The Lying Game (24 page)

SHAKESPEARE PAPER
OR
C’S PARTY.

A creak sounded outside the door. Emma froze and cocked her head. A shout emerged from the party downstairs. Someone’s cell phone rang. She strained for any sounds that were close, every nerve ending tingling. Slowly she breathed out.

Turning back to the computer, she pulled up the Finder and hurriedly typed
Lying Game
into the search field. The little rainbow wheel whirled. One folder popped up, buried deep within a temporary drive. Emma clicked on it several times. The computer made a sharp barking sound.

The folder listed a series of videos. Emma clicked on the first one, and a short clip of Madeline pretending to drown in a pool appeared. It was the same video Emma had seen on Facebook. Another video showed Sutton, Charlotte, and Madeline on a green golf course at night, spray-painting a rock. “A thousand bucks says Laurel doesn’t show,” Sutton said. It was another video from Sutton’s Facebook page.

She clicked on more videos: one of Sutton calling the police and telling them she’d heard a baby crying in a Dumpster. One of Madeline stealing Mrs. Mercer’s car while she shopped at AJ’s Market, the rest of the girls hiding in the bushes with the camera and giggling when Mrs. Mercer came out of the store and panicked. One of the girls turning the desks in a classroom backward and hanging the American flag upside down on its pole. On and on it went. Prank after prank. It never seemed to end.

I watched, too, feeling sicker and sicker. Every prank we’d pulled was cunning—and cruel. We’d hurt a lot of people. Maybe not everyone found it funny.

Emma clicked on the very last video, a file at the bottom of the list titled
THE QUEEN GOES DOWN
. A dark screen

appeared. For a few seconds, the camera bucked, shooting trees and bushes and the moon and then swirling back to the ground. Someone breathed close to the microphone. There was a sharp snap, and the camera became level and still, as if it had been fastened to a tripod. It focused on a close-up of a chair in the middle of an empty field. Then, with a whoosh of sound, a figure landed on the chair as if she’d been pushed. She had a black blindfold over her face. A round silver locket bounced at her throat. Emma clapped her hand over her mouth, filled with both terror and relief.

This was the video that had started it all for Emma. The video that had brought her here. This was her
proof.

A figure appeared on the screen. Emma gasped as the person leaned into the camera and adjusted the lens. Moonlight from above made an eerie halo around her head. The lighting features adjusted, and her face came into focus. Emma pressed her hands to her mouth. She felt like she was on a roller coaster that had just plunged down a hill.
Laurel.

I gasped silently, too. So it was … true?

Laurel’s empty green eyes stared blankly into the lens. There was a sinister smile on her face. Very faintly in the background, Emma could hear Sutton whimpering. Emma’s eyes widened as she realized that this version of the video had sound. Her hands trembled. Her heartrocketed. Her whole body screamed at her to
run,
but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen.

“Shhh,” a voice said from behind the camera. Sutton turned her head toward the direction of the noise. Suddenly Charlotte appeared on the screen. She walked over to Sutton and straightened the blindfold on her head. And then
Madeline
emerged in the frame, dragging Charlotte back out of view.

Emma’s heart beat so fast she could feel it churning away behind her ribs. This couldn’t be happening. They’d
all
been there that night?

Laurel appeared in the frame once more and pulled a ski mask over her head. She waited as the camera tilted right and left. After a moment, someone whispered “Go!” from behind the lens. Then Laurel nodded and approached the back of Sutton’s chair. Calmly, she pulled the locket hard against Sutton’s throat, the video finally synching with the version Emma had seen nearly two weeks before. Sutton kicked blindly. Her shoulders rolled right and left, trying to fight Laurel off. Laurel pulled and pulled.

I watched, horrified. How could they
all
do that to me? How could all my friends band together to kill me?

“Harder!” Emma heard a voice whisper off-screen. It sounded like Madeline. Laurel yanked with more force. “A little higher up!” Charlotte whispered next.

It went on for an agonizing twenty seconds. The girls off the camera hooted and giggled, and Sutton continued to claw and thrash. And then Sutton went limp, and her head slumped forward. Emma pressed her hand to her mouth.

