Projection

by Risa Green

  “What did you fight about?” Ariel demanded.

  “He wanted to have sex with you! Starting a fight was the only thing I could think of to get out of it. So I said that I thought he had a thing for me and that I didn’t like watching my boyfriend flirt with another girl.”

  Ariel shook her head. Unbelievable. “Really. And what did he say to that?”

  Jessica frowned. “He said that I’m not his type. And that the reason he loves you is because you’re so sweet and easygoing, while I’m a pain in the ass, and he doesn’t know how Connor deals with me.”

  Ariel tried not to laugh.

  “He’s not wrong,” Gretchen said. “You are a pain in the ass.”

  Jessica smacked her playfully on the arm. “Whatever. You’re just jealous because you never got past holding hands with him.”

  The two of them laughed.

  Ariel glanced from Jessica to Gretchen and back again. “Wait, Gretchen, you and Nick were together? When?”

  “We weren’t together,” Gretchen corrected. “We held hands for five minutes at the end of eighth grade. It was nothing.”

  Ariel hesitated. Great. Add one more reason for her to hate me to the list. “So, are you mad that he’s my boyfriend now or something?”

  Gretchen rolled her eyes. “No, Ariel. I was gone for two years. I didn’t expect him to wait for me, like some girl whose boyfriend has gone off to war. And anyway, I don’t care about Nick Ford anymore. Honestly. I mean, yeah, he’s hot shit in Delphi, but spend five minutes in the real world, and you might see him a little differently. But whatever. I’m not even interested in guys right now. I’m not interested in anything except finding out the truth.”

  Ariel recoiled the slightest bit. Gretchen could be so blunt sometimes. But was she was right? Was Nick just some dumb, provincial lacrosse player from Delphi? And was she too dumb and provincial to even see it? Ariel had never been out of California, let alone out of the country.

  “Okay. I’m sorry I asked. It’s just still hard for me to believe that we’re really friends. You know, after everything that happened.”

  Jessica reached out and grabbed Ariel’s hand. “Look, Ariel, we were really mean to you in middle school. It was stupid. I don’t blame you for putting out that video. I probably would have done the same thing if I were you.”

  Ariel glanced at Gretchen. Sometimes she felt like they were both just being themselves. Sometimes she felt like they were playing good cop, bad cop with her. It was impossible to know what was really going on. She almost said something—almost just blurted out how she was feeling—but she bit her tongue. It was better just to plow ahead and go along with them. Their power was greater than hers.

  “Soooo,” Ariel said. “It’s you and Gretchen tonight, right? I’m going to be the witness?”

  Gretchen looked up. “Actually, I was hoping that you and I could project tonight.”

  Ariel felt a shiver run down her spine. “I don’t understand,” she said, keeping her voice even. “I thought that Jessica always had to do it. I thought she was, you know, ‘the leader.’ ” Ariel said this last part in air quotes.

  “Whatever. I’ve been Jessica a dozen times!” Gretchen shouted. “I don’t need to be Jessica anymore!”

  Ariel put her hands up defensively. “You don’t have to get upset. I’m just trying to understand how this works.”

  “Gretchen and I were talking about it, and we both think that there’s no reason why it has to be me every time,” Jessica explained, her wary eyes on Gretchen, who was staring at the ground. “Gretchen knows the words. She knows how to do it.” She shrugged. “She should have been the one who was chosen anyway.”

  Ariel tapped her fingers up and down on her jeans. Being Gretchen could be a huge opportunity for her. She could do some snooping, maybe find out what Gretchen was up to. Maybe even get a better handle on who might have wanted her mother dead. But she didn’t trust Gretchen, and she worried about what might happen if Gretchen went around pretending to be her. After all, she could do something that might implicate Ariel in the murder. She could confess to the police, even. It was a gamble any way you looked at it.

  Ariel’s fingers stopped tapping. Her mom had told her very few details about her father, but she knew one thing about him: on more than a few occasions, he’d almost lost everything he had at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. Gambling was in Ariel’s blood. It was part of the reason she liked to shoplift. Or so said Mrs. Lackman …

  She smiled at the two girls sitting across from her. “Okay then. Let’s do it.”

