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But Lili looks at me like I’m nuts. “You seriously expect me to lie for you?” She sets her hands on her hips. “I’m telling the cops what you did!”
“Your choice,” I say calmly. “But whatever is going on with your freaky sister has nothing to do with me, and you know it. If you tell the cops—if you tell anyone—you’ll regret it.”
Lili’s eyes widen. “Is that a threat?”
My face hardens to a mask of stone. “Call it what you want. If you tell, we’ll have no reason to be friends anymore. Things will change for you, big-time, and they’ll change for your sister, too.” I step so close to Lili I can feel her warm breath on my face. “Lili,” I say, speaking slowly so that she can understand every last word. “When Gabby wakes up, perfectly fine, and finds out that you’ve just made the two of you the biggest losers at Hollier, do you think she’s going to thank you for doing the right thing? Do you think she’s going to see you as a hero?”
Everyone is silent. Behind us, Gabby is being strapped to a stretcher. My friends shift back and forth, but I know they’re not surprised. We’ve done this before. Lili’s nostrils flare in and out. Her eyes burn with anger. I stare back. There’s no way I’ll crack first.
We remain in deadlock until the police cruiser roars up in a cloud of desert dust. Two cops, one stocky with a pencil-thin moustache and the other red-haired and freckled, get out of the car and walk toward us.
“Ladies?” The redhead removes a notepad from his pocket. His walkie-talkie beeps every few seconds.
“What’s going on here?”
Lili whips around to face him, and for a moment, I think she’s actually going to spill everything. But then her bottom lip starts to tremble. The EMTs pass us, carrying Gabby to the ambulance. “Where are you taking her?” Lili calls after them.
“Oro Valley Hospital,” one of the EMTs answers.
“I-is she going to be okay?” Lili asks, her shaking voice swallowed by the wind. No one answers her. Lili catches them before they shut the back doors. “Can I ride with her? She’s my sister.”
The cop clears his throat. “You can’t go yet, miss. We need you to make a statement.”
Lili pauses, her toes pointed toward the ambulance, her body twisted back toward us. A swirl of emotions cross her face in a matter of seconds, and I can practically see her brain racing as she calculates her options. Finally she shrugs, a pure white flag of surrender. “Let them speak for me. It happened to all of us. We were all together.”
I exhale.
The cop nods and turns to Madeline, Charlotte, and Laurel and starts his questions. Just after Lili climbs into the ambulance and it turns away, I feel a buzzing in my pocket. I pull out my phone and see a new message on the screen from Lili.
IF THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY SISTER, IF SHE
DOESN’T MAKE IT, I’M GOING TO KILL YOU.
Whatever, I think. And then I hit DELETE.
Chapter 19
The Writing on the Wall
At first, Emma could only make out blurry shadows. She heard screams, but it was like they were coming from the end of a long tunnel. A hardwood floor pressed into her back. A musty, closed-up scent assaulted her nostrils. Something wet pooled on her face—she wondered vaguely if it was blood.
Soft fabric brushed up against her bare arm. Breath warmed her skin. “Hel o?” Emma struggled to say. It took an enormous effort to form the words. “Hel o?” she said again. “Who’s there?”
A figure moved away. The floorboards creaked. There was something wrong with Emma’s vision. Someone loomed nearby, but al she could see was a black blob. She heard squeaking sounds, smel ed chalk dust. What was going on?
A few seconds later, her vision focused. The blob was gone. Sitting in front of her was a large upright chalkboard from an old set. Emma had passed it countless times during the party preparations today, noting that someone had written a quote from The Glass Menagerie on it:
“Things have a way of turning out so badly.” Those words had been wiped away now, and a new message had taken its place. As soon as Emma read the slanted handwriting, her blood went cold.
Stop digging, or next time I’ll hurt you for real. Emma gasped. “Who’s there?” she screamed. “Come out!”
“Say something!” I yel ed, too, as blind as she was. “We know you’re there!”
But whoever had written the note didn’t answer. And then the warm, throbbing darkness began to take hold of Emma once more. Her eyes fluttered, and she fought to keep them open. Just before she passed out again, she caught sight of the same blurry figure—or maybe two blurry figures—
swirling their hands over the chalkboard, wiping the words clean.
The next time Emma opened her eyes, she was lying on a bed in a smal white room. An instructional sheet on how to properly wash one’s hands hung on the opposite wal . Another poster for how to administer the Heimlich maneuver hung over a smal table that contained jars of cotton swabs and boxes of latex gloves.
“Sutton?”
Emma turned toward the voice. Madeline sat on an office chair next to the cot, her knees pressed tightly together, her fingers knotted in her lap. When she saw that Emma was awake, relief flooded her face. “Thank God! Are you okay?”
Emma lifted her arm and pressed it to her forehead. Her limbs felt normal again, not fil ed with sand like they had as she lay on the stage floor. “What happened?” she croaked.
“Where am I?”
“It’s al right, dear,” said another voice. A lanky woman with dishwater-blond hair cut bluntly to her chin and a pair of tortoiseshel glasses perched on her nose swam into view. She wore a white lab coat that had the words T. GROVE and NURSE stitched on the breast. “It appears you fainted. It was probably from low blood sugar. Have you had anything to eat today?”
