve been planning this all along
, she realized.
They’ve been counting on me to be their third since the day that video went viral
. “So, let me see if I have this straight. The two of you coincidentally show up back in Delphi at the same time. You pretend to be a psycho, and Jessica uses me in order to become popular again. She pretends to be my friend, and then when I least expect it, she springs this … this blackmail, on me? Was that the plan?”

Gretchen nodded coldly. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

“But you’re saying that somewhere along the line, things changed. You’re saying that Jessica really does like me, and that now the two of you want me in this for real.”

“That’s what I’m saying, yes.”

Ariel chewed on this for a moment or two. Her mind was going a million miles a minute as she calculated the many different ways they could be manipulating her.