Page 138 of Let’s Make a Scene

“That’s not the knock we agreed on,” a voice comes from behind the door.

“You were serious about that?” I ask.

There’s no reply. With a sigh, I rap my knuckles in a vague approximation of the chorus to “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift.

The door swings open and Arjun beams at me. “Nice,” he says. “Welcome to the secret headquarters.”

“You’ve all been very cryptic,” I say, moving past him into Hannah’s room. “What’s this about?”

Hannah looks up from her desk, which is covered in papers, and are those… blueprints?

“Are we heisting something?” I ask, interested. “I’ve always fancied being in on a heist.”

“If Hannah wanted to plan a heist, she’d plan a heist,” Patty says from the sofa, where she is sprawled, eating a bag of gummy worms. “And no one would ever know about it. For all we know she’s sitting on the real Mona Lisa and the one in the Louvre is a clever forgery.” Patty bites the head off a worm with obvious relish.

“I’m more of a diamond girl,” Hannah murmurs, still scrawling on the notepad in front of her.

“Babe, you really need to clean your makeup brushes.” Liam emerges from the bathroom and beams at me. “Jack! You made it.”

“Yeah,” I agree, bemused. “But I still don’t know why. What’s going on, guys?”

Hannah gets to her feet. “First of all,” she points at me, “did you invite Cynthie on a date tomorrow like I told you to?”

“Yes.”

“And she agreed to it?” Hannah looks pleased.

“Honestly, I didn’t exactly give her time to disagree,” I say.

“He ran away,” Arjun puts in, flopping down next to Patty and pinching one of her gummy worms.

“I didn’t run away!” I protest. “I rode away. On a horse. Manfully.”

“Smart.” Liam nods. “Can’t give her time to talk herself out of things.”

I’m not sure that’s a flattering interpretation of events, but it’s not exactly wrong.

“So I take it there’s a reason you wanted me to ask her,” I say. “Not that I’m complaining. I wanted to do it anyway; I just wasn’t sure about the timing.”

“That’s precisely why you’re here.” Hannah nods. “Please, take a seat.”

Patty and Arjun leap up from the sofa so that I can sit there, and Liam disappears back into the bathroom and then reemerges, rolling a whiteboard into the room.

“Oh my god,” I whisper.

“Pretty cool, hey?” Arjun says proudly.

In the middle of the whiteboard are blurry photos of me and Cynthie, and surrounding the pictures are a web of strings leading to words and phrases like: 9:15 leaves wardrobe on hunt for coffee and contact dove guy??? And hot librarians!!!!!!! (That one is underlined three times.)

“Are you… planning to murder us?” I ask.

Arjun laughs loudly and then squints at the board. “Huh,” he says. “Now that you mention it, I guess the vibe is a little murder-y.”

“If you’ll all turn to page one of your handout,” Hannah sails on, ignoring this.

“There’s a handout?” I ask weakly, but Patty is already thrusting it at me. It’s been professionally bound and the title on the cover is “Operation Grand Gesture.”

“On the first page you’ll find a word cloud of Cynthie’s interests,” Hannah continues. “The bigger the word, the greater the frequency with which she references it.”