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Tell them, I wished I could say. My friends would probably encourage Emma to get over her oh-so-unSutton-Mercer shyness and ask Ethan out. Sure Ethan was a loner, but he was a hot loner.
Suddenly, the front door slammed. “Hel o?” a man’s voice cal ed out.
Madeline leapt up, stabbed out the cigarette on the windowsil , and fanned the fumes outside. There were footsteps, and then Mr. Vega peered into the den. “Oh. Hel o, girls. Madeline didn’t tel me you were coming over today.”
“They’re just here to plan the Homecoming dance, Daddy,” Madeline said, jumping from the window seat to the La-Z-Boy chair. Her face was even paler than usual. Mr. Vega turned and gave her a long, discerning stare. He tilted his nostrils up and sniffed the air. “Was someone smoking?” The transformation of Mr. Vega’s stony face into a fiery scowl now reminded Emma of Mr. Smythe, another one of her foster dads. He was like Dr. Jekyl /Mr. Hyde: sweet one moment and volatile the next. The only way Emma could tel he was going to freak out was when he started feverishly licking his lips.
Madeline shook her head. “Of course not!”
“It’s from outside,” Charlotte said at the same time. “A bunch of kids walked by, and they were al smoking.”
A neutral look settled over Mr. Vega’s face again, but his eyes stil burned. “Wel , if you girls need anything, I’l be in my office.” Then he eyed the episode of Jersey Shore on TV. “You shouldn’t watch that trash, Madeline.”
Madeline clicked the remote. A chase scene of a male lion taking down a frantic zebra fil ed the screen. After he left, Charlotte walked over and touched Madeline’s arm. A tinny bleep issued from Madeline’s iPhone, which sat facedown on the coffee table. Everyone started. She grabbed it and studied the screen. “Surprise, surprise. Another text from Lili and Gabby. They’ve been begging to come to Mount Lemmon with us al day.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Charlotte said. Sutton’s phone, which Mrs. Mercer had let Emma have back in case of an emergency, rang, too. Emma pul ed it from her bag. HELLO, SWEETS! Gabby wrote. YOU TOTALLY
WANT TO BE US, DON’T YOU? THAT MAKES THREE OF US—WE LOVE
US, TOO! MWAH!
Charlotte groaned as she read her BlackBerry. “If they were any more ful of themselves, they’d have to have ego liposuction.”
Their phones lit up once more. GUESS THE l IN LYING GAME
STANDS FOR loser!
“That’s not cool.” Laurel jabbed at her phone to delete the message. “If they keep this up no one wil ever vote for them again.”
“I don’t know how they got voted in at all,” Charlotte mused, fiddling with a ceramic donkey statue on the coffee table. “I took a look at the bal ots online—Isabel Girard and Kaitlin Pierce were also on it, and guys are much more into them than Gabby and Lili.”
“I vote we stop hanging out with them.” Madeline reached for a handful of popcorn.
“I second that,” Emma said quickly, remembering Gabby’s eerie gun-trigger gesture at lunch the other day. I third that, I thought.
The phones beeped once more, and everyone diverted their attention to their screens. TWO PRETTY COURT GIRLS
DESERVE A SMOKIN’ PARTY! STEP IT UP, BITCHES!
“You know what I think we should do?” Madeline leaned back on the couch and curled her knees to her chest. “We should knock those princesses down to size. Hit ’em where it hurts.”
“A prank?” Laurel’s eyebrows shot up.
Emma shifted her weight. “I don’t think so. . . .” She thought about the file at the police station—Gabby going to the hospital, al of it being Sutton’s fault. She stil hadn’t figured out how Gabby had gotten hurt, but a trip to the ER
couldn’t have been good. “It might be going too far. Especial y after what happened . . .” She let her voice trail off and gazed out the window, figuring Sutton’s friends knew far more about the train incident than she did. Sutton’s friends were silent. Laurel stared at her hands and picked at a cuticle. Madeline flipped through her binder. “Oh please,” Charlotte final y said. “Now that you’re al buddy-buddy with them, they’re off-limits?”
Emma raised an eyebrow. Buddy-buddy? Not from what she’d noticed of the Twins.
Charlotte draped her arms over the top of the couch.
“They said they shoplifted with you at Clique,” she said, rol ing her eyes. “Gabby and Lili bragged about it like it was the coolest thing, like we al hadn’t done it a mil ion times before.”
Madeline’s mouth dropped open. “Were they with you the other day when you got arrested?”
“No, not that time,” Emma said quickly, her mind racing.
“It was before that,” Charlotte butted in.
Emma turned away, needing a moment to process al of this. According to Sutton’s credit card statement, the last time Sutton was at Clique was on the thirty-first. And Samantha at Clique had said Sutton stole something from the store while she’d been with someone else—or, more specifical y, a posse of someones. And the very last phone cal Sutton picked up on the thirty-first was from Lili.
“Yeah, I went to Clique with them right before school started,” Emma said slowly.
Al of a sudden, a memory ignited in my mind: Gabby and Lili, flanking me behind a rack of silky camisoles and lingerie at Clique. “Do it, Sutton,” Gabby had whispered, her warm, mint-scented breath on my neck.
“C’mon, Sutton,” Laurel urged. “Those bitches deserve to be pranked.”
