Her phone kept vibrating in her snakeskin clutch, but she ignored it. It was probably just another text from Ethan saying he was on his way. She didn’t want to see Ethan right now. She didn’t want to talk to him. Or did she? Did she want to talk to him right away so she could tell him just what she thought of his little secret? She shoved the thought away and went back to the bar. Another drink might help her make up her mind.
Nisha stood in front of the array of bottles, measuring a precise amount of gin into her glass. She looked up just as Emma stumbled into her, grabbing her to stop her fall. “Whoa, girl. You okay?”
“I’m Sutton Mercer,” Emma said, striking a pose. “I am fabulous.” She reached for the vodka, but Nisha took the bottle before she could pour herself another cup.
“Slow down there, champ.” Nisha laughed and poured Emma a glass of water instead. “Where’s Ethan? Isn’t he supposed to be here?”
Emma sipped the water slowly. The room spun pleasantly, pretty and bright, like a children’s carnival ride. “Who knows? He’s probably watching a meteor shower or something.”
Nisha put her hand on Emma’s arm. “Hey, is everything okay with you two?”
Maybe it was the alcohol, but before Emma could stop herself, words started spilling out. “Remember how you helped me find that … information about my mom?” Emma whispered. “Well, Ethan had a file in there, too. A huge one.”
“Whoa,” Nisha said, her eyes widening. “Have you talked to him about it?”
Seeing the alarm on Nisha’s face made Emma’s vision spin even faster, and she suddenly realized what she had done. Yes, Ethan had betrayed her, but that was between him and her. “Forget it. I’m sure it’s nothing,” she mumbled, pushing her way back through the crowd.
“Hang on, Sutton,” Nisha called, but Emma kept going until she made it onto the patio. A couple of the boys were playing water volleyball in the pool, wearing nothing but their mesh shorts. Laurel and another girl were sitting by the hot tub, trailing their feet in the water. They beckoned her over, but Emma sank into a chaise longue instead. She leaned back and closed her eyes. When her phone vibrated again, she didn’t even bother checking it.
At ten, Poor Tony, the bare-chested DJ Emma had run into earlier, started to play from the upstairs landing. The entryway flooded with screaming partygoers. Emma wandered into the crowd, the heavy bass vibrating through her body like a second heartbeat. She spotted Madeline and started to head in that direction, then realized that Mads was with a boy and probably wouldn’t want to be bothered. She squinted—the boy definitely wasn’t Antonio. Mads moved fast.
Emma took a step backward, stumbling right into a tall guy with perfectly gelled blond hair. He gave her a withering look as she caught her balance. Garrett.
“Sorry,” she yelled over the music. He just rolled his eyes and leaned over to Celeste, who was standing next to him, wearing an ikat-print baby-doll dress and velvet stockings. She shook her hair, which was curled into thick ringlets, and laughed. Then she wrapped her arms around his neck and danced close to him, staring pointedly at Emma.
The world started to tilt dangerously. Suddenly, Emma wanted nothing more than to escape, to go somewhere away from all the noise and chaos. The music was starting to feel less like a heartbeat and more like a hammer pounding at her skull. She tripped toward the front door, ducking as she passed Gabby and Lili to avoid being pulled into their hyperactive dance circle. She slipped out onto the porch and sighed in relief at the feel of the cool night air on her skin.
Even with the massive oak door shut, she could still hear the rumble of the music and the screams of the crowd. But compared to the rest of the party, the porch, tiled in elegant stone and covered with enormous potted plants, was an oasis of calm. Moths threw themselves again and again at the lights in antique iron sconces, battering them with their tiny bodies.
Emma closed her eyes and rested her head against one of the pillars. Garrett’s expression had shattered her good mood, and she suddenly felt sober.
Then she heard it. A soft rustle, the sound of someone moving nearby. She froze, rooted to the spot. Someone was on the porch with her.
“Mom?” she whispered, peering into the shadows where the noise had come from.
“Go back inside!” I hissed at her. “Hurry!”
But it was too late. A tall form moved out from the darkness, laughing softly. Both Emma and I screamed, my voice inaudible to everyone but me, hers swallowed by the noise from inside.
No one would hear us.
27
A VOICE IN THE DARK
Emma scurried backward into a terra-cotta planter. Her pulse thudded loudly in her ears. Should she run out toward the street, or back inside? The alcohol slowed her thoughts, keeping her in dangerous indecision. She took another step backward. This was it. She was about to die.
“I didn’t mean to scare you, Sutton. It’s just me,” said a male voice from the shadows.
Thayer stepped forward into the light. He looked gorgeous in a blue Hugo Boss button-down and khaki shorts.
Emma exhaled in relief.
I watched enviously as he reached out to take Emma’s arm and led her over to the porch swing. They sat down next to each other in friendly silence.
“What were you doing out here?” Emma finally asked. Her heart still hadn’t slowed down to its resting rate.
Thayer smiled sadly, holding up his Coke can. “Turns out being in recovery makes you kind of a buzzkill.”
Emma thought about what it must be like for Thayer, showing up to a party like this. It wasn’t easy resisting that kind of pressure, listening to drunken teenagers wreaking havoc inside, knowing he couldn’t really be one of them.
