Ch. 6: One Person, Many Faces

The next day would be another feminine one. Or it might be a week. Or a year, for all Harvey knew. Her day of classes was essentially the same, except that she felt uncomfortable anytime she looked at herself in the mirror or wasn’t lost in thought.

After class that day, she thought she’d investigate Twill’s work history on campus, since he’d taken on so many jobs in such a short period of time. Venturing through the deluge, she first visited the Custodial Department, which she found to be completely empty. A thin wooden door with a 3x3 grid of single-paned glass was slightly ajar, allowing a rare ray of sun to cast a narrow rectangle of light into the room. Harvey knocked gently and heard no response aside from the creaking of the door, dragged open by the phantasm of gravity.

Greeting her were two desks empty of life. The desk closest to the door hosted a computer monitor, the school’s logo wandering mindlessly across its screensaver. Behind the desk was the room’s filing cabinet. Harvey approached cautiously, looked around behind her, and tugged on the top of three drawers. It was locked.

Harvey breathed a sigh of relief realizing that going through filing cabinets was probably not how she wanted to end her tenure at Moorehaven. Thankfully she wouldn’t have to fight her will to investigate. She casually tugged on the second drawer. Also locked. “Thank god,” she thought.

Then she pulled the third, which slid open to reveal an assortment of folders.

“Welp,” she thought. “Do I continue breaking school code and possibly the law, all for what will probably be a complete waste of time? Or do I go home and study the Crimean War, which will surely give me some perspective on the transformation of human affairs over time?”

Looking at the open drawer, it occurred to her that the task was already nearly done. She might as well do a rapid skim of the drawer’s contents.

Most of what she found was related to supplies, as well as some tax documents. Noticing that the tabs were organized alphabetically and covered the last third of the alphabet, Harvey reasoned that “Applications” could have been in that first, locked drawer.

As she gazed forward at the lock—forged from some once vibrant metal ripped out of a sacred mountain in South Africa—Harvey recalled that time, two summers ago, when she encountered the magician at the state fair. He had assured her parents unprompted that the trick he was going to teach her wouldn’t really be useful for breaking into high-security doors. He then went on to show her how to hack an insignificant, open shackle padlock, the kind that might come with a toy treasure chest.

While she couldn’t break into Fort Knox or even her middle school with the skill, it became a nuisance around the house as Harvey and her friends spent countless days that summer undoing any simple lock they could find. In fact, they belonged mostly to her parents’ filing cabinets and it wasn’t the lockpicking that was annoying, but the fact that she’d forget to relock them and the drawers would eventually come sliding out on their own, thus becoming the perfect boobytrap for scarring up exposed shins and knees.

Harvey stared at the locked cabinet for what felt like an eternity, wondering if she was cool enough to pull something like this off. On the one hand, she could lose her scholarship, get kicked out of the most prestigious boarding school in the country, and have to go to a state school for a degree in something like marine biology, which she could attempt to use to address the fatal carbonization of all oceans on Earth. While PISCES had managed to cool the Earth temporarily, it did not address the carbon in the atmosphere and the fact that the oceans had absorbed far too much of it.

On the other hand, she could leave the room, put her nose to the grindstone to graduate from Moorehaven with honors. Then she could try to get into the Ivy Leagues, followed by law school and politics to try to make an impact at the policy level.

Were those the options? If so, the former didn’t seem any worse than the latter. Plus, was she just going to put that lockpicking skill to waste?

Out of her satchel, Harvey pulled a pair of nail clippers, which she carried for her obsessive grooming habit. She extended the nail file out and inserted it into the bottom of the lock, pushing it in as far as possible. Hearing a creaking of the door behind her, she paused and listened for any interlopers before returning to the task at hand.

Next, Harvey tested the lock to determine if a clockwise or counterclockwise twist would be necessary. More creaking. Harvey paused again and then turned her attention to the lock once more.

She jiggled the file up and down a few times when she heard a thunderous boom and flipped around to see that the cross breeze had caused the office door to slam shut.

Relieved, Harvey breathed out a cloud of tension and continued. She shook the key once more, disengaging the pins inside. After hearing the lock collapse, she turned her wrist and opened the drawer.

