Chapter 22: Scheming
The Karen call had already happened — Mike had handled it, detected the third party, and gone to bed.
What he hadn't anticipated was that Karen would call back.
Not on his cell this time. On Connie's landline, which Connie apparently still had and apparently still answered at eleven-fifteen on a Friday night with the cheerful availability of someone who kept no particular schedule.
Mike heard her voice through the wall — warm, amused, the specific tone she used when she was enjoying something. Then, louder:
"Mike, honey — phone. Another girl."
He came out of his room to find Connie leaning against the hallway wall with her Lone Star in one hand and the receiver in the other, wearing the expression of a woman who was having a very good Friday.
"Karen," she said, handing it over with a significant look. "Very polite. Nice phone manners."
Then she patted his arm, finished her beer, and disappeared down the hall toward her room with the unhurried satisfaction of someone who had contributed to the evening's entertainment and was now ready for sleep.
Mike looked at the receiver.
Sat down on the couch.
"Karen. Hey."
In the pink-and-white bedroom across town, Karen Smith was lying across her bed with her phone pressed to her ear, her legs crossed at the ankle, wearing the expression of someone who had agreed to do a thing and was now doing the thing and was not entirely sure how she felt about it.
In her own bedroom — connected by the three-way call that Karen had set up with the careful infrastructure of someone who had done this before — Regina George was sitting against her headboard with a throw pillow in her lap, listening.
"Nothing major," Karen said, keeping her voice at the light, easy register she used when she was being careful. "I just — are you free tomorrow? We were thinking of going to the mall. Regina's going."
She glanced at the small indicator light on her phone that meant the third line was active.
On that third line, Regina's expression had shifted into something attentive. She'd been the one to suggest this approach — you call him, Karen, it's less obvious — and she'd meant it. What she had not fully anticipated was that Karen would be this natural at it, or that watching Karen be natural at it would produce the particular feeling it was currently producing.
She pushed the feeling down and listened.
"Tomorrow doesn't work," Mike said. "I've already got plans."
Karen kept her voice even. "Oh, that's too bad. What are you up to?"
"Just catching up with a friend. Nothing major."
In her bedroom, Regina's jaw tightened by approximately one millimeter. She pulled the throw pillow closer.
Which friend, she thought. Ask him which friend.
Karen, who could read Regina's silences across a phone line as fluently as most people read facial expressions, understood the instruction without receiving it.
"Anyone I know?" she asked, in the most casual voice she had.
"Probably not," Mike said, pleasantly. "New friend."
Regina's throw pillow received additional pressure.
Karen tried the subject change she'd been holding in reserve. "Mike — okay, random question. Who do you think is the prettiest girl at Medford High?"
In Regina's bedroom, the pillow was set down. This was the question she'd suggested Karen ask, and she had the self-awareness to recognize that her interest in the answer was not entirely analytical.
A beat of silence on Mike's end.
Then: "Karen, you are."
Karen's feet stopped moving. Something warm went through her that she immediately tried to distribute evenly across her whole body so it didn't show up anywhere specific.
On the third line, the silence had a different quality entirely.
Mike continued, without changing his tone: "Regina is too. And Gretchen. Honestly, all three of you — you've got a look that most people at that school aren't putting together. It's noticeable."
Karen exhaled.
The warmth redistributed itself. She wasn't sure if that made it better or worse.
In Regina's bedroom, the atmosphere shifted — the specific way Regina's atmosphere shifted when she received something she'd been hoping for and had been prepared to be indifferent about. The tightness around her jaw released. Something that was almost a smile moved through her expression.
The "Plastics" aesthetic was, after all, entirely her construction. She'd built it from scratch over three years. That someone had noticed the architecture of it — and not just noticed, but named it as a cohesive thing — was, she had to admit, satisfying.
"That's really sweet," Karen said, in a voice that was trying to be normal and was mostly succeeding. "Well — if your plans change tomorrow, we'll probably be at Ridgemont Mall around two."
"I'll keep that in mind," Mike said. "Goodnight, Karen."
"Goodnight," Karen said quickly, and ended the call before Regina could give further instructions.
She sat on her bed for a moment in the sudden quiet.
Then her phone buzzed. Regina, texting now.
Find out who he's seeing tomorrow.
Karen looked at the text. Looked at the ceiling. Sent back: I'll ask around.
She put the phone face-down on the bedspread and stared at the ceiling for a while.
Being Karen Smith, she thought, is genuinely complicated.
In Regina's bedroom, the throw pillow had been relocated to its decorative position.
