The Lying Game tlg-1

by Sara Shepard

  A cold, clammy feeling of understanding washed over Emma. But before she could say anything, Charlotte put her finger to her lips. Shhh.

  Nisha’s dark hair cascaded down her back. She carried a green tennis bag on her shoulder. When she turned the corner and noticed the crime scene, she stopped hard. She took a few tentative steps toward it, staring at the locker surrounded by police tape. A helpless look washed over her face.

  “Miss?” A woman in a police uniform burst into the room, making everyone, including Emma, Charlotte, and Madeline, jump. Nisha flinched and pressed her arm to her chest as if to say, Who me? “Can you tell me whose locker this is?”

  Nisha’s tawny skin turned ashen. She glanced at the cop’s badge, then at her gun. “Um, that’s my locker.”

  Laurel let out a tiny yelp of a laugh. Charlotte shot her a look.

  The cop tapped the locker door with the antenna of her walkie-talkie. “Would you mind opening it for me? I need to search it.”

  Nisha’s bag slipped from her shoulder to the floor. She didn’t pick it back up. “W-Why?”

  “I have a warrant right here.” The cop unfolded a piece of paper and flashed it in Nisha’s face. “I need to search this locker.”

  Charlotte covered her mouth with her hand. Madeline’s whole body shook, making tiny I-don’t-want-to-laugh squeaks. They both turned to Emma. Charlotte lifted her eyebrows in a silent look that seemed to ask, Don’t you love this? Emma looked away.

  More girls gathered in the locker room, nudging and staring. The cop paced the aisle. Nisha opened and closed her mouth a few times without speaking. Tears welled in her eyes. “Am I in trouble? I didn’t do anything!”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” the cop said. The handcuffs on her belt jingled.

  Madeline nudged Laurel in the ribs. “Where did you find her?”

  “I put an ad on Craigslist.” Laurel beamed. “She’s a theater major at the U of A.”

  The cop nodded at Nisha again, this time more forcefully. Nisha’s hands shook as she worked the combination. By now Charlotte was doubled over, her shoulders shaking. Madeline had her tongue wedged between her teeth to stave off giggles. When the locker opened, the cop plunged her hand inside and pulled out a kitchen knife. More red stuff smeared the pointed tip.

  Nisha sank down to the bench in the middle of the aisle. “I-I don’t know how that got there!”

  Emma picked nervously at dry skin on her palm. Sure, Nisha was a bitch, but was she this much of a bitch?

  I watched uncertainly, too. Maybe I’d been a prankster when I was alive, but from the other side, a staged murder definitely turned the proverbial stomach of a girl who’d just been killed. In fact, it seemed almost eerily coincidental. . . .

  “I need to search the top part of the locker, too,” the cop demanded. “And then you and I are going to take a little trip down to the station.”

  “But this is a mistake!” Nisha’s eyes filled with tears.

  Emma tugged Charlotte’s sleeve. “Guys. Come on. That’s enough.”

  Charlotte shot up and whirled around. “What?”

  “Nisha seems kind of freaked out.”

  Madeline cocked her head. “That’s why it’s funny.”

  “We don’t want her to have a heart attack,” Emma argued.

  “Like you haven’t done worse, Sutton?” A water droplet from the shower nozzle plopped on Charlotte’s head, but she ignored it. “Don’t get all soft on us now. Anyway, we had to go big with her. She knows what we’re about. We couldn’t just fill her pool with frogs or put Nair in her shampoo or something dumb like that.”

  “I think it was a genius idea,” Laurel whispered behind them.

  “Thank you.” Charlotte grinned. “I knew we needed something special to kick off a new year of the Lying Game!”

  Emma chomped down on the inside of her cheek to keep from showing surprise. The Lying Game?

  The words swirled in my head, too. Sensations bobbed to the surface. Screams and laughs, hands clapped over mouths, the hot stomach-pull of excitement. I strained to remember more, but it was just a cascade of feelings that rushed over me.

  Out in the aisle, the cop pressed the latch to open the top compartment of Nisha’s locker. Charlotte grabbed Emma’s hand. “Get ready.” As the door opened, something shot out of the space. Nisha screamed and covered her eyes. Emma braced herself, too . . . and then she saw a shiny Mylar balloon float lazily into the aisle and bob to the ceiling. It was in the shape of a banana with bug eyes and a deranged smile. “That’s bananas!” a robotic voice rang out from the balloon as it bounced off the ceiling. “That’s bananas! That’s bananas!” A note dangled from the end of the string that said GOTCHA!