  Jessica grinned and elbowed Gretchen in the ribs. “Just remember Rule Number Three, Gretch. No fooling around with Nick Ford.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Gretchen’s house was big. Not mansion big—but big in a high ceilings, spacious rooms, generous backyard kind of way. She walked through the empty first floor, recalling how she’d stared at the rooms through a side window three years ago on the night of their graduation from eighth grade. Of course, Ariel hadn’t been invited to that party. No, Gretchen had made a point of inviting every single member of their class but her (or so it seemed), so she’d crashed the party in retaliation. Well, if “crashing” could be defined as sneaking in through the side gate, looking through the window, and then chickening out and running away.

  The only person who knew she’d gone there was her mom. At dinner that night they’d argued about it. Ariel had wanted to show them all that they couldn’t just keep pretending that she didn’t exist. Ignoring her wasn’t going to make her go away. But her mom disagreed. She thought crashing the party would just be giving them exactly what they wanted. Better to ignore them back, her mom had said. Let them think you have better things to do than go to their stupid party. It wasn’t until Ariel actually got there and saw them all having fun without her, watched them not even giving her a moment’s thought, that she realized her mom was right.

  She was still standing outside the window when she heard the screams, and she ran away before she even knew what had happened. The next day, when the murder was all over the local news, her mom had burst into her room with a serious look on her face.

  Did anyone see you? she’d asked. She’d been hidden in a shadow, and all she’d done was peer through the window. She hadn’t seen anyone, and nobody had seen her. She was sure of it.

  You were never there, her mother said sternly. Whatever happens, you were never there.

  And when the police had knocked on their door that night, asking “routine questions” about whether they were at the party and where they’d been that night, Ariel and her mom were as calm as the ocean on a windless day. They’d gone out to a celebratory dinner, just the two of them, then went home and watched a movie. End of story. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that Gretchen had started sending her those texts.

  At first, Ariel had been freaked out. She knows that I was there, she kept thinking. Somehow, she knows that I was there.

  Every time the doorbell rang, every time she heard a car pull up in her driveway, she expected it to be the police, coming to take her away. But as time went on and the police never came, and as the texts from Gretchen got stranger and stranger—accusing her of murder and of wanting to bring down the Oculus Society—Ariel started to think that maybe Gretchen didn’t know anything after all. That maybe Gretchen was just a sad, grief-stricken girl looking for someone to blame. And then Gretchen went away, and the texts stopped coming, and Ariel had nearly forgotten all about crashing the party that night … and had almost convinced herself that it had never even happened. Until now.

  Now she climbed the sweeping, curved staircase to the second floor, peering into each of the bedrooms. The first one had no furniture, and the brown Berber carpet was barely visible beneath dozens of boxes. Ariel noticed that the boxes bore labels. Clothes. Shoes. Paperwork. It took her a second to understand that these were things that had belonged to Gretchen’s mother. These boxes held the remains of someone’s life. Arie
l shuddered and shut the door behind her.

  The next room appeared to be a guest room, but it was lived in. A pair of men’s pants were on the floor, a razor perched on the edge of the sink. The bed linens were crumpled. A book was on the nightstand. Living with Grief.

  Her dad sleeps here, Ariel realized. He probably can’t bear to go in the master bedroom, let alone sleep there. She couldn’t blame him, but Ariel felt compelled to see the scene of the crime for herself. She walked down the hall and found a pair of tall white double doors tightly shut. A beige tassel hung from one of the brass doorknobs. Ariel pulled it …

  Inside was a king-sized bed that had been stripped of its sheets. On one side was a dark wood nightstand with a mirrored top. On the other side was an identical nightstand covered with fashion magazines, a few pieces of mail, an almost empty glass of water, and a crystal bowl cradling a pair of large diamond studs. Off to the side off the room there was a marble-topped vanity strewn with makeup, a hair dryer, and perfumes. On the mantel over the fireplace was a framed picture of Gretchen and her parents on a beach somewhere.