Thayer pushed them gently back and forth on the swing, his feet on the floor. Overhead Emma could hear the squeaking call of hunting bats. The slow rocking of the swing calmed her nerves. She had to get a grip. What if he had been Becky? Screaming and tripping over furniture wouldn’t exactly do her any good. She needed to always be ready for anything. She shouldn’t have let her guard down, even for one night. She sighed. It just wasn’t fair. She was so tired of being constantly alert. She wanted to be vulnerable, to be normal, just once.
“You feeling okay?” Thayer asked.
“Everyone keeps asking me that tonight,” Emma said. “Don’t I look okay?”
“You look perfect, as always. I asked how you felt.”
She turned toward Thayer. It struck her that he was probably the only person who would have pressed her on that point, forcing her to distinguish between appearance and reality. He gazed back at her seriously, his eyes bright against his tanned skin. She didn’t know how to begin to answer. She hadn’t felt like herself in weeks. Or maybe she had never felt so much like herself? The alcohol softened the edges of all her thoughts, so she wasn’t quite sure what she meant until she said it out loud. Nothing made sense anyway tonight—not her and Thayer, sitting here on this bench in the cool November evening; not her friends; not even Ethan. Especially not Ethan.
She tucked a lock of hair behind her ears. “Do you ever feel like no one is really what they seem?”
Thayer’s lips twisted ironically. “All the time. Why do you think I didn’t tell people I went to rehab? I knew half of the people I thought were my friends would turn their backs on me.” He gave a short bark of laughter. “I knew I’d end up alone on the porch drinking soda while almost everyone I knew pretended they hadn’t seen me there.”
Emma suddenly felt self-conscious. Here she was, smelling like beer while she sat next to a boy who’d won a hard-fought battle for sobriety. She fidgeted with Sutton’s clutch, opening and closing the clasp.
“I just don’t know who I can count on anymore,” she said softly. “I keep getting hurt by people I think I know.”
Thayer looked out over the wrought-iron porch railing. The Chamberlains’ sprawling front lawn looked like an elephant graveyard in the darkness, cars parked haphazardly across it. Someone
had angled their Miata right into one of Mrs. Chamberlain’s prize rosebushes. Emma wondered distantly how Charlotte would talk her way out of that one.
“That sucks,” Thayer said, playing with the pop-top on his Coke can. It broke off in his fingers and he set it on the swing’s armrest. “Maybe you need some new people in your life.”
Emma bit her lip and gave an awkward little laugh. “The problem is some of them are related to me.”
“Ah,” he said. “Yeah, I know that story, too. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could pick your family?”
“I’ll take Steve Carell for a dad and Tina Fey for a mom,” she joked.
“Bart Simpson for a brother.”
“Wednesday Addams for a sister.”
Thayer smiled. He leaned back into the porch swing, his expression thoughtful. “You know, one of the things I learned in rehab that turned out not to be a total cliché is that you can’t control other people. The best you can do is be honest with the people you love and hope that they’ll care enough about you to listen. But you can’t make someone be something they’re not.”
“That sounds very … adult,” Emma said.
“Well, a lot of addicts act like children,” he said, shrugging. “I’m just saying—you can’t prevent other people from disappointing you. It’s bound to happen at some point. We’re all only human. What you can do is decide how you’re going to respond to it, how you’re going to deal with it.”
Emma nodded slowly. It was good advice—she just wasn’t sure it really worked in her situation. This was a murder investigation, and she had to fight fire with fire. She couldn’t play a defensive game, not anymore. “It’s all just so complicated sometimes,” she said, wishing she could tell Thayer everything.
“Yeah, I know.” He exhaled loudly. “Believe me. Living with my dad, there’s so much I have to let go of. Sometimes I want to hit him, to punish him. I’ve done that, you know—before I went to Seattle, I took a few swings at him.” He shook his head. “But that’s just me thinking I can change him somehow. Make him sorry. I can’t, obviously.”
They sat there in the shadows, rocking back and forth, Poor Tony’s music still shaking the house. Emma was sobering up quickly thanks to the cool air and the rush of adrenaline from thinking Becky was on the porch. But she was still tipsy enough to admire Thayer without feeling self-conscious. She kept sneaking glances at his profile, studying the curve of his cheek, the small scar along his jawline. She wondered if that, too, was a reminder of the accident in Sabino Canyon.
“Thayer,” she whispered. He turned to face her, and the intensity of his eyes made her lose her breath for a moment. She coughed into her hand. “I never said this, but … I’m really proud of you.” It was true: She admired Thayer’s resolve, his strength. Even though she hadn’t known him before, she felt that he wasn’t the boy from the MISSING posters any longer. The boy who’d vanished without a word. He’d come back a new person. More than anyone else here tonight, he knew exactly who he was and what he believed. It was refreshing—especially after all the lies and pretending she’d been piling up.
“Really?” he asked.
“It takes guts to change,” Emma said quietly. “To start telling the truth to everyone, and mostly to yourself. I know it’s been hard for you. But the people who really care about you—we’re here to support you.”