As she’d guessed, there was a divider labeled “Applications”. Harvey quickly found the “T” section of files, where Twill’s application was organized right alongside the rest, and pulled it out. She snapped a picture with her phone and put the file back. Yet another abrupt creaking sound brought in a shaky voice from outside.

“Hello?” a teen stammered. “Can I help you?”

Harvey spun her head to see a student volunteer with a puzzled expression on his face.

A creative energy came over Harvey, “Just grabbing a file for Ms. Hopkins, thanks.” She quickly shot out of the chair and out of the office before the volunteer could think twice.

Next, Harvey ambled below her bright umbrella through the cold rain down a gravel driveway to the open garage that served as the workspace for the auto body shop. A one-person crew was working on repairing an electric Campus Safety cart. Harvey walked in and was greeted by the student volunteer, immediately triggering acid in her stomach to bubble.

“Sup,” he asked, wiping his hands on a rag hanging on the handle of a tool cart.

“Hey,” Harvey, began. She then improvised a new line: “I’m working on a sociology project about gender and jobs. Do you think I could look at the student volunteer applications you have on file?”

The kid looked at her skeptically.

“I won’t be using any of the names. Just the genders.”

“Gender?” He asked. “Let me go ask Mr. Davis.” The student shuffled off to an office in the back of the shop. He returned about seven minutes later with a cardboard box filled with papers.

“He said you could look in here. He’s not sure what’s in it, but he thought it might be where he keeps that sorta stuff.”

Now it was Harvey’s turn to be skeptical. “He told me to tell you to take it or leave it,” the student said.

“I’ll take it,” she replied. He dropped the box on the ground and returned to the cart. Immediately Harvey began rifling through the mortuary of disused papers. As luck would have it, a pile of oil-stained applications was about halfway through the box, below a couple of dated magazines, a battered attendance journal and some miscellaneous junk. There were about 20 of them in no particular order. One of them was Twill’s. Again, she took a photo, then muttered a “thank you” to the student before taking off.

The last place was the campus bookstore. The student manager, Tad Blithe, was there behind the register, saying something condescending to a female student volunteer. Harvey approached the counter and waited nervously until he took a break to acknowledge her existence.

“Yeah?” he said finally. Harvey tried out her line again. It was again mechanical and forced, but still seemed to work. Again, the student had to go into a back office. He then popped his head out of the office door and said, “Bill wants to talk to you.”

In the back office, the adult supervisor, Bill Thompson, sat behind a desk, apparently immersed in some work. She sat down at the chair in front of him, feeling Blithe standing behind her, leaning on the door frame.

Without looking up, Thompson said, “So, what’s this gender project?”

“I’m doing a survey of the student work on campus,” Harvey began timidly, “to see if there’s any gender disparity between the types of jobs.”

“Some sort of sexism thing?” Thompson said, pulling yellowed eyes from the screen to glare at her beneath two gray tufts of eyebrow hair so thick Harvey thought she could see spiders weaving their webs. He rolled back in his chair to lean up against the back wall.

“Not really,” Harvey said hesitantly. “Just—“

“I don’t really believe in sexism,” Thompson interrupted, as he placed two large, hairy hands behind a head of thinning gray hair. “See,” he said. “It’s all about upbringing.” This would be the start of a half-hour-long diatribe, a sort of toll fee for getting where Harvey wanted to go. Thompson would eventually relent, but he wanted her to know that nothing in life was free.

When he finally did let her look through the files, Thompson and Blithe stood behind her the whole time, making it difficult for Harvey to just take the file and go. She thumbed through the papers, feeling the pair hovering above her and looking for an opportunity, waiting for them to return to work. But, apparently, they had nothing better to do.

“Don’t you have to write anything down?” Blithe asked.

Harvey paused. “Got it all up here,” she said, pointing to her head.

“Smart kid,” Thompson said, shooting Blithe an accusatory look.

Harvey got to Twill’s name and stopped.

“Is that Twill’s?” Thompson said. “Let me see that. He yanked the paper out of the filing cabinet and looked at it. “Man, maybe this will be worth something someday. You know this kid shot Josh Kilpatrick? Little pinko commie SOB.”