  Ariel quickly shut the door behind her. No wonder Gretchen had gone to boarding school. Ariel couldn’t imagine having to live in a place like this; part shrine, part storage space. A halfway house caught between life and death.

  Finally, Ariel opened the door to the last bedroom. As she peered inside at the walls painted a pale blue, at the full-sized bed draped in a blue-and-white flowered quilt, she felt like Goldilocks. This room, she thought, is just right.

  She stepped inside and took a slow walk around, examining the pictures taped up on the wall next to Gretchen’s bed. Most of them were of Gretchen’s mom, a few of Gretchen and Jessica from back in middle school. Ariel recognized one from eighth-grade graduation, right after Gretchen had won the Oculus Society award. She felt a pang of regret; Ariel had been on a vengeful binge that day, fueled by envy and jealousy. She remembered how beautiful Mrs. Harris had looked up on the stage in her white dress and beige heels, her shiny dark hair skimming the olive skin around her tiny collarbone. After everything that happened, she’d felt terrible for the things she’d said. But how could she have known that the woman would be killed later that same night?

  She searched through Gretchen’s desk drawers where she uncovered a few newspaper clippings and Internet printouts. WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN DELPHI; STRANGLED DELPHI WOMAN WAS PILLAR OF COMMUNITY; NO LEADS IN CASE OF MURDERED MOM FROM DELPHI.

  Ariel skimmed the articles, but there wasn’t any information in them that she didn’t already know. She kept digging. She was just about to move on when she came across a manila envelope at the very bottom of the last drawer, buried under a stack of old report cards and AYSO certificates. Ariel opened the envelope and took out seven or eight file folders, carefully making note of the order in which they were arranged.

  Her eyes widened as she flipped through the first few folders. Gretchen had compiled files on half a dozen women, all of whom were in the Oculus Society. There was Tina Holt, the current President. There were two other women Ariel didn’t recognize … Joan Hedley and Kristen Renwick. And to her surprise, there was Jessica’s aunt, Michelle. Ariel’s heart began to pound as she opened the last folder. Somehow, she knew what she was going to find, and she was right: it was a file on her.

  So these are her suspects.

  According to Gretchen’s notes, all of these women—except for Ariel, obviously—were part of the innermost sanctum of the Oculus Society, the secret group that guarded the Plotinus Ability. And one of them, Gretchen seemed to think, wanted her mother dead. Ariel flipped through her own file first. There were pictures of her from eighth grade, printouts of the texts she and Gretchen had sent each other, the web address of the video that Ariel had released. The last few pages contained police documents. There was a copy of the police report from the night Ariel and her mom had been questioned. And on the final page, there was a statement Gretchen had given to the police on the night of the murder:

  Victim’s daughter observed a female, approximately 5’5”, dark blonde hair (shoulder length), slim build, entering northwest gate of property at approximately 9:00 P.M. Witness believes this person may have been one Ariel Miller, age 13.

  Ariel’s hands began to shake. Gretchen had seen her. Of course she had.

  Her eyes skimmed down to the follow-up section at the bottom of the page, in which the detective had handwritten a note. It was dated July seventh, nearly three weeks after the murder.

  No person interviewed could recall seeing Ms. Miller or anyone who fit her description. Further, we could find no reason to doubt the validity of Ms. Miller’s alibi. According to interviews with Ms. Miller and her mother, the two were home watching a movie at the time of the murder. Therefore we have no to cause to believe that Ms. Miller is a suspect in this investigation. Recommendation: no further action required.

  Ariel took a few deep breaths and tried to compose herself. The detective who interviewed her had never mentioned that anyone thought they’d seen her at the party. But that was probably the point. He wouldn’t want to tip her off.

  So that’s why she thinks I killed her mom. She actually saw me at the party just moments before the murder.