She was already composing the revised plan. Tomorrow's mall trip was still happening — Gretchen would come, Karen would come, and between the three of them, they would find out who had gotten to Mike first. Deford was a small town. Information traveled.
She picked up her phone and typed the group message.
Then she set it down and looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone who was deciding, for the first time, that a specific situation required more effort than she'd originally intended to give it.
She wasn't used to that. She wasn't sure how she felt about it.
She turned off the light.
Saturday morning arrived with the full confidence of a Texas August that had no intention of moderating itself.
Mike was still in bed when he heard the knock — soft, deliberate, the knock of someone who had weighed whether to do it and decided yes.
He opened the door.
The Cooper family was assembled in the hallway in their church clothes — Mary in a pressed blue dress, George Sr. in his good slacks and a button-down that he'd clearly ironed, Sheldon in his clip-on bow tie, Missy in her Sunday dress with her hair done, and Georgie in the specific expression of a teenage boy who has accepted his circumstances.
Connie stood slightly behind them in a floral blouse and her good earrings, which meant she'd made the same decision.
Mary smiled with the warm, genuine brightness of someone extending an invitation they actually meant. "Mike, we're heading to church. You're welcome to join us."
"I appreciate that," Mike said. "I've got somewhere to be this afternoon, so I'll sit this one out."
"Of course." Mary's expression held no pressure — just the open, undemanding warmth of someone who'd offered and was content with whatever the answer was. "Maybe another time."
Sheldon, beside her, turned to look up at Mary with the expression of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"If Mike isn't going," he said carefully, "it would seem reasonable that—"
"No," Mary said.
"But scientifically speaking, the probability of God's existence is no higher than—"
"Sheldon."
"I'm just saying that statistically—"
"Bow tie's crooked," Connie said, reaching over and adjusting it with a deft movement that also functioned as an end to that line of inquiry.
Sheldon subsided.
Missy, who had been watching this with the alert attention of someone looking for an opening, tried: "Mom, if Sheldon doesn't have to—"
"You're going," Mary said. "Both of you."
Georgie, who had learned years ago to stay quiet on Sunday mornings, said nothing.
George Sr. put his hand on Mary's back and gently steered the family toward the front door with the efficiency of a man who had been navigating this particular Sunday morning sequence for a decade.
Connie paused at the door and turned back to Mike. "There's a container of roast beef in the fridge — made it Thursday, still good. Help yourself, and if you're going out, take some for your friends."
"Thank you, Connie."
She gave him the sun hat wave — one smooth, departing gesture — and followed the family out.
Mike went back to bed for an hour.
He got up when the house was quiet and the sun had made clear it was serious about the day. Showered, dressed — dark jeans, a clean white t-shirt, the simple combination that required no effort and looked like it had — and combed his hair into some approximation of intentional.
He checked the time. Forty minutes until noon.
He went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and found Connie's container — roast beef, still good, enough to bring without it being too much of a thing. He packaged it neatly and set it by the door.
Then he sat at the kitchen table for a moment with his coffee and thought about the day ahead.
Cady's house. Her parents, who were academics and protective in the specific way of people who loved their kid and were paying attention. An artifact collection from Kenya that Cady had described with the particular warmth of something she genuinely cared about.
Dress like you respect anthropology, she'd said.
He looked down at the white t-shirt and jeans.
Close enough.
Meanwhile, in the sanctuary of Medford First Baptist Church, Pastor Jeff was midway through his sermon when a small, precise voice from the third pew interrupted him with a question about the statistical probability of divine existence.
Pastor Jeff, who had been doing this for twenty-two years, paused.
He tried the fifty-fifty argument — existence or non-existence, equal probability.
The small voice pointed out, with considerable patience, that probability required a defined sample space, and that applying it to metaphysical claims constituted a fundamental misuse of Bayesian reasoning.
The congregation was quiet.
Pastor Jeff gathered himself and cited Charles Darwin — who had, after all, been a man of faith while also being the architect of evolutionary theory. A historical example. Common ground.
The small voice went quiet.
Not because the argument had landed, exactly. More because Sheldon Cooper, nine years old, had run the counterargument and found that it would require citing specific passages from The Descent of Man that he hadn't memorized precisely enough to quote accurately, and he was not going to cite a source imprecisely in public.
He sat back.
Mary, beside him, had the expression of a woman who was simultaneously proud of her son's intellectual engagement and mortified by its venue.
Connie, two seats down, had the expression of a woman who had been watching Sheldon Cooper operate for a week and was no longer surprised by anything.
She caught Mary's eye.
Mary pressed her lips together.
Connie looked straight ahead and said nothing, which, this morning, was the most charitable thing she could offer.
(End of Chapter 22)
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