The four conjoined teens were upset that Ethan and Scott wanted them to unfuse for the rest of the day--and with Luke's cousin visiting and them wanting to hide their fusion powers from him for the time being, it looked as though it might be some time before any of them could share a body with at least one other person.
When the quad finished their time in the steam room, they dried themselves off, stepped back into the basement, and put on their fused clothes. Together, they unfused back into Mark, Max, Zack, and Luke, original clothes and all.
"I understand why we should hide all this from Evan," said Zack, "but this kinda sucks."
"Yeah," Mark agreed. "I was looking forward to spending at least a little more time with at least one of my brothers, including you when our dads are joined, Luke."
"At least none of us are traveling for the holidays," said Max. "So at least we'll still be together in that way, if not the way we want to be together."
"Yeah. In a few days, Christmas is here for us," Luke smiled. "And I think today is the last day of school until January."
"That's right," Mark smiled. "Today is Tuesday, and tomorrow beings our holiday break. I guess that's a silver lining to all this."
"I wonder if we're gonna be wearing those ugly sweaters," Max added.
Luke answered, "Maybe, but it will be worth it if--"
Luke suddenly stopped, because a thought entered his head at just that moment.
"--if we are all together!" Luke finished excitedly. He had an idea.
"Luke, what is it?" Zack asked.
"Follow me!" Luke exclaimed as he ran up the basement stairs. Mark, Max, and Zack followed Luke as he went up the stairs, towards his front door, up to the second floor, down the hall, and into his bedroom. Luke opened his closet door, and found that all the "special outfits" he had gotten from that "mall Santa" a few days ago were still there, and all his regular clothes were still folded and piled down below. As the others stood behind him, Luke began scouring the closet, looking for something that he was sure might be in there now. After a few seconds, he found what he was looking for when he pulled out a few large boxes from one of the shelves. The boxes were kinda flat, and to the others it looked as though they might just contain ordinary clothes, even though they all knew about and had seen the conjoined twin suit that Luke had gotten in this--and Kevin and Dean had secretly borrowed and taken home with them the other day. But once the four teens opened the boxes and saw what was inside, they immediately knew what Luke's idea was.
Inside the boxes were a bunch of Christmas sweaters, made with red, white, and blue wool, and decorated with the stitched designs of snowflakes, gingerbread men, ornaments, skates, and of Christmas lights. What set them apart from most other sweaters were the number of collars: Luke now owned many of each variation of the TOMS and Target "Together Sweater". There were several sweaters in several boxes, the ones that they saw at first having either two, four, six, eight, even ten heads. It was possible that there might be others with odd numbers like three or five, or maybe even more than ten heads, but they would look into those later. There was a note in one of the boxes saying that none of the sweaters could bring people together in the same way as the conjoined twin suit, but that did not truly disappoint any of the teens. They could still use the sweaters to simulate their conjoined states in various configurations--and perhaps if they kept their hips and legs separate, they could still fuse their torsos together and hide them under the sweaters while Evan was there (at least until they, their dads, and their friends decided to let Evan in on their little secret).
In the meantime, the four teens felt like trying the sweaters out, and wondering if they should include the others.