of the circumstances, and we all pulled together to make it work. I’m also grateful to Kristin Marang for her web and cross-promotional genius—I don’t know what I’d do without you! Huge kudos to everyone working on The Lying Game TV show, including Gina Girolamo, Andrew Wang, Charles Pratt Jr., and all of the other amazing writers, producers, and crew—not to mention the lovely Alexandra Chando, who plays the best Sutton and Emma I could imagine. I’m so excited to see what twists and turns are next!
Most of all, a big thanks to Katie Sise—without you, this book wouldn’t exist. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
CREDITS
Cover photo © 2012 by Gustavo Marx/Merge Left Reps, Inc.
Cover design by Liz Dresner
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE
Copyright © 2012 by Alloy Entertainment and Sara Shepard
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Produced by Alloy Entertainment
151 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
ISBN 978-0-06-186974-7 (trade bdg.)
ISBN 978-0-06-213007-5 (int. ed.)
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN 978006208414
Design by Liz Dresner
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FIRST EDITION
Dedication
To Lanie
Epigraph
Cherish those who seek the truth
but beware of those who find it.
—VOLTAIRE
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue Dead Like Me
1. Don’t Feed the Earthlings
2. To Grandmother’s House We Go
3. Volleying with the Enemy
4. The Ungiving Tree
5. The Devious Four
6. Evidence Locker
7. Can You Hear Me Now?
8. A Brush with Danger
9. That’s One Way to Win
10. Smoking Gun
11. Too Hot to Handle
12. Track Meet
13. Grandmothers Know Best
14. Racketeering
15. The Birthday Surprise
16. Another One Bites the Dust
17. Hit and Run
18. Watch Your Back
19. One Big Unhappy Family
20. Where It All Began
21. Wandering Minds
22. Play Along
23. The Rattlesnake in the Room
24. Mano a Mano
25. Midnight Snack
26. Call the Doctor
27. This Means War
28. Breaking and Entering
29. Motel Hell
30. Diner Dash
31. A Fateful Goodbye
32. Grandfather Clause
33. She’s Back
34. Mama Drama
Acknowledgments
Credits
Copyright
PROLOGUE
DEAD LIKE ME
I’d always thought the afterlife would be like an eternal stay at a resort on St. Barts—hot French waiters bringing me fruity drinks until the end of time, the azure Caribbean sky in a permanent sunset, a cool ocean breeze tickling my forever tanned skin. It would be my reward for living a full, fabulous, long life.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Instead I died days before my eighteenth birthday and what was supposed to be an amazing senior year. And rather than sipping a mojito on a white-sand beach, I woke up in Las Vegas, tethered to a twin sister I never knew I had. I watched as Emma Paxton was forced into my life and had to begin impersonating me. I watched as she sat at my place at the table with my family and giggled with my friends, pretending she’d known them forever. I watched her read my journal, sleep in my bed, and try to figure out who killed me.
And I seemed to be stuck here until further notice. Everywhere Emma went, I went, too. Everything she knew, I knew as well—the problem was, I didn’t know much beyond that. My life before I died was a question mark. Certain things have come back to me—like how I wasn’t exactly the nicest girl at Hollier High, how I took for granted all the things I’d been given in life, and how I’d made plenty of enemies by playing vicious pranks on people who didn’t deserve it. But everything else was a blank, including how I died, and who murdered me.
One thing I did know was that my killer was now watching Emma’s every move right along with me, making sure that she plays along. I was a breath away when Emma found a note saying I was dead and warning her that if she didn’t pretend to be me, she’d be dead, too. I felt the stars explode behind Emma’s eyes when she was nearly strangled during a sleepover at my best friend Charlotte’s house. I had a front-row seat when a light fixture in the school’s auditorium careened toward her head. They were all warnings. My killer had been so close. And yet, neither of us had