Jessica Garner's afternoon and evening conform to a fairly regular routine, one that you have only slightly delayed with your ambush. It starts with you spending ninety minutes on homework: reading for AP World History and exercises for AP German IV. That is followed by thirty minutes of free time during which you can check social sites and text messages. These are a little thin on the ground recently, thanks to the split in the AP group, but you field a couple of messages from Yumi Saito complaining about Chelsea Cooper, and one from Adrian Semple asking a dumbass question about the last meeting of the Environmental Club (to which you both belong).
There are more interesting things over on Instagram, where Catherine Muskov has been posting pictures of herself and select friends at various Saratoga Falls landmarks. You intently study them, both the ones that are new to Jessica and the older ones. There's Catherine and Kristy Suffolk at the entrance to Suffolk Wilderness. (No relation, despite teasing.) There's Catherine and Almida Jones at the Railroad Museum in the old Appalachian & Pacific train depot. There's Catherine and her boyfriend, Michael Allen, in front of Polk Elementary. Catherine has said that there's a pun or an allusion behind each photograph—something that connects her and the person and the location—but you're not trying to penetrate those meanings. You—Will Prescott—are more taken with Catherine's fresh-faced, natural beauty and open countenance; Jessica feels a burning finger of envy. Why hasn't she asked you to pose in any of the pictures? But you leave likes on all the recent ones anyway.
But Jessica has her own Instagram presence. She doesn't update it very regularly, but—
On an impulse you take out your phone and take a selfie A couple, actually, until you get one you really like. You quickly get it online and spend a few minutes admiring it. That's you behind that pert, enigmatic smile and gleaming eyes. I'm really Jessica Garner, you think again, and another thrill goes through you.
But then it's 5:30, time for Eva to practice on the viola and for you to do daily aerobics in the exercise room. You shut out the sound of your sister's warbling bow with ear buds and some ironically iconic 80s rock. Wow, it really is amazing having a strong and supple body that's in decent physical shape. The workout leaves you drained and energized simultaneously. Tingly. You take a quick shower and change into relaxed flannel shorts and a t-shirt in time for dinner.
As with most evening meals in the busy but well-to-do Garner house, this one is delivered from a restaurant: Sans Serif, in this case. It's a rich and savory chicken pot pie, and instinctively you limit your portions. Martin Garner—the paterfamilias—who is developing an apple-shaped belly, noticeably does not, and enjoys the meal with a boisterous good humor. So does Marc.
At least until he has to kick you in the foot a third time and give you a quick, meaningful smile.
"We're talking about going to see a movie tomorrow night," you announce.
"Oh yeah, which one?" asks Mr. Garner genially.
"The Cabin in the Snow."
"Which one is that?"
"It's starting tomorrow. It's about these four exchange students in Iceland who rent an old farmhouse for a weekend, but there's a ghost and it—"
"Oh, a spooky movie!" Mr. Garner exclaims.
Cynthia Garner shudders. "You couldn't get me in to see one of those," she says.
"I got you into plenty when we were dating." Mr. Garner winks at you. "That's where you kids came from. So who are you seeing it with?"
"Just the three of us," you say, and are by now conscious of the way Marc and Eva are letting you carry the burden of the conversation. "You know, kids' night out."
"For a scary movie? That's a waste. You're supposed to see it with someone you're dating, so you can hug each other tight during the scary parts."
You have no answer to that. The three Garner kids had consciously chosen The Cabin in the Snow as a movie that their parents would not want to turn into a family outing. It hadn't occurred to anyone that it might be an odd choice for brother and sisters to go see.
Marc comes to your rescue. "We're going to try asking some people from school along. We just got the idea this afternoon."
"Sounds great," says Mr. Garner. "You three going to try eating out before the show?"
"What are we having for dinner tomorrow?" Marc asks cautiously. There follows a not-very-interesting discussion of places that dinner might be delivered from, concluding in a temporizing "We'll decide tomorrow" from Marc.