This was the start of another rant, this time about the virtues of the free market. Before it could go on for too long, Harvey thought of a diversion.

“Wow, Mr. Thompson,” she forced out. “This is all really amazing stuff. Do you know any books at the shop I could maybe buy to learn more?”

“I thought you’d never ask! You know, Tad’s graduating in June and you might make a good student manager,” he said, rising from the chair with a groan. “Now, we can’t carry everything I want—political correctness and everything. But let me grab you a couple books,” he continued, exiting the room, leaving Tad staring down at her from the doorway.

“Tad,” he shouted from the bookstore, “help me find these books.” Tad then left the room to help out his boss and possible mentor.

In that instant, Harvey grabbed the paper, snapped a picture and swirled it back onto his desk. She then fled out of the bookstore, stopping only to notice that the work that had so preoccupied Thompson when she entered the office was an enthralling game of Hearts on the computer.

***

Harvey ran to the nearest park bench out of sight from the bookstore and took out her phone. Shivering in the brisk air, she read each application under the protection of her umbrella. The questions on the form were pretty standard: why do you want to work here, what do you have to offer, etc. And Twill’s answers were just as standard: valuable life experience, strong work ethic, etc.

Harvey wondered if she’d missed something and thought a walk might allow her subconscious to process the information for her. As she began to stand up from the bench, however, a detail on Twill’s bookshop application caught her eye. In the biodata section, where students were required to fill out information related to allergies, medical history and physical details, Twill had put that he was 5’9. He put the same thing on the other two forms, too. But in the Wilson Report, he was listed as 5’11.

Some impulse beneath the surface of her awareness drove Harvey to open up social media on her phone and search for “James Twill” again. She looked through the multiple accounts a second time.

This go around she realized that, in addition to the joke accounts, there were two complete with biographical information, photo albums and connections to friends. Many of the names Harvey had come across were in the friend networks of both accounts. For all intents and purposes, both were created by Twill—or made to look like they were. The fact that they were both publicly viewable suggested that at least one of them was meant for the outside world to see.

As Harvey wandered aimlessly around campus, she skimmed the activity of the various Twills, their liking of posts and sharing of memes. In one instance, one of the Twills with the extensive profile information had made a post on a marketplace page for “Andover Trucks LLC” requesting the lease of five mid-sized moving trucks on January 5, 2024, the semester that Josh Kilpatrick was elected. The Andover social media rep replied by asking, “Is this for you or your parents?” Twill answered, “For me, James Leonard Twill.”

Andover’s response was that Twill should message the firm privately to make arrangements. The idea that a high school kid would be leasing multiple trucks was suspicious. Even more bizarre was that he was doing so in a public forum and listing out his name in that awkward manner.

Harvey went back to check when the Twill account was created: January 2024. If Twill was being impersonated online, it began six months before Kilpatrick was assassinated, during the time that Twill was abroad in Venezuela.

Harvey took a minute to lean against the brick wall of John Judge Auditorium, unintentionally crumpling with her back a student assembly campaign poster for Seagram Black and Prescott Yoder’s presidential and vice-presidential run.

Within Harvey’s brain, neurons fired along synaptic pathways near routes that had been activated just an hour earlier: 5’9. That could have been the height of… a physical doppelgänger? Twill was being impersonated online and IRL. And his imposter was 5’9, applying for those jobs in person, lining them up for Twill’s return stateside.

It also meant that the plan to murder Kilpatrick began as early as January 2024, before any Evader Fiasco. If the Evader Fiasco and Douglas’s firing played any role in the assassination plot, they weren’t the only factors. Something in January seemed to set the plan into motion.

It was at that point that she felt a thick shoulder thrust into her chin, knocking her over and onto the cement below. As she looked up from the ground, supporting herself with one hand and nursing her jaw with the other, she barely caught sight of a tall, bulky figure speed-walking around the corner. By the time she pulled herself up and turned the corner, the apparition had disappeared into the mist.

Potentially worse, when Harvey returned to the scene of the hit-and-run, she found her phone on the pavement, screen completely shattered.

Next Chapter: Sambuca