It was so great. The network is going to totally freak out.
Hazel
They already have.
Jackie
Huh?
Hazel
Oh! You don’t know! It’s all over the Internet. Apple and McDonald’s have pulled their sponsorship from the show.
Jackie
!!!!
Hazel
Can you meet me and Max in WoW later?
Jackie
I can’t. We’re going back to be with my dad, and they’ve taken away my computer. I can’t go online.
Hazel
Okay, you may not need to. I think we have a plan for you to get some footage for the next “Real Family Stone.” It’s going to get you in a lot of trouble, though.
Jackie
The more the better.
Hazel typed furiously as she shared the plan she and Max had hatched. It was far-fetched, she knew, but if nothing else, at least it would give Jackie hope.
***
“What do you mean you lost them?” Ethan asked. He had been back at the Stone house only five minutes and already things were unraveling.
“That bitch and her two little bitches,” Andersona spat. “She pulled some crazy cop movie stunt in a mall parking lot and lost the trail car.” She was overstating the facts for effect, though only a little, mostly to cover her own ass.
“What about the journalists?”
“She lost them, too.”
“Pull up the feed from the car,” Ethan said, nodding toward the array of screens in the control truck. Andersona didn’t say anything; the other three crew members in the room looked at the floor.
“Well?”
“Phil,” Andersona said, motioning to the technical director seated in the well-cushioned and ergonomically perfect chair. Phil swiveled around and tapped a few buttons. The largest monitor on the wall came to life. It showed an extreme close-up of Jackie, her tongue hanging out of the edge of her mouth, her eyes focused dead center. Something was jolting the camera every second or two, as if it was being hit.
“This is from inside the car?” Ethan asked.
“Just watch,” Andersona answered.
The banging stopped, and Ethan heard a voice—Deirdre’s: “Use your shoe.”
Jackie disappeared from view for a moment. With her face gone, the rest of the car’s interior was visible. Ethan could just barely make out Megan in the backseat.
Jackie’s face popped back into the frame. She was so close, and it was so abrupt, that Ethan flinched.
More jolts to the camera, this time much more severe. On the third jolt, the camera tumbled from the sky. There was a jumble of swirling images as the rearview mirror, surreptitious home to ATN’s secret eye, was manhandled and eventually thrown out the window. It landed with a crack on another car. The final image was of a journalist Ethan knew—a flack, really—cursing loudly enough to be heard through the thick pane of his windshield’s glass.
“That was more than an hour ago. It’s the last we saw of them.”
“Are you telling me that three-fourths of the family starring in the highest-rated show in the history of this network, the only three-fourths not currently in a coma, have gone AWOL?”
No one said anything because there was nothing to say.
Then Ethan did something he never did. He lost control.
“Holy fuck!” he screamed, the sound of his voice a kind of whiny shriek. He punched the wall next to him and screamed again.
“Holy fuck!” This time it was with the agony of a sprained wrist and broken finger. He went down on one knee and clutched his hand.
No one in the control room moved a muscle.
“Don’t just stand there,” Ethan whimpered. “Call the staff doctor.”
While Andersona was on the phone to the medical team, Phil said, “Look.”
Ethan turned his attention to the wall of cameras and saw Deirdre’s car pulling into the driveway.
***
Megan was humiliated that ATN had aired her betrayal of Jackie. It would have been bad enough if the network had shown what really happened—that Megan had been drawn into the conspiracy by Ethan, that he had exploited her vanity—but to see it twisted into something an order of magnitude worse left Megan shaken.
When she tried to apologize to Jackie and Deirdre in the car, after the library, she broke down and cried. She was hysterical enough that Deirdre pulled the car over and climbed into the backseat to hug her. For a brief moment, Megan was a little girl again and burrowed her face into her mother’s bosom. She had never felt so safe.
“If you’re really sorry,” Jackie said from the front seat, after Megan’s sobs had subsided and her mother started driving again, “I know of a way you can help.”
“Anything,” Megan said, and she meant it.
Jackie laid out Hazel’s plan. It was, on first blush, so replete with points of failure that one of her online friends had code-named it Chernobyl. It involved theft, misdirection, and a bold kind of escape. Megan listened intently as Jackie explained.