Ms. Ambrose shrugged. “I expect they’ll let you get your GED in prison. Now please leave, before I report you for trespassing.”
The crowd surrounding Emma went absolutely quiet, a hundred pairs of ears straining so that they could later report everything they’d seen and heard.
“Can I at least clean out my locker?” she asked quietly. Her palms were suddenly moist with sweat. She let go of Ethan and grabbed her backpack straps in each hand.
“Those aren’t your things,” Ms. Ambrose said simply. “The police have confiscated the contents of Miss Mercer’s locker.”
Emma took two steps back, tears stinging her eyes. How could she be so stupid? She should have expected this. She turned to run when Ethan caught her hand.
“Here,” he said, pressing his car keys into her palm. “Go home. Call me if you need anything.” With that, he planted a firm, ostentatious kiss on her lips. Then he pulled away, giving the principal a
defiant smirk, and shouldered past her into the school.
Bolstered by Ethan’s kiss, Emma turned and walked with as much dignity as she could back toward Ethan’s Civic. She was so focused on getting out of there that when Madeline and Charlotte stepped in front of
her, it took her a moment to process. She stopped in her tracks.
Madeline looked as unkempt as Emma had ever seen her. Her hair was loose and unstyled, and while her balletic frame normally seemed willowy and graceful, the shadows under her eyes gave her a skeletal look.
Charlotte stood next to her, her face pale beneath her freckles. She hadn’t put on makeup at all.
“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.