  Emma couldn’t help but explode with laughter. Now that was funny.

  Nisha wiped her eyes, a tiny wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. She looked over her shoulder for the cop, but the University of Arizona drama student had run off, bloody knife and all. Nisha ripped the GOTCHA! note off the string, crumpled it up, and tossed it to the floor. “That’s bananas!” the balloon bleated again and again in a robotic voice.

  Charlotte emerged from their hiding place in the showers, her high-heeled boots clicking on the tile. Nisha turned and glared at her, her face puce. “You better not tell on us,” Charlotte said in a chillingly even voice. She wagged her finger back and forth. “Or else we’ll get you worse.”

  Madeline and Laurel formed a convoy behind Charlotte, shooting Nisha the same don’t-mess-with-us looks, too. Emma ran past Nisha as fast as she could. Out in the hall, the girls leaned against the wall and laughed long and hard. Madeline grabbed Charlotte’s hand. Tears rolled down Laurel’s cheeks.

  “Her face!” Charlotte said between breaths.

  “Priceless!” Madeline cried.

  Laurel poked Emma’s side. “C’mon. You can admit it now. You loved it, right?”

  They were all staring at Emma like she was the be-all and end-all, the final thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Emma stared blankly out the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the hallway. A mini yellow school bus pulled away from the curb. A group of girls in field hockey uniforms passed, all giggling. Then Emma turned back and regarded each of Sutton’s friends. Whatever this was, Sutton had clearly been the ringleader.

  Charlotte waved her hand in front of Emma’s face. “Well? A-plus or F-minus?”

  Emma hefted her purse higher on her shoulder and mustered a devious smile. “A-plus,” she managed to say, trying to channel her sister. “It was awesome.”

  The girls smiled with relief. “I knew it.” Charlotte gave Emma a high five. The bell rang, and they linked elbows and started down the hall. Emma was pulled along with them, but all her body parts, down to the individual cells, were quivering.

  The Lying Game. If this was something Sutton and her friends did often, if this was something they’d done to a lot of people at school, they might’ve pushed someone too far. She thought of what Charlotte had said. Like you haven’t done worse, Sutton? What if that was just it? What if Sutton had done worse—much worse—and someone had killed her for it?

  I concentrated hard, but I still couldn’t see what that horrible thing could have been. But even so, I had a sinking feeling Emma might be right.

  Chapter 16

  LAST BUS TO VEGAS

  Emma pushed through the congested halls to her locker. Her nose still stung with the smell of the fake blood. Over her shoulder, she noticed two girls glance at her with a mix of fear and reverence. She distinctly heard them whisper the words “Nisha” and “crime scene.” A guy in a soccer jersey stood in the doorway of the student council room and chanted, “That’s bananas! That’s bananas!” Had the details of the prank gotten out already? How could they all laugh about it?

  “Hi, Sutton!” a girl called to Emma as she passed, but her smile looked twisted and sinister. “What up, Sutton?” a tall guy in baggy pants and skate shoes called from inside a science classroom, but was it Emma’s imaginatio
n or did his voice have a steely, hateful edge? Sutton could’ve pranked these people—all of them. Anyone could be her killer.

  She whipped around the corner and nearly collided into a tall figure carrying a large cup of coffee. “Whoa,” he said, protectively placing a hand on the lid. Emma backed up. Ethan stood before her, wearing a gray hoodie, long army-green surfer shorts, and faded Converse shoes. His unapproachable, surly expression softened when he saw it was her. “Oh. Hey.”

  “Hey,” Emma answered, grateful to see a friendly face. She started down the hall. “H-How are you?” She tried to sound cheerful, but her voice trembled.

  “I’m cool.” Ethan kept pace with her. “You? You’ve got that the-bogeyman’s-after-me look again.”

  Emma ran her hand over the back of her neck. It was suddenly sweaty. Her heart was pounding really fast, too. “I’m just a little freaked out,” she admitted.

  “Why?”

