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Iris rolled her eyes. “Stop being so dramatic.”
“I’ve definitely done my part,” Emily insisted. “Now tell me something about Ali.”
Iris rubbed her palms together. “What do you want to know?”
Emily’s mind scattered in a thousand different directions. She hadn’t been prepared to get to choose her question. “Did Ali have a boyfriend?”
Iris ran her fingers across one of her newly stolen shirts. “Everyone adored Ali. Guys and girls. Everyone wanted a piece of her.”
“Was there someone special? Someone who would do anything for her?”
A knowing smile spread across Iris’s face. “You were the one who was in love with her, weren’t you?”
Emily flinched. “Who told you that?”
Iris’s eyes locked on Emily’s. “Ali talked about you all the time when she was at The Preserve. She was like, My sister has this one friend named Emily who’s got it bad for her. That’s how I’m going to win her over. She’ll be a piece of cake.”
Emily focused on the lines on the highway until they blurred. That was exactly how Ali had won Emily over; she’d kissed Emily as passionately as Emily had kissed Their Ali in the tree house at the end of seventh grade. And then Ali had said how much she’d always loved Emily, even when she was trapped in The Preserve. Of course Emily had bought it. It had been what she’d always wanted to hear.
“Aw, did I hit a nerve?” Iris asked, stroking Emily’s forearm.
Emily ripped her arm away. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Do you still love her?”
“I’m not talking about this with you,” Emily snapped. “But no, I don’t love her anymore.” Again, Jordan’s face flashed in her mind. She felt a pang of sadness.
“But you did after the fire in the Poconos, didn’t you? Someone snuck an iPad into The Preserve around the time all that Ali stuff went down, and I remember watching a lot of the footage. I saw your face on the news. You looked crushed that she might be dead. Your true love . . . gone. That had to hurt.”
Emily turned her head so sharply toward Iris that Iris cowered. “What do you know about true love?” Emily snarled.
Iris’s bottom lip trembled. “I was in love once, too.”
The moment suddenly defused. There were tears in Iris’s eyes. She pressed her lips together so tightly they were translucent. Emily did the same thing when she was trying to hold it together.
Emily faced front again, feeling bad for lashing out. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I thought you were teasing me. Do you want to talk about it?”
Iris sniffed. “I’m not talking about this with you,” she said in the exact same tone Emily had used.
“Touché,” Emily said softly.
They passed a Wawa and a flower shop, and then the road that led to Aria’s house. Emily tried to imagine the person Iris had been in love with, but when she tried to picture a face, she only came up with a question mark.
“Okay, fine.” Iris broke the silence. “Ali did have someone special. A guy.”
Emily’s heart started beating faster. “Okay . . .”
“She talked about him all the time. They were really tight.”
Emily was so excited that she pulled over onto the shoulder. Cars whipped past. She shifted the car into park and stared at Iris. “Was he a patient at the hospital? Or just a visitor? Do you know his name?”
“Ah, ah, ah!” Iris wagged her finger. “You just wanted to know if she had a boyfriend, not what his name was.” She patted Emily’s thigh. “All in good time, honey. Now, I believe we have more things on my bucket list to get to, don’t we?”
Then she yanked the list out of her bag and consulted it. Emily bit down hard on the inside of her lip, trying to swallow her frustration. After all, she had no choice but to play Iris’s game.
Especially if it led to some answers. And Ali.
12
Kissing and Telling
On Monday, Aria stood in the Rosewood Day gym. The bleachers had been folded up to make more room on the basketball court, the air smelled like rubber sneakers, and a flickering fluorescent light in the rafters was doing its best to break her concentration. The six girls on the decorations committee, all with smooth, long hair, perfectly toned bodies, and matching Tory Burch flats, stood in a circle around her, awaiting instructions. Aria knew she should be thrilled to be bossing around Typical Rosewoods, but instead she just felt on edge.
“Um, okay, so the theme is The Starry Night,” Aria said shakily, holding up a big picture of the Van Gogh painting in a library book. Just holding it, pointing at it, made her feel like a marked woman. She was sure all the girls could tell exactly what was hiding in her closet—and exactly what she’d done.
She coughed and continued. “So, I’m going to hire a company that specializes in papier-mâché sculptures to do some big moons and stars for us—since we have to do this by the end of the week, we need some outside help.” That was the nice thing about Rosewood Day: They had a big budget for decorations. “I’ve also called up a company that custom-dyes table linens and can even make interesting slipcovers for the chairs. But the seven of us should definitely paint at least one of the murals. But, um, I was thinking The Night Café instead. It’s much more romantic, don’t you think?”
A pert-nosed blond girl named Tara raised her hand. “Um, the theme is The Starry Night for a reason,” she said in a haughty, nasal voice, glancing derisively at Aria’s thigh-high pleather boots.
