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“Tell us it’s a prank,” Madeline said, her voice tremulous. “Please. Tell us it’s the best one yet.”
Emma stared at Sutton’s best friends, wishing desperately that she could tell them what they wanted to hear. Even though their friendship was built on a lie, she’d grown to genuinely care about the girls. Underneath the petty jealousies and pranks, the Lying Game girls were fiercely loyal to one another. Emma wasn’t quite sure when she’d stopped thinking of them as Sutton’s friends and started thinking of them as her own—but like everything else of Sutton’s, they weren’t hers at all.
Emma looked down at her shoes, avoiding Madeline’s gaze. “It’s not a prank,” she said softly.
A sharp pain cut across her cheek as Madeline slapped her. “You bitch!” she shrieked, her voice a full octave above its normal range. “What did you do to my best friend?”
Emma reached a hand to her stinging cheek, blinking back tears. The two girls swam in her vision for a moment before a tear finally fell.
“You guys have to believe me,” Emma pleaded. “I didn’t do what they say I did. I didn’t mean for this to happen—I never wanted to lie to you.”
Charlotte had gone even paler under her freckles. Her eyebrows were bright reddish-gold without her makeup, and they made her look wild-eyed.
“We trusted you,” she hissed. “We told you all kinds of secrets, let you ride in our cars, let you in our houses . . . after you killed our best friend!”
“I didn’t kill anyone!” Emma’s voice came out louder than she’d intended, reverberating around the parking lot. A few feet away a little conference of pigeons took wing at the sudden noise. She took a deep breath and said more softly, “I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Sutton since I got here. If you help me, we might be able to figure it out together.”
Madeline gave a bitter bark of laughter. “Help you? You’ve got some nerve. What makes you think we’d help someone who’s been lying to us for months?”
“Madeline, we created an entire game about lying,” I shouted, annoyed. “And you have to help her! She’s my only hope!” But obviously I didn’t get a vote this time.
“I hope you rot in jail,” Charlotte said, her lip curling upward. “And I hope you dream of Sutton every night for the rest of your life. I hope she haunts you until you die.” Then she headed back toward the school entrance without glancing back.
Madeline gave Emma one last look of loathing, and then turned to follow Char.
Emma stood frozen, watching them go, until she realized that the entire parking lot full of students was staring at her. With a nervous glance around, she quickly let herself into Ethan’s car and locked the doors.
In the rearview mirror she could see the entrance to the school. Principal Ambrose still stood there, staring daggers at her. Most of the students started streaming toward the door now that the show was over. The clock on the dash read 7:58. The bell was about to ring.
Suddenly, Emma picked one face out of the crowd as if a spotlight shone over him. Garrett stood alone in the shadow of a ten-foot saguaro cactus growing in the desert-scaped bed separating the school from the parking lot.
His eyes were honed onto my sister like a laser beam. He stared at her for a long moment, his face motionless.
I stared at him right back, wishing I could unleash the full force of my anger on him. I might have been taken in by those eyes when I was alive, but now that I was dead I knew the truth: They were the windows to a soul that was as dead and rotten as my body.
23
A WALK IN THE PARK
Emma started Ethan’s car, fumbling with the clutch so it rabbit-hopped a few feet before snapping into gear. She swerved toward the exit, narrowly missing a pudgy girl with a backpack shaped like a panda. A few feet away, Tricia Melendez stood close to her cameraman. Emma gritted her teeth. Without looking into the oncoming lane she hit the gas pedal hard, peeling out into the road just as the reporter started rushing toward the car. As the car roared away from the crowd, she could hear Tricia yelling: “Emma! Emma! Emma, what do you plan to do next?”
She’d never hated the sound of her own name so much.
Her eyes blurred with tears as she entered a neighborhood lined with pastel bungalows. In one yard a terrier ran alongside the chain-link fence, barking as she passed. A tottering old man with a pair of shears in one hand glared at her suspiciously from another.
Her heart sank as she glanced in her rearview mirror. A navy blue BMW was tailing her closely. She recognized it immediately—it was Thayer’s car. He honked lightly on the horn, signaling her to pull over. Her heart picked up speed. If Madeline and Charlotte were pissed, he’d be livid.
Still, Emma took a deep breath, then pulled over. The guilt of hiding Sutton’s death from him had been eating her alive. He deserved the truth, and a part of her believed she deserved what she was about to get.
She rolled down the window. Thayer held Emma’s gaze for a long moment before speaking.
“I knew there was something weird about you,” he said finally. “I knew it.”
Emma swallowed hard. Her pulse throbbed in her ear. “I tried to tell everyone at first. But no one would listen.” She winced, bracing herself for the onslaught of accusations.
But Thayer just nodded, eerily calm. “I know. Laurel told me.”
With a sigh of relief, Emma got out of the car and followed Thayer to an empty playground around the corner. A rusted merry-go-round pivoted slowly in the breeze. The jungle gym was shaped like a giant red spider, its long metal legs covered in footholds for climbing. Emma sat down on one of the swings, empty of energy, drifting listlessly back and forth. Thayer slouched against one of the swing set’s support poles, crossing his arms over his chest.