  They turned another corner and walked through the lobby, sidestepping a group of kids break-dancing by the ceramics display case. “Let’s just say I’m tempted to blow off school for the rest of the year and hide in a cave somewhere.”

  “Is this about the Nisha prank?” Ethan asked. “Two girls ahead of me in the coffee line were talking about it,” he went on. One of his shoulders rose in a sheepish shrug. “It sounded . . . crazy.”

  Emma sank down on a lobby bench. “Yeah. My friends kind of went . . . too far.”

  Ethan sat down next to her, picking up a flyer that said FALL HARVEST DANCE! GET YOUR TICKETS NOW! and twisting it in his hands. One corner of his mouth pulled up into a sarcastic smile. “Isn’t that kind of how it works? Don’t you guys always go too far?”

  A knot formed in Emma’s stomach. Charlotte’s words spun in her head like clothes in a dryer: Like you haven’t done worse? Was that how it worked?

  She swallowed hard, staring blankly across the room at a large display case next to the auditorium. A gold-lettered poster said IN MEMORIAM. Black-and-white yearbook portraits of dead students marched up and down the page, along with their names and death dates. Sutton should be on that board, Emma thought. She wondered if whoever had killed her passed this lobby all the time.

  Two guys played tag down the hall, their footsteps ringing out on the hard floor. Emma blinked hard. Before she could say anything more, the bell rang. Ethan gave Emma a parting smile. “If you’re sick of the pranks, you should tell your friends you want to stop. Just walk away from it, y’know? Everyone would thank you for it.” He tossed the coffee cup in the trash. “See you around.”

  Emma watched him disappear down the hall. Her palms felt sweaty. She knew she needed to stand up, but her legs wouldn’t work. The dead faces on the IN MEMORIAM poster watched her with eerie, knowing smiles. And then what she needed to do zinged through her body like a dart. “I have to get out of here,” she whispered.

  She’d never felt so sure of something in her life. Whatever Sutton was involved in, whatever the Lying Game was, it was scary and dangerous and way too intense. Just sitting here in the school hall made her feel like a target in a rifle range.

  And maybe, I thought with a shudder, someone was already taking aim.

  Laurel’s Jetta made a screeching noise as Emma wheeled it into the parking lot of the downtown Tucson Greyhound station. She hit the brake just before ramming into a cinderblock parking divider. Turning off the ignition, she looked cautiously around.

  The air was oven-hot and the blacktop shimmered. Two old men outside the station gave Emma a squinty look. Across the street, three scruffy college kids shuffling into Hotel Congress turned and stared right at her, too. Even the sex kittens in the S&M window seemed to be watching. Emma slipped on Sutton’s big D&G sunglasses, but she still felt exposed.

  It was later that afternoon, and Emma was supposed to be at tennis practice. She’d racked her brain all day for how she could get out of town—and where she’d go. Emma didn’t want to use Sutton’s ATM or credit cards to fund her escape—it would be too easy for the killer to track her.

  And then she’d realized: the locker in Vegas. She’d stashed her two-thousand-dollar nest egg there, afraid to bring such a huge wad of cash to Tucson. The locker required a numerical combination, which Emma had set to Becky’s birthday, March tenth. If Emma could just get back to the money, she’d be okay for a while. She could take a cheap bus to the East Coast, where no one would find her. Maybe, if she got out of the way, people would realize Sutton was gone and start searching for her.

  And maybe I’d finally figure out why—and how—I’d died. Or would I? If Emma left, would I go with her—to live her new, anonymous life in New York or New England? Constantly following her while she moved on? Or would I disappear forever once she left my life? What would happen to me then?

  Emma had swiftly stolen Laurel’s keys from her tennis locker. Please forgive me, Laurel, she’d silently beseeched as she’d gingerly plucked the keys from the bag and slipped them into her pocket. Not a minute later, she was pulling out of the parking lot, stabbing Greyhound Bus Station into Laurel’s GPS.

  Emma entered the bus station and stood in line behind a thin balding man with square-framed glasses and a frizzy-haired woman with a giant rolling suitcase. The shifty-eyed ticket attendant glanced up and stared straight at her, then went back to ringing up a sale. A sign over the woman’s head gave a bus schedule for Las Vegas. The bus left in fifteen minutes. Perfect.

