The Lying Game Complete Collection - Sara Shepard Page 0,437

I don’t know if you should miss any more school. We talked to the principal this afternoon, and she promised me there would be no press allowed on campus. I know it won’t be easy. I’m sure your friends have a lot of questions for you.”

Emma rolled her eyes. That was an understatement. All day long she’d been fielding texts from Madeline and Charlotte. WHAT IS GOING ON???? Charlotte had asked, while Madeline had seemed excited that a “mega-foxy” reporter had cornered her outside campus to ask if she knew Sutton. THIS IS SO CRAZY, she’d texted, along with a photo taken from her phone of a line of news vans just off campus.

The Twitter Twins’ updates had been the most useful real-time description of the school day. Early in the morning Gabby had tweeted:

Media circus at Hollier. How’d the paparazzi find me again?

Lili had followed up shortly after:

Life expectancy of teen girls seems to be plummeting in Tucson. Be careful, everyone.

They’d chronicled each rumor as it circulated and had live-blogged the school assembly at which the principal had announced the discovery of another body. Gabby’s last post had read:

Hollier High needs a hero. Sutton Mercer, come back and lead your people!

She knew the halls were going to be buzzing with rumors the next day, and she would be at the center of it. Even imagining it made her heart beat faster—but not nearly so fast as it did a moment later when the news came back from commercials.

A male reporter with a shellacked helmet of hair stood in front of a coffee shop, talking to a girl wearing an apron over a vintage Bad Religion T-shirt. She wore a pair of black plastic-frame glasses, and her dark hair was spiked in a short, edgy pixie cut. Tears glittered in her eyes. Emma hurried to turn the volume back up.

“—just don’t understand how this could happen,” the girl was saying, wiping at her eyes. “Emma was my best friend.”

Before she could stop herself, Emma jumped to her feet, banging her knee on the table leg. Vibrations of pain shot up through her hip, but she ignored them.

The girl on the screen was Alex Stokes—Emma’s best friend from Henderson. The one person she’d been in contact with since coming to Tucson. She was standing outside of Sin City Java, where she was a part-time barista.

The Mercers gawked at Emma, alarm plain on their faces. She’d knocked her chair over, and she stood gripping the side of the table, her knuckles white. Her grandfather looked from her to the TV set, and then back to Emma, his eyes round and baffled. “Do you know that girl?”

Emma sat down slowly, shaking her head no, but they still stared. Laurel’s glass hovered halfway to her lips, frozen in midair. Mrs. Mercer gave her a worried look. Emma cleared her throat and forced herself to speak. “It’s just that that girl seemed to care about Emma a lot. No one else seems to miss her. It’s just so sad.”

Emma stared at her friend’s face. Alex was the only person from her old life who actually cared about her; she also happened to be the only person who could blow Emma’s cover.

Since coming to Tucson, Emma had been lying to Alex, just like she’d been lying to everyone. She’d told her friend back home that she and Sutton were getting along perfectly, that the Mercers had welcomed her to stay with them for a while. She’d been texting Alex on and off for the past three months—long after “Emma Paxton” was supposed to have died.

And now Alex could blow all of her lies wide open. All she had to do was mention the texts she’d gotten from her best friend, apparently from beyond the grave, and Emma would be through.

“We were joined at the hip,” Alex said. And then she looked directly into the camera, tears hanging from her long, dark eyelashes. “We used to meet at the rec center and talk for hours.”

And just like that, relief flooded Emma’s body. Alex wasn’t going to expose her. Alex was covering for her. The “rec center” had been their own private code for any kind of rule-breaking. It started when Emma was staying with the Stokeses; one night Alex had slipped out past her curfew for a date with a boy from UNLV. When Alex’s single mom came home early and asked where her daughter was, Emma had stammered out that Alex was swimming at the rec