Projection

by Risa Green

  “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.”

  “The clothes!” Michelle gasped, stricken.

  “Exactly. But what he doesn’t know is that the anklet isn’t the key to projecting. It’s just a symbol. And he can’t possibly know about the words. It’s not in any of the research I did. Plotinus must not have written it in his diary because he was worried that it could fall into the wrong hands. He had to have taught them to Gemina, and she must have passed them down to her own daughter, and on and on. But spoken. Always spoken. It’s why Tina couldn’t find anything written about it in the Oculus Society archives.”

  “But if he thinks that the anklet is the key, then he’ll have to wear it when he tries to project with Nick,” Gretchen said.

  “So then we’ll have to catch him,” Ariel added. “We’ll have to catch him while he’s got it on.”

  “He’s meeting Nick at the bank on Monday right after school. Nick thinks Rob wants to transfer some money into his account for him to hold onto until Rob gets settled in a new city,” Jessica explained. “But I think it’s just a ruse to get Nick alone.”

  Michelle nodded. “He’s got a safe deposit box at the bank,” she offered. “It was in the file from the PI. I’ll bet you that’s where he’s keeping the anklet.” She tapped on her leg as she tried to think like Rob. “He’ll go to the bank early, to get the anklet out of the box, and then he’ll go back outside and wait for Nick.” She paused. “It would be a genius plan, actually, if the anklet really worked. God, you’d think if he was that smart, he would have been able to find himself a job in the last ten years.”

  Jessica almost laughed. Ariel cracked a smile. But Gretchen’s face darkened, and Jessica swallowed. She reached out and placed a hand on her friend’s shoulder.

  “So how do we get the police there?” Gretchen asked. “It’s not like we can call them up and tell them our theory. They’ll think we’re insane.” She lowered her voice. “And I’m finished with people thinking I’m insane.”

  Jessica looked at Michelle, waiting to see if she’d come up with the idea on her own. It wasn’t even a second before Michelle locked eyes with her. They both smiled.

  “I know exactly how,” Michelle said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  At exactly 3:10 P.M. Monday afternoon, Gretchen pulled up across the street from the Delphi Bank and Trust. None of the girls had said a word since bolting from school minutes earlier. Jessica snapped off her seatbelt and glanced at Gretchen, then Ariel. They nodded. The white van that Michelle had described was inconspicuously parked about half a block behind them. As they approached it on foot, the door to the van slid open and Michelle waved them inside, sliding it shut again behind them.

  The inside of the van had been reconfigured. The back seats had been ripped out, and a long, wide shelf that functioned as a table had been connected to one wall. On it sat two small video screens and a large computer monitor.

  Three men wearing black pants and black jackets, lettered on the back with the word POLICE, huddled around the screens. Michelle was also in black pants, but instead of a police jacket she had on a black windbreaker over a white shirt.

  “This is Jack, Mitch, and Finn,” Michelle said, pointing at each of the officers. Jessica looked them over. Jack was an older guy with a neat, greying mustache and sharp blue eyes. The self-confident air about him told her instantly that he was the guy in charge. Mitch looked to be about Michelle’s age, and he could have been a movie star. He was tall with close-cropped dark hair and a chiseled jaw line covered with a few days’ worth of stubble. Finn was clearly the rookie. He didn’t look much older than they were, and he had the same goofy, dumb jock expression that she always wanted to wipe off of Nick and Connor’s faces. “This is my niece Jessica, and her friends Ariel and Gretchen. They’ve been briefed on protocol,” she assured them. “They won’t get in the way.”

  Yeah, we’ve been briefed, Jessica thought. Michelle’s ins
tructions had been to say nothing and to touch nothing. These guys are doing me a favor, she’d told them. They’re squeezing this in before the real bust they have to do on Monday night. So don’t screw it up.

  “Is he inside?” Jessica asked in a quiet voice.

  “He got there at two forty-five on the dot,” Michelle answered. “Went right into the bank and asked to be taken to his safe deposit box.”

  Gretchen’s mouth fell open. “How do you know? Do you have someone on the inside?”

  Michelle smiled mischievously. “Mitch gave me a button with a pinhole camera in it. I replaced one of the buttons on Rob’s shirt collar with it last night. We can see everything he’s seeing.”

  Jessica leaned in to look at the video monitor. “I don’t see anything but static.”

  Jack leaned back in his chair and stroked his mustache with two fingers. “Unfortunately, the safe deposit box room is underground, and it’s heavily insulated. We can’t get a signal from there. But as soon as he comes back to ground level we’ll pick him up again.”

  Ariel sighed. “So we have no idea if he has the anklet.”

  Mitch whirled around to look at Ariel. “What anklet?” he asked. He turned to Michelle. “I thought we were looking for money,” he said to her.

  Ariel’s eyes got huge as she realized her mistake. Michelle had been very clear with them. Don’t say anything about the murder or the anklet. All they think we’re doing is stopping Rob before he transfers his money to Nick.

  “We are,” Michelle said, gritting her teeth. But before she could go on, Jack was calling them back to the video screen.

  “He’s back!” he hissed.

  Jessica held her breath. In silence, she and the others watched the backside of a bank officer as he pushed open a metal door and held it open. The camera seemed to pass through the door, then past half a dozen people. It was disconcerting, watching it like this, a disembodied eye floating along. The exterior door to the bank pushed open, and there on the screen was the street, trees, some cars passing by. The camera stopped moving.