  The thin balding man leaned forward on his elbows at the ticket counter and made small talk about the weather. The overhead light made an anxious, high-pitched squeal. Every time the wind gusted, the door blew open and shut, making Emma jump. The hair on her arms stood on end. If only this line would move a little faster.

  A Paramore song suddenly exploded from Emma’s bag. She pulled out Sutton’s ringing iPhone. LAUREL, said the Caller ID. Emma instantly hit SILENT.

  The MISSED CALL message flashed on the screen, but then Laurel called right back. Emma muffled Paramore once again. Why wasn’t Laurel on the tennis court? Emma thought she had at least an hour before Laurel would notice her car missing. After another MISSED CALL message flashed, a new text appeared. Emma opened it. 911, Laurel wrote. DID YOU TAKE MY CAR? ARE YOU OKAY? IF YOU DON’T CALL BACK IN FIVE MINUTES I’M SENDING OUT A SEARCH PARTY.

  The frizzy-haired woman in front of Emma peered at her curiously. The ticket attendant leered as she licked a finger to count out dollar bills. Emma tried to swallow the lump that had formed in her throat. All at once, her escape plan felt foolish. Laurel was probably freaking out about the missing car at tennis right now.

  And even if Emma did get on the bus for Vegas, the police would find Laurel’s car in the parking lot in no time. With no Emma inside, everyone would assume the girl they thought was Sutton had just run away. And then Shifty Eyes the ticket attendant would identify Emma as the girl who’d bought a ticket to Vegas . . . and the cops would be looking for Emma there, not for Sutton’s body here.

  Laurel called again just as Emma stepped out of the ticket line. Emma pressed the green answer button and said hello. “There you are, flake.” Laurel sounded annoyed. Her voice was hollow, like the phone was on speaker. “Did you steal my car?”

  “Just get your own car out of the impound lot already!” Charlotte’s voice called from the background. “We’ll all pool our money!”

  “I’m sorry,” Emma blurted. “I just . . . needed to do something. Something important.” She walked to the window and gazed across the street at the girls in the shop window. What could be so important down here? Sex toys? Seeing an emo show at Hotel Congress?

  “I’m taking Laurel home from tennis, so no worries,” Charlotte said. “But finish up your little errand before our sleepover, okay? It won’t be complete without the executive committee.”

  “Don’t forget Lili and Gabby,” Laurel piped up.

  “Yeah, but they don’t count,” Charlotte countered.

  The loudspeaker in the station cra
ckled, making Emma jump. “Now departing in Stall Three, Greyhound 459 to Las Vegas,” the ticket taker’s bored, nasal voice boomed. “Las Vegas, now boarding.”

  Emma scrambled to muffle the iPhone, but it was too late. There was a pause on the other end. “Did they just say Greyhound?” Laurel sounded confused.

  “Are you going to Vegas?” Charlotte asked.

  Emma pushed the creaky door out of the station and walked as fast as she could to Laurel’s car, afraid the blaring announcement might sound again. “I-I was just passing by the bus station. The window’s down. But I’m on my way back home now, okay?”

  The already hot upholstery in Laurel’s car burned Emma’s shoulders and the backs of her legs as she climbed in and hung up the phone. Her fingers shook as she pushed the key into the ignition. A motor growled, and she looked up. A bus chugged under the porte cochere, a big sign that said LAS VEGAS on the windshield. People threw their luggage in the lower compartment and climbed aboard.

  Then a small clicking sound made her stiffen and turn. The backs of her ears burned. It felt like someone was staring at her. She looked around. The old men on the bench had vanished. On the street, traffic had come to a standstill. A neon green Prius that said DISCOUNT CAB honked. A red hatchback with a big dent in the fender idled behind it, and a black pickup revved its engine impatiently behind that. In front of them all, a silver Mercedes crept slowly past the bus station. Emma stared hard at its gleaming hood ornament. Through the tinted windows, Emma could just make out that the driver was looking at something in the bus station parking lot. Her.

  I squinted hard to see who it was, but I couldn’t make out a face.

  The green cab honked once more, and the Mercedes driver faced forward again and rolled through the light. Emma watched the car until it vanished over the hill. Only after it had disappeared from view could she exhale. But her jittery paranoia was for good reason.