  Ariel closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe evenly. She turned to the file on Michelle. Inside was a slick black-and-white headshot that Ariel assumed Michelle used for auditions, and a photograph of Michelle and Rob at an Oculus Society event. The photo was a few years old; Rob was in a suit, but he’d taken off his tie and loosened his collar. His hair was a little bit longer than it was now, but still slicked back in his signature look.

  Michelle’s hair was shorter, and she looked stunning in a red dress and simple gold hoops. There was another photograph, too, of Gretchen’s dad with four other men. All were wearing golf shirts and standing in front of the snack bar on the ninth hole at the Club. Gretchen had circled one of the men’s faces with a red pen. Ariel recognized him from when she’d worked at the Club. His name was Mr. Renwick. Mike Renwick. She didn’t understand the significance of his presence, though, or why he’d be circled in a picture in Michelle’s file. Frankly, she didn’t understand why Gretchen would suspect Michelle at all.

  Ariel was arranging the folders back in order when a chime rang on an alarm pad in the hallway, causing her to startle.

  Garage door open, said a robotic voice. She quickly placed them back inside the envelope and put it back under the report cards and certificates where she’d found it.

  “Gretch?” came a voice from downstairs.

  Mr. Harris: home from work. Ariel closed the drawer to the desk and took a quick glance in the mirror. There was Gretchen’s face, staring calmly back at her. She ran a hand over her hair to smooth it out and walked toward the bedroom door.

  “Hi, dad!” she called.

  Gretchen’s dad had brought home take-out; Caesar salad and “your favorite, Gretch,” pizza with olives and green peppers. Ariel tried not to frown as she sat down at the kitchen table. She hated Caesar salad, and olives made her gag.

  “So how was your day?” Mr. Harris asked as they settled in.

  Ariel wasn’t sure how to answer. She didn’t know if Gretchen’s dad was aware of his daughter’s faux-loser status or if Gretchen just lied and told him everything was great. She decided to go with that old, teenaged standby that seemed to work in every awkward parental situation.

  “Fine.”

  Mr. Harris frowned. “More of the same?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the kids still aren’t talking to you?”

  Ariel shrugged. “Whatever, Dad. I really don’t care.” She took a bite of the pizza, resisting the urge to pick off the olives first. Mmm, she thought, surprised. This is actually kind of good.

  “I just don’t understand why you insisted on coming back, Gretchen. There’s nothing here for you. And you and Jessica were doing so great at Chadwell.” He smiled ruefully. “To tell you the trut
h, I was really starting to like England. I’m going to miss having Christmas there this year.”

  Ariel was glad to know that at least that part of their story hadn’t been a lie. She met Mr. Harris’s eyes. “You’re here,” she said.

  He sighed. Ariel got the feeling that they’d had this conversation many times before. “I’ve told you, sweetie, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine.”

  “Great,” Ariel said, smiling. “And I’m fine, too. So we can be fine together.”

  Mr. Harris laughed, but his eyes still looked sad. “Touché.”

  There was a long silence as they both ate their pizza. Gretchen had warned her before they’d projected that she and her father weren’t the greatest of communicators, but she hadn’t realized it was this strained between the two of them. Ariel thought of her own mother and how she could talk about anything with her. She couldn’t imagine things being this tense between them. Gingerly, Ariel broached the subject she was really interested in.

  “So, um, have you heard anything about the police reopening the case?”

  Mr. Harris gave her a sharp look. “Gretchen,” he said, in a practiced tone, “the police are not reopening the case. They have no leads. They have no suspects. You need to stop obsessing over it. Your mother wouldn’t want this. She would want you to go on with your life.”

  Every muscle in Ariel’s body relaxed upon hearing these words. She hadn’t even realized she’d been so tense. She wanted to reach across the table and hug Mr. Harris. But he’d become suspicious if Ariel didn’t act like his daughter. So she clenched her fists, like she’d seen Gretchen do that night in her backyard.

  “Really?” she asked, raising her voice. “You think she’d want her murderer running loose around town? You think she wouldn’t want someone to pay for what they did to her?”