Four Of A Kind

"They don’t share a face."

"They literally have the same face, Angelo."

"Same features. Completely different faces." I wasn’t sure when I’d started being able to articulate this distinction, but it was true. Harlow’s expressions moved like weather, fast and bright and constantly shifting. Cassidy’s face communicated through intensity, her default setting hovering between annoyed and murderous with occasional breaks for something softer that she’d sooner die than acknowledge. Vivienne composed her face the way she composed everything, each micro-expression vetted and approved before deployment. And Sabrina, the one who haunted my sleep and knew it, her face was a locked room that only opened from the inside and only for people she’d decided were worth the key.

Four faces. One bone structure. Worlds apart.

Mr. Patterson entered at exactly eight o’clock, his Dracula cape conspicuously absent but his energy still riding the high of festival victory. He placed the engraved trophy on his desk with reverent care, angling it so the overhead lights caught the brass plate just right.

"I want you all to know," Patterson announced to the room with the gravitas of a man delivering a State of the Union address, "that class 3-A has achieved something that has not been accomplished in seven years. SEVEN YEARS of 3-C dominance. SEVEN YEARS of their stupid haunted house and their stupid fog machines and their stupid CHAD MORRISON doing his stupid zombie walk that isn’t even scary, it’s just bad posture." He paused, visibly composing himself. "But that era is over. We are the champions. The trophy stays on my desk until the day I retire, at which point it will be buried with me."

Scattered applause. A few genuine cheers.

Patterson’s eyes found me across the room, and the man actually nodded. A single, crisp nod of acknowledgment that communicated more respect than any words could have. His gaze moved to Harlow next, who beamed. Then Cassidy, who gave him a thumbs up that somehow looked threatening. Patterson cleared his throat, pulled out his attendance sheet, and began calling names with the weary efficiency of a man who had used up his annual reserves of enthusiasm in a single speech and now had nothing left for the remaining seven months of the school year.

After homeroom, I walked through the hallway toward AP English with the container of Harlow’s cookies tucked under my arm and Vivienne’s folder stuffed into my bag. Three days until Thursday. Three days until I sat across from the most dangerous woman I’d ever encountered and tried to convince her that I deserved to be in her daughters’ lives.

The hallway traffic parted slightly as I moved through it, which was still a novelty. Three weeks ago I’d been invisible. The scholarship kid who showed up, did his work, and disappeared. Now people recognized me. The festival photos had spread. The Page Six article had named me. Somewhere on TikTok, a fan account with two thousand followers posted daily compilations of my espresso-making technique.

My life had become genuinely ridiculous.

A hand caught my wrist from behind. Firm grip. Callused fingers. The scent of expensive soap and something darker underneath, jasmine or night-blooming flowers, the kind of smell that belonged in a gothic novel rather than a school hallway.

I turned and found Sabrina standing behind me. She wore the Hartwell uniform the way she wore everything, like armor designed to keep the world at arm’s length. Sweater buttoned to the throat. Skirt at regulation length. Black stockings without a single run. Her wine-red hair fell across one eye, the darkest shade of the four sisters, almost burgundy in the fluorescent hallway light.

"You didn’t text me back last night."

"I fell asleep reading your sister’s intelligence briefing."

"Which section?"

"Appendix C."

Something shifted in Sabrina’s expression. Not a smile, not quite, but the corner of her mouth moved a fraction of a millimeter upward, and for Sabrina, that was practically fireworks and confetti. She released my wrist but didn’t step back.

"Walk with me."

Not a question. Never a question with Sabrina.

I walked with her.

The hallway was crowded enough that our proximity didn’t register as unusual to anyone watching. Two students moving in the same direction. Nothing to see. But Sabrina walked close enough that her shoulder brushed mine with every other step, a contact so light it could have been accidental if I didn’t know that nothing Sabrina did was ever accidental.

"I spoke with my mother this morning," she said, her voice pitched low enough that only I could hear. "She confirmed Thursday at three. Her office. She wants you there alone."

"I’ll be there."

"I told her you would be. She said good." Sabrina paused. The hallway noise swelled around us, lockers slamming and conversations overlapping, a hundred teenagers performing the daily theater of high school without any awareness that two people were having a conversation that would determine the course of several lives. "She also asked me a question."

"What question?"

"She asked if I was happy."

I looked at Sabrina. Looked at her in the way that I’d learned over the past month, the way that saw past the mask and the book and the carefully constructed fortress of quiet detachment. Underneath all of it, in the space between her words where the real Sabrina lived, I caught something I’d never seen before.

Fear.

Not the cold, intellectual variety that Sabrina wore like a second skin. This was the warm kind. The human kind. The kind that came from having something precious and knowing it could be taken away.

"What did you tell her?"

Sabrina stopped walking. We were at the junction of the east hallway and the main corridor, standing beneath a portrait of Theodore Hartwell himself, the school’s founder, who stared down at us with the same vaguely disapproving expression that every wealthy dead person seemed to master. Students flowed around us like water around a stone, parting without conscious thought.

"I told her yes."

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