That should be the end of it, but Marc follows you and Eva upstairs immediately after dinner. "Thanks for helping out down there with the movie plans," he tells your sister. "You could have made it look like it was something you wanted to do."
"Bite me," Eva retorts.
Marc snorts, and jostles past you to go downstairs again.
The pressure from Jessica's personality is irresistible, and you push the door closed after entering the room that the sisters share. Eva is on her bed, knees up to her chin, glaring furiously at the wall. "What are you going to do tomorrow night?" you ask her. She shrugs. "We could go off together, just you and me. We shouldn't let the opportunity go to waste."
"What opportunity?"
"A night out. Friday night out."
"With who?"
"Maybe you could call Jeremy?"
"I'm not going to call him," she says acidly.
"Then call Cindy. See if she wants to go out. Her and Seth and you and— Well, you could suggest you and me to make it a foursome, let her make the inference that she should call Jeremy and prod him into calling you."
Her eyes fall. "What's the use?"
"Well, don't say 'no' if someone asks you."
She looks up, and you hold each other's gaze. She knows exactly what you're saying without saying it: You can set things up so she goes on a double-date with Jeremy Richards in the company of Seth Javits and Cindy Vredenburg. "We'll talk about it tomorrow," you tell her when she says nothing, and still she says nothing, so you pick up your books and go downstairs, to finish your homework while giving her some privacy. But you can't concentrate on it for thinking about the problems you've caused Eva and Marc.
Marc's problem—aside from the way he's gotten into fights with many of his friends—is that he's acting like a fool over Hannah. As you might have anticipated, the antics of "Hannah Westrick" at the Warehouse did not go unnoticed—or undocumented. Gossip about the night began to circulate the very next day, and when Hannah denied she had been at the Warehouse that night, the photos started going up on social media sites. Particularly unflattering were the ones of her, with her top off, gnawing the faces of some of the musicians.
Marc instantly stopped courting her, even though his sisters told him that if he didn't like that kind of thing in a girl he liked, he should go out with her and keep her out of that kind of trouble. But his stupid, pig-headed pride is in the way for some reason. Jessica and Eva have been fielding calls from Hannah asking them for help in fighting the gossip and getting Marc back onto her side.
These requests are especially poignant given that Eva was also sighted at the Warehouse that evening. Fortunately there were no photographs showing her clearly—those purportedly of her are too blurry and smeared or dark to make out the figure clearly—and she has a quasi-alibi, as she was out on a date with a Jeremy Richards, that night.
Or so she and Jeremy claim. Karl Hennepin says she was with Hannah when they all went out to the Warehouse.
Jessica doesn't disbelieve her sister, and is really pissed off at Hennepin now. Marc at least pretends to believe Eva, and is taking her side in all the arguments about the night. But that isn't stopping him from trying to leverage his support into an advantage for himself.
That's what this "movie night" is all about: paying him back for supporting her alibi with one for him. The triplets are supposedly going to a movie while in fact Marc takes off with some of his guy friends for some kind of guy thing; meanwhile, the two girls will pretend that they all three went to a movie, then accidentally met some school friends and wound up spending the whole night out.
But as you sit down to Jessica's calculus homework—whose complexity is nothing on what's been going on thanks to your duplicates showing up—you're pondering turning that movie night to another advantage. While Marc is out with his friends, if you can get Eva to go out with Jeremy and a few others, you can dash over to Kelsey's and get that mask made. It should be easy to get Eva and Jeremy together; you just have to convince Cindy Vredenburg that—
A text pops up. Fuck. It's Connor, asking for a status update. You text back that nothing can be done until tomorrow night. That leads to series of texts that climaxes in a phone call—sotto voce on your end. "I knew I shouldn't have given you this job," Connor fumes. "You're going to fuck things up. Just get the—"
"They're already fucked up! Every time we use a mask we fuck things up for someone."
"So get this last mask and get out of there!"
But you have a sudden flash of inspiration.
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