She felt Thayer’s warm hands, calloused from all the yard work he’d been doing, wrap around her fingers. “The people who really care about me, huh?”
Her cheeks burned. “You know, Mads, Char, Laurel. Your dad, even. We all care about you.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said softly, drawing her closer. And then, before she knew it, his lips were on hers.
For a split second, she leaned into the kiss. Thayer’s mouth was so soft and inviting. All she’d wanted to do tonight was let go of being Emma and become Sutton, even if it had to end at the stroke of midnight like a fairy tale. And in this moment, tasting the sweetness of vanilla Coke on Thayer’s lips, the line between her and Sutton felt especially blurry. She moved unconsciously toward him on the swing, and his fingers slid around her waist.
As strange as this was for me, I understood Emma’s complicated feelings, about the line between us getting more and more confusing. We were both sinking deeper into each other, in danger of losing ourselves in the process. Watching Emma live my life and feeling the thrill of Thayer’s kiss on her lips was the next best thing to actually kissing Thayer myself. I couldn’t even decide whether I wanted to throw the Coke can at their heads or cheer them on.
But then Emma pulled away from Thayer with a jolt. What was she doing? Just because everyone called her Sutton didn’t mean she had turned into her twin. Guilt stabbed her like a knife. She’d betrayed Ethan and misled Thayer. All she’d done was break things right and left. Just like Becky, she thought bitterly.
“What the hell?”
An angry voice tore through her thoughts, and she looked up to see Ethan on the steps to the porch.
His eyes blazed in fury. His jaw was tight and clenched, his fists opening and closing as if he couldn’t figure out if he wanted to hit something or strangle it. Emma’s hands flew to her mouth.
“Ethan,” she exclaimed. “It’s not what you think—”
“You,” he snarled, ignoring her. His eyes were locked on Thayer. “You’re dead.”
Thayer barely had time to get to his feet before Ethan was on him, his fist landing square on the taller boy’s chin. He gripped Thayer by his shirt and slammed him against one of the porch’s pillars.
“Stop it!” Emma screamed. Blood trickled from a cut on Thayer’s head. He rammed an elbow into Ethan’s rib cage and Ethan leaned over, wincing. Thayer tackled him off the porch.
Poor Tony chose that exact moment to finish his set. Emma’s cries pierced the sudden quiet, and the doors quickly flew open, the confused and rowdy crowd spilling out onto the porch.
“Fight!” someone yelled, catching on to what was happening, and everyone took up the chant. “Figh! Fight! Fight!”
The spectators divided almost instantly into two sides. Most of the boys cheered on Thayer with cries of “Kick his ass, Vega!” and “Take that, Landry!” It was a testament to Sutton’s power and popularity that the girls, especially the younger ones, all started screaming for Ethan.
The two boys in the yard kept fighting, seemingly unaware of the crowd that had gathered. Blood pooled in the dirt and smeared muddily over them both. Someone’s shirt ripped audibly.
Emma locked eyes with Charlotte in the crowd, shooting her a pleading look. Charlotte understood, and quickly turned to Mark Bell, who hurried back to the house and yelled at someone Emma couldn’t see. A few moments later, two other boys—both of them on the varsity basketball team—hurried down the steps. Ricky Parker, the shooting guard who’d just been handed a full ride to Duke, latched onto Ethan and held his arms back while Andrew Collins and Mark Bell pulled Thayer in the opposite direction. Ethan and Thayer struggled to break free, staring at each other with open hostility.
“Nice one, Science Fair,” Thayer said, the ironic smirk back on his lips. There was a nasty cut over his eye. “Looks like you finally beefed up.”
Ethan’s breath heaved as Ricky let go of his arms. His jeans were smeared with grass stains and dirt. For a moment Emma thought he’d fall on Thayer again. Instead, he turned to her.
“You haven’t changed at all, Sutton,” he spat. “You’re a selfish slut, just like you’ve always been.”
With that he turned and strode across the lawn toward his car.
28
SCENIC OVERLOOK AHEAD
“Ethan, wait!” Emma called, but he didn’t turn around. She hurried down the porch steps and ran after him, ignoring the curious looks of everyone behind her. She stumbled on the flagstones and kicked off her heels in frustration, abandoning them on the grass. Ethan’s beat-up Honda was almost at the gates, since he’d been one of the last people to arrive
at the party. She reached the car just as he was getting in and climbed stubbornly into the passenger seat.
The spring-loaded hula girl Ethan kept on his dashboard swayed as he slammed the door. “Stop,” she panted. “I can explain.”
“What is there to explain?” Ethan snarled in disgust. His fists clenched dangerously, as if he wanted to hit something again. In the dark she could see a streak of blood trickling down his forehead into his eye. “You told me not to be jealous, Emma. You said Thayer was Sutton’s thing, not yours. You’re such a liar. As big a liar as your sister was.”
“Don’t you dare say that about my sister!” Emma spat. “And please. You’re one to talk about lying.” She felt completely sober now, her anger filling her with its sharp edges so that everything stood out in clear relief.
“What are you talking about?” Ethan’s fingers curled