The Lying Game (14 page)

“You had some good ideas with this one,” Charlotte murmured while typing on her BlackBerry. “You deserve some credit.”

Emma climbed in behind Laurel. Madeline handed her a hot coffee, too, though Emma didn’t remember giving her an order. She took a sip and winced. It was black with Splenda,
yechh.
Twins must not share the same taste buds. “What’s this all about, anyway?” she asked.

Charlotte waved the little stirring straw that had come with her latte at Emma. “Don’t you worry about a thing. It’s
our
turn, Sutton. This is for you.”

Charlotte turned out of Sutton’s neighborhood, passing the park where Emma and Ethan had played tennis. “It’s all timed perfectly,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve been watching Nisha since Monday.”

“And you set up everything last night? “ Madeline was wearing her new Gucci sunglasses. The sunlight caught the gold frames and sent reflections around the inside of the car.

Charlotte nodded. “You girls are going to love it.” She wheeled around and peered at Laurel. “And you talked to … you know?”

“Yep.” Laurel giggled.

“Perfect.”

Within minutes, they were pulling into a space in the school parking lot. School didn’t start for another half hour, so the bus lanes were empty and the boys’ soccer team, who practiced both before and after school, were still galloping on the field. The girls grabbed Emma’s arms and pulled her through the courtyard and a side door. The hallways were deserted. Posters for student council elections flapped in the air-conditioned breeze. Big swirls from the janitor’s mop gleamed on the floor.

The locker room was deserted, too, smelling like a mix of powdery deodorant and bleach. Each sports team got its own wide aisle. Girls kept the same sports locker from year to year—Emma had opened Sutton’s designated tennis locker on the first day of practice and found a few things still inside, including a shiny nylon jacket that said
HOLLIER TENNIS
on the back.

As they rounded the corner to the tennis team’s bank of lockers, Madeline stopped short.
“Whoa.”
Laurel covered her mouth with her hand.

Emma peered around them and nearly cried out. Papers lay scattered over the floor and on the benches. Red liquid covered a couple of doors and lockers. There was a tape outline of a body on the floor, with a big splattering of red stuff—
blood?
—near the head. Yellow police tape strung around the outline said
CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS.

Emma’s vision began to narrow. She took a big step back. Could it
be?
She thought of the note again.
Sutton’s dead.
Maybe someone had found Sutton’s body …
here.
Maybe the snuff film had taken place in a field nearby. The killer had dragged Sutton into the locker room and deposited her here for someone to find. And if they’d found Sutton, what would that mean for Emma?

I tried to imagine my body lying on the cold locker room floor, blood seeping out of my head, my eyes fluttering closed. Had this been it? Had someone dumped me here? But the locker room setting didn’t match the flickers I’d already had about my death—the screams, the darkness, the knife at my throat. Something seemed off about the whole thing. Then I noticed Laurel’s small, nervous smile behind her hand.

“Psst.”
Charlotte yanked them into the shower room. The floor was shiny and wet, and someone had left a big bottle of Aveda shampoo on a built-in shelf in one of the stalls. Charlotte peeked around the doorway and gestured for the girls to do the same. A few girls on various teams passed the tennis lockers, doing a triple take at the crime scene. An angular cross-country runner took a picture of it with her phone. An Asian girl saw it and immediately turned around and went the other direction. When Nisha appeared at the far end of the hall, Charlotte squeezed Emma’s hand. “Let the games begin.”

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.

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 insidea science classroom, but was it Emma’s imagination 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. “Twogirls 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.