Projection (28 page)

“When is he doing this?” Jessica asked. “When is he leaving her?”

“Monday. I’m supposed to meet him at the bank right after school to transfer the money, and then he’s taking off.”

“Are you going to?” Jessica held her breath as she waited for him to answer.

“What choice do I have? I either help him to commit a fraud that nobody will probably ever find out about. Or I don’t, and he ruins my lacrosse career and my chances at getting into a decent college. What would you do?”

Jessica lifted her head up and pressed her body against his. “I’d go to the bank,” she whispered in his ear.

Gretchen and Ariel were
waiting for her in the backyard. Ariel nearly pounced on her as she approached. “Well? Did you get what you needed?”

Jessica felt a little unsteady on her feet—Ariel’s feet—as she grappled with the emotions that were just now starting to hit her. She hadn’t known Rob at all. Everything she’d built him up to be was a lie. He was a fake, a fraud, and worst of all, she was pretty sure that he was a murderer. But she’d been right about one thing: he was smarter than he looked. A hell of a lot cleverer than she’d ever given him credit for, in fact.

“Jess,” Gretchen said, looking carefully at her. “Are you okay?”

She sat down on the stacked bluestone that ran along the edge of the patio and leaned forward so that her head was parallel to the ground. Ariel’s thick blonde hair fell like a curtain around her face. “Yeah. I’m okay.” She glanced around
at the yard, making sure no one else was in earshot of them. “Come on,” she said, standing up and walking back toward the garbage area, motioning for them to follow her. “We need to switch back. Now.”

Jessica couldn’t kiss Ariel fast enough; her heart was pounding and she was starting to sweat as she thought about Plotinus and Gemina.
What must that have been like for her?
she wondered.
How did she survive it?
But Jessica knew that she’d never be able to clear her mind enough to project if she kept dwelling on it; she shook her head to try to make the thought go away.

“
Écho exorísei aíma egó dió xei ostó n, proválloun ti n psychí mou se állo spíti
.”

Jessica felt the strange, overwhelming warmth rush into her throat and spread out through the rest of her body. She exhaled.
Thank God
.

When she opened her eyes, Ariel was staring back at her with a relieved expression on her face. “Never again,” she affirmed.

“Agreed,” Jessica responded.

“So, did Nick tell you what you wanted to know?” she asked.

Jessica bit the skin around her thumbnail.
Her
thumbnail. “Yes,” she said.

“And what do you think?” Gretchen asked.

She met Gretchen’s eye and held her gaze, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud. Gretchen’s face seemed to crumple before her eyes.

“You really think he did it?” she asked. The words came out sounding choked. Ariel put her arm around Gretchen’s shoulder as Jessica nodded.

“And I think I know how we can catch him,” she said quietly. “But we’re going to have to tell Michelle about everything. We can’t do this without her.”

Ariel took a small step forward. “Well, let’s go get her, then.”

The teepee was not
designed for four. If it hadn’t been for the circle of night sky that appeared through the top of the curved roof, Jessica would have been too claustrophobic to stay inside. As it was, her left knee was practically on top of Michelle’s right one, and her right one was smushed under Gretchen’s left, as if they were lasagna noodles layered in a casserole dish.

Of course, they’d prepped Michelle in the car.

We’re going to tell you some things
, Jessica had explained,
and you’re going to be mad. But just try to remember that we were only trying to do what was right
.

And Michelle had agreed to be open-minded. She’d promised to listen to the whole story before she said anything or made any judgments. But now that they were actually explaining it to her in this tiny space—where the kissing crime had occurred, no less—Jessica realized that Michelle was going to be furious on many, many levels. No matter what. She was starting to wish that she
had
gotten stuck in Ariel’s body after all.

“It all started with the meeting where they told me about the Plotinus Ability,” Jessica explained, keeping her eyes on her flats, crossed in front of her in the darkness. “I did some research afterwards, and I read something about how the anklet might not have any power, it might just be part of the ritual. So I wanted to see if it was true. Plus, Gretchen and I thought that if we could just be each other for a little bit, we might be able to snoop around and figure out who might have killed her mom.”

