“I’m sorry, I can’t do”—Emma gestured to the bed—“this.”
Garrett sat tentatively on the edge of the bed, staring at Emma as if her skin had turned purple. “But . . . we’ve been talking about it all summer.”
Emma’s mouth fell open.
“I mean, I thought about it,” Garrett went on, running his hands over his spiky hair. “And I realized you were right: There’s no reason to wait. I want my first time to be with you. Don’t you want it to be with me, Sutton?”
Emma looked everywhere in the room except at the big strip of boxer shorts peeking out of the top of Garrett’s jeans. I’m not Sutton, she wanted to scream. “I-I guess I’ve changed my mind,” she said instead.
“Changed your mind?” Garrett searched her face desperately. Then he placed his palms flat on the petal-strewn mattress. “Wait a minute,” he said in a low, shaky voice. “Were all of our sex talks just some big prank? Is this what you did to Thayer?”
“No, of course not!” Emma shook her head fast, wondering what Sutton had done to Thayer. “It’s just . . . I can’t . . .”
She took a big step back. The essential oil smell was starting to make her woozy. “I’m sorry,” she said again. Then she flung the door open and fumbled clumsily into the hall. Instead of galloping down the stairs to the party, she turned the other direction and dove into a room one door down.
She shut the door just as Garrett stepped into the hall. “Sutton?” he called. Emma crouched next to the door. She heard him spinning around, his footsteps soft on the carpet. “Sutton?” he called again.
Emma didn’t move, forcing herself to breathe quietly and praying he wouldn’t come in.
After a moment, Garrett groaned. A door slammed, and a few seconds later opened again. Emma heard his footsteps down the staircase, then stomping through the foyer.
She turned and slumped against the door, sighing in relief. The room she was in had two diamond-shaped night-lights that illuminated a bed with a black-and-white striped bedspread. A white-and-pink egg chair sat in the corner. An avant-garde mobile hung by the window and millions of photos of girls lined the walls. Emma blinked hard at the three-way mirror on the wall by the closet. She frowned at the MacBook Air on the desk and the flat-screen TV on the low bureau. This looked exactly like Sutton’s room, but in reverse. So this was . . . Laurel’s room?
Emma’s knees cracked as she slowly rose to her feet. She’d never seen inside Laurel’s room before—Laurel always kept the door closed. Emma flipped on a light at Laurel’s desk and peered at the photos on the bulletin board. The picture of Sutton and her friends in front of the monkey house at the zoo looked oddly familiar. So did the one of Sutton, Madeline, and Charlotte waving cookie-batter spoons at one another. They were exactly the same photos from Sutton’s room—Laurel wasn’t even in most of them.
There was something eerie about Laurel’s room being such a precise knockoff of her sister’s. Almost like she’s studying Sutton, she thought. Preparing to become her.
Emma tiptoed to Laurel’s bed and stuck her head under the dust ruffle. Besides an extra tennis racket, there were only balled-up socks and a couple of hair ties. She peeked into the closet. A slight smell of perfume and brand-new denim wafted out. While everything in Sutton’s closet had its place, Laurel’s blouses and dresses hung messily on their hangers, straps and sleeves dangling halfway off, jeans and T-shirts piled in the corner. Shoes lay scattered on the floor.
Emma closed the closet again and rubbed her temples. There had to be something here. Some kind of proof of what Laurel had done.
I hoped there wasn’t. I hoped she hadn’t done it.
A single blue light on Laurel’s computer monitor glowed across the room. Swallowing hard, Emma paced to the desk and sat down. The screen saver was a montage of Sutton, Laurel, and the rest of the crowd at dances, restaurants, and sleepovers. It quickly dissolved when Emma touched the mouse, showing a dark desktop jammed with icons and files. Most of them were labeled things like 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 heart rocketed. 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.