The camera whipped to Laurel. She stood a few steps away from Sutton, staring at her in horror. She reached out to touch her sister, then nervously drew her hands away. “You guys …” Her voice cracked.

“What the hell?” Madeline sounded on the verge of panic. “What did you do, Laurel?”

“What are you talking about?” Laurel’s chin trembled. “I did exactly what you told me to do!”

Charlotte’s footsteps crunched through the dead grass. “Sutton? You’d better not be fucking with us.” When Sutton didn’t answer, Charlotte let out a shrill combination of a whimper and a shriek.
“Shit,
guys. Shit.”

And then, close by, someone let out a loud scream. The video camera lost picture for a moment. After a clonk it was on the ground, the image of Sutton now on its side. Footsteps scuffled through the grass, growing softer and softer until they were inaudible.

Another figure appeared on the screen almost instantly. Whoever it was pulled the blindfold off Sutton’s head and the gag from her mouth. Her hair was matted and sweaty, and her face drained of color. After a moment, Sutton opened her eyes and looked blearily into the camera lens. Emma searched her sister’s barely conscious face.

Then the monitor went dark. Emma sat rigid in the chair. “They were all there,” she said, her voice quavering. “They all did it.”

Suddenly the past two weeks snapped into sickening focus. The reason no one had noticed Emma wasn’t actually Sutton was because they all
knew
she wasn’t—they were all in on it. Madeline had kidnapped Emma at Sabino and taken her to Nisha’s party. Charlotte had brought Emma home to Sutton’s after Nisha’s party, and she’d walked her to tennis practice the next day. Laurel had driven Emma to and from school. They’d all been at the sleepover, and Laurel and Charlotte had figured out Emma was in the bus station so they knew they had to stop her from leaving.

They needed Emma to be Sutton. After all, no body, no crime.

“Sutton?” someone called from the hall.

Emma jumped, banging her knee on the bottom of the desk. It was Charlotte’s voice.

“Sutton?” Charlotte called again.

Emma searched the desktop frantically for Safari so she could open her Gmail. She had to send this video to herself. But her vision was blurry. All the icons looked like hieroglyphs.

“Hello?” Charlotte called again. And then, more softly, to someone behind her: “Maybe she’s in here?”

“Sutton?” a second voice called. Garrett. He knocked on Laurel’s door.

Emma darted frantically away from the computer, tipping over the desk chair in the process. She wheeled in the center of Laurel’s room for a moment, trying to figure out where to go.
Under the bed? In the closet?
She dashed to the window and pressed her back to the wall.

Another knock. “Sutton?” Garrett called. The doorknob began to turn. She inched over to the window and looked out. Laurel’s bedroom faced a long line of hedges in the backyard. Kids raged at the party just a few feet away.

Trembling, she touched the window sash and lifted it up. Cool night air wafted in.

“Sutton?” Charlotte’s voice called. “You here?”

Emma glanced over her shoulder. The strip of light under the door began to widen. Emma caught sight of Garrett’s blond hair in the doorway.
Here goes,
she thought. She turned back to the window and took a deep breath.

“Sutton?” a voice sounded from inside Laurel’s room. But by that time, Emma had already hit the ground.

Emma’s fall landed her square in a hedge and tore a big hole in the hem of her dress. Her hand scraped against a rock and her high-heeled ankle twisted on the hard dirt. Letting out a groan, she ripped off her shoes and stashed them under a cactus.

She peered through the hedge. The guys continued to play Speed Racer with the RC cars. Girls giggled and passed around a chrome flask. Gabriella and Lilianna stood just a few feet away, their backs to her, heatedly whispering, frustrated looks on their faces.

The sliding glass door opened. Garrett and Charlotte emerged from the house. Garrett went one way, but Charlotte found Madeline and Laurel and all three huddled in a knot near the bushes. Emma crouched down close by. She didn’t dare move a muscle.

Madeline’s voice floated over the other sounds of the party. “Was she up there?”

“I even checked Laurel’s room,” Charlotte said. “She’s gone.”

“She can’t be
gone”
Madeline made a face.

The girls turned for the gate. Emma crouched down and crawled to the next bush, then the next. Her bare knees dug into the gravel. When she reached the wall surrounding the house, she hoisted herself up and over. The rough surface scraped her arms and the top of her thighs.

Her bare feet crunched to the gravel on the other side. She looked around wildly. She had no money, no phone. No shoes. Where could she go?

A wall of parked cars stood in front of her, blocking her passage to the street. A Jeep Cherokee stood closest to her, a Toyota was to her left, and a crookedly parked Subaru Impreza pinned her in on the right. Then Emma spied a narrow escape corridor on the other side of the Subaru along the block-wall fence that separated the Mercers’ yard from the neighbors'. All she had to do was get around the Subaru and she was free. Sucking in her stomach, she squeezed past the car’s side mirror, praying that the car didn’t have one of those car alarms that blared as soon as someone touched it.

A clang made her stop halfway. Three figures stood at the back gate. One was tall and angular, with dark hair and golden skin. Another was shorter and thicker, with pale skin that shone luminously in the moonlight. The third girl had a familiar blond ponytail. All of them looked around. Laurel had a flashlight. Emma quivered, momentarily paralyzed.

“Sutton?” Madeline shouted, her voice cold and unfriendly.

Then Laurel gasped. “There she is!” She shone the flashlight across the yard to where Emma stood. They ran toward her, tramping through the flowerbeds and past the porch. Emma took off down the narrow corridor, her heart drumming in her ears.

“Sutton!” Charlotte, Madeline, and Laurel wove around the cars. “Come back here!”

Emma sprinted, her feet screaming, her gaze on the street just a few yards away. Just as she reached the end of the driveway, her foot landed on something sharp and hot. She yelled out and flew to her knees.

“Get up!” I screamed uselessly at her. “Get up!”

Emma scrambled to her feet. The girls had squeezed past the Subaru, too, and started down the corridor. Emma locked eyes with Laurel. Her shoulders were hunched angrily. Emma let out a whimper and staggered into the street.

And then the automatic light timer on the garage clicked off, bathing the driveway and the street in total darkness. Emma froze, her heart jumping to her throat. She groped for the edge of the block wall that surrounded the Mercer house, then ducked around it, out of their view.

“Sutton?” the girls called. Their high-heeled shoes clicked on the asphalt. They were moving closer and closer in the darkness. For all she knew, they were right next to her.

A hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. Emma jumped and cried out. She was yanked to her knees and dragged farther into the neighbors’ yard. Her palms hit hard, sharp gravel. Tears came to her eyes. Her foot throbbed in pain. Her nose twitched with the sharp smell of a cigarette. She stared at the dark figure in front of her, expecting to see Charlotte’s angry face or Laurel’s searing gaze. “What are you
doing
?” a guy’s voice asked instead.

Emma blinked hard. “Ethan?” she whispered, her eyes adjusting. She could just make out Ethan’s shorn head and angular jaw. He held a cigarette between his fingers, the red tip glowing eerily in the darkness.

Ethan stubbed out his cigarette in the gravel and stared at Emma’s sweaty, harried face, her torn dress, her lack of shoes. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Sutton?” Madeline called out at the same time. Shewas right next to them, separated only by the block wall. “Where are you?”

Emma grasped Ethan’s hand hard. “Can you get me out of here? Now?”

“What?”

“Please,” Emma whispered desperately, clasping Ethan’s hands. “Can you help me or not?”

He stared at her. A look Emma couldn’t quite discern flashed over his eyes. He nodded. “My car’s a couple houses down.” Hand in hand, they slipped into the darkness.

I only hoped he could get her away before they caught her.

Ethan led Emma to an old red Honda Civic hatchback with a gray door and a crack in the windshield. The inside smelled like McDonald’s and old shoes, and the passenger seat was littered with textbooks and papers. Emma swept them aside and belted herself in. Ethan swung behind the wheel. Swiveling around, Emma saw Laurel standing at the edge of the driveway, looking right and left.

The stereo blared as soon as Ethan turned the ignition. It was a fast, raging song, and Ethan dove quickly for the dial and snapped it off. The wheel squeaked as he maneuvered into the street and drove away. Emma’s nails pressed hard into her thighs. She watched the Mercer house growsmaller and smaller in the side mirror until it was no longer visible.

“What’s this all about? “ Ethan’s low voice pierced the silence.

“It’s hard to explain,” Emma answered.