Michelle blanched. “And who were you planning on snooping on?”

Jessica gnawed on the skin around her nails.

“Ariel,” Gretchen said, stepping in. “I saw her at my party that night, and I was convinced that she had something to do with killing my mom.”

“I never went in the house, though,” Ariel said, quickly. “I just looked through the window, and then I ran away. But Gretchen didn’t know that.”

Michelle narrowed her eyes. “
That
was your suspect? A thirteen-year-old girl who crashed a graduation party?”

All three of the girls looked down at the floor.

“Well,” Jessica said, in a meek, apologetic voice. “We might have also suspected you.”

Michelle recoiled, as if an invisible force had pushed her shoulders back. “Me! You thought
I
killed Gretchen’s mom? Why? Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know!” Jessica shouted. “You were so insistent about Gretchen not being the leader, and then you volunteered to take her place … I’m sorry, okay? It just seemed suspicious at the time.”

“But I told you where I was when she was killed!” Michelle yelled back. She caught herself and glanced at the other girls. Jessica knew that she was wondering whether or not they knew about her affair with Mike.

“Actually,” Gretchen said calmly, “you told me.”

Michelle’s mouth fell open. Her eyes got huge, and her cheeks turned bright red. She blinked three or four times in a row. “It worked? It actually worked?”

Jessica and Gretchen nodded.

Michelle slumped against the back of the teepee, shaking her head as she spoke her thoughts out loud. “I always thought it was just a metaphor for the Oculus Society’s power. I only wanted to be the leader because I thought it would give
me more cache. I never actually thought it was real.” She focused on Jessica, her eyes suddenly full with understanding. “Oh, my God. That video. Was that the two of you …”

“Yeah,” Jessica answered.

Michelle sat up with a jolt, as if she’d just remembered that she was supposed to be angry. “Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell anyone in the Oculus Society?”

“We couldn’t,” Gretchen pleaded. “They would have made us stop, and I needed to do it. I needed to try to figure out who killed my mom.”

“Then what about her?” Michelle asked, pointing at Ariel. “What does she have to do with any of this now?”

“She’s been projecting with us,” Jessica said, trying not to wince. Best just to plow forward. And so she went on—all the way through the entire two years of scheming, the plan that she and Gretchen had cooked up at boarding school, and how it had all fallen apart since they’d been back.

When she was finished, Michelle squeezed her head with both hands, as if she were trying to steady her brain. “So, let me get this straight: she videotapes you projecting and runs you out of town. You two come back and pretend to hate each other all this time. But really, you’re in cahoots with each other to find proof that Ariel committed the murder. And in order to get the proof you need, you bring her in to project with you. But now you don’t think she did it anymore. Do I have that right?”

They looked at each other and nodded. Jessica wondered if she looked as sick and embarrassed as her friends. “More or less,” Jessica answered.

Michelle flashed a brittle smile. “Great. So, you”—she pointed at Jessica—“are grounded for, like, the rest of your life.”

Jessica’s stomach dropped. “What? Why?”

“Why? Shit, Jessica! You let me think that she was you, and I don’t even know her! Who knows what I might have said if we’d been alone? What if that had been her, tonight, when I came in your room?” She shook her head. “And you’re going to get kicked out of the Oculus Society for sure—”

Ariel cleared her throat.

“
What
?” Michelle spat.

“Um, I understand that you’re upset, but I think you’re kind of missing the point.”

Oh, God
, Jessica thought.
This should be interesting
.

Michelle smiled in mock amusement. “Really, dear?” she asked. “And what point is that exactly?”

Ariel gave her a skewering look.

You’ve got to hand it to her
, Jessica thought.
This girl cannot be intimidated
.

“The point is not what happened before, but what’s happening now,” Ariel said. “It’s only because they projected—with an
outsider
—that Gretchen and Jessica were able to uncover things that the police couldn’t. Things that not even your private investigator could find.”

Michelle didn’t say anything. Jessica couldn’t believe it. She’d never seen anyone render Michelle speechless before.

“What kinds of things?” she finally asked.

Ariel opened her palm in Jessica’s direction, ceding the floor back to her. Jessica took a deep breath. “I think there’s more to Rob leaving you than you think,” Ariel said.

Michelle’s eyes widened. “You told them?” she asked angrily. “You told them he’s leaving me?”

“Listen, Michelle,” Jessica pleaded. “Just listen, okay?”

Michelle crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Okay. But this had better be
really
good, or I will think of punishments for you that you didn’t even know existed.”

Jessica took a deep breath. “So, I was doing research about Plotinus today for the project that Tina assigned to us. Anyway, he wrote in his diary about how he and Gemina were planning to project, and then right afterwards, Gemina gets thrown in jail for treason—I don’t know why—and she gets executed. And after that Plotinus stops writing in his diary, after writing in it every day for years, and suddenly there are accounts of him acting schizophrenic and behaving like he’s someone else.”

“Wait, what?” Michelle asked. Jessica could practically see the wheels turning in her head as she put the pieces together. “Do you think …?”

Jessica finished her thought. “Yes. I think they got stuck in each other’s bodies, either by accident or on purpose, it doesn’t matter. But it got me thinking, what if that happened to one of us? What if we projected, and we couldn’t switch back? We’d have to live out the rest of our lives as someone else. It would be awful. Unless—”

Ariel’s face went pale. “Unless you wanted to escape your life.”

Jessica touched her index finger to the end of her nose. “Bingo.”

“Oh, my God,” Ariel whispered. “But it won’t work, right? The anklet isn’t enough to make it work. Not by itself.”

Michelle’s ears perked up at the mention of the anklet. “I’m not really following all of this, but do you know where the anklet is?”

Jessica sighed. She didn’t know how to put this delicately, so she wasn’t even going to try. “I think Rob has the anklet. I think he killed Gretchen’s mom for it.”

Michelle scoffed. “You think Rob killed Octavia? Come on, Jessica, that’s ridiculous. He might be an asshole, but he wouldn’t murder someone any more than I would.”

“Actually, I think he would.”

Michelle stared at her, disbelief moving across her face like clouds crossing in front of the sun. “Are you serious?”

She nodded. “Listen, he knew who Plotinus was. He mentioned him to me this afternoon when I said I was doing research on the history of the Oculus Society. I was surprised, and I asked him how he knew about that.”

“And what did he say?” Michelle asked.

“He said he remembered hearing the name at my eighth grade graduation. And that the graduation program explained who Plotinus was. But I checked the program, remember? I looked at it while you were in my room.”

“It didn’t explain …” Michelle’s voice faltered.

“No, it didn’t. So he must have looked it up on his own. Look, I think it probably started out innocently. At graduation, he saw Mrs. Harris give Gretchen the Plotinus Award, and it piqued his interest. You know: a secret society that all of the women in his life are members of but that he can’t know anything about? It must have driven him crazy. So he hears about this Plotinus Award, and he thinks, what’s Plotinus? Maybe it’ll give me some clues about what they do over there …”

Jessica paused. Together in this tiny plastic teepee, with only the moonlight and the crickets, she was suddenly aware that not a single one of them was breathing. All eyes were on her.

She went on: “So he goes home, and he Googles it. And he reads about projection and the amber anklet. Most people would be like, okay, whatever, this Plotinus guy was crazy. Only he remembers that Mrs. Harris was wearing an amber anklet just like it at graduation that day. I mean, I remember seeing it on her; it was blinding when the sun hit it. And so he puts it all
together, and he thinks, hey, maybe this isn’t just some old philosopher who was losing his mind. Maybe this is real, and it’s why the Oculus Society is so secretive. He starts to think about what he could do if
he
had that anklet. And that night, at the party, when he sees Mrs. Harris wearing it again … well, he probably figured it was his only opportunity.”

Jessica stared at her aunt as she processed the information. For a second, she looked like she was going to cry. But then she took a deep breath and pushed her shoulders back.

“So what is it you think he’s planning to do?”

Jessica knew that she had to say it now. It was time. “I think he’s planning to project with Nick Ford. And I don’t think he plans to project back.”