The Lying Game Complete Collection - Sara Shepard Page 0,114

steering wheel. She paused for a long moment, her eyes fixed on the horizon. “Sutton, are we seriously going to have this conversation right now?” she said finally in a steely voice. Emma stared at her, waiting, but she didn’t offer anything more.

Laurel pulled the car up to a familiar low-slung ranch house with a big front yard full of desert succulents. It looked exactly the same as it had the last time Emma had come here, her very first day in Tucson, before she knew her twin was dead. Back before all of this craziness started. Several cars were parked in the driveway and at the curb, many of them pasted with bumper stickers that said TENNIS IS THE GOOD LIFE or LOVE with a yellow tennis ball as the O. All the lights were on in the house, and a giggle exploded from somewhere inside.

“Come on.” Laurel hit the key fob to lock the Jetta and started up the driveway, but Emma hung back for a moment. She stared across the street at Ethan’s house. The front porch was dark. The telescope Ethan had peered through the first night Emma had met him had disappeared. She wondered what Ethan was doing tonight. Had he thought about their near kiss in the pool the other night? They’d seen each other in the halls, but they hadn’t really spoken since.

Nisha’s front door flung open, and the tennis team greeted them with hugs and squeals. Emma poked her head into the room and nudged Laurel. “Where’s Maggie?”

Laurel started to laugh. “Maggie’s not actually here.”

Charlotte emerged through the crowd wearing an off-the-shoulder striped top and wide-leg jeans. She linked her elbow through Emma’s. “I see my little plan worked!” The freckles on her nose scrunched together as she grinned.

Emma frowned. Little plan?

Charlotte extended her thumb and pinkie to make the shape of a phone. “ ‘Hello, Mrs. Mercer?’” she said in an adult voice. “ ‘This is Coach Maggie. I’d really, really like Sutton to attend the tennis team dinner tonight. It’s such a show of solidarity! Oh, I understand she’s grounded, but I’ll watch her carefully, I promise. You can count on me!’”

Not even I saw that one coming. My friends were good. With a rush of relief, I tried to wrap my arms around Charlotte, thrilled once more that she wasn’t my killer. But, as usual, my fingers just passed through her skin.

Charlotte put her arm around Emma’s shoulders and squeezed. “No need to thank me. Now all we have to do is figure out how to spring you for Homecoming.”

She pulled Emma into the dining room, where platters of roast chicken and panini sandwiches lay on a checkered tablecloth next to big bowls of pasta salad, crispy, foil-wrapped garlic bread, and a tier of chocolate-iced cupcakes for dessert. Red plastic cups sat next to bottles of Gatorade, Smartwater, and Diet Coke. Everyone else on the team had already dug in, scooping food onto their plates with long-handled plastic spoons.

As Emma stepped toward the table, an icy hand circled her wrist. “Glad you could make it, Sutton,” Nisha said with a saccharine smile.

Emma flinched, jittery at the sight of Nisha. Something about the girl was too glossy, starting with the way she was styled to anal-retentive perfection: her cream-colored silk blouse perfectly tucked into a pair of dark-wash trouser jeans. The gold bangle bracelets on her wrist looked as though they’d been spit-polished. Her hair was a smooth, glassy sheet that hung down her back, and her makeup looked as though it had been professionally applied.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” Nisha went on. “It was kind of hard work to put all this food together. Especially because I had to do it alone.”

“Liar!” I wanted to call out. In the kitchen, past all the girls, I spotted a bunch of AJ’s market grocery bags on the kitchen island. No doubt Nisha had bought all this stuff ready-made and just arranged it artfully on plates.

“So,” Nisha’s voice oozed with faux sweetness. “What’s it like for Sutton Mercer not to have a boyfriend? It must be the first time since, oh, I don’t know, kindergarten!”

Emma straightened. “I’m actually really enjoying myself,” she said, reaching forward to pop a cracker into her mouth. “It feels good to be free.”

The corners of Nisha’s mouth curled up into a sickly pink grin. “I heard you wouldn’t have sex with him,” she added, loudly enough to turn the heads of two sophomores lining up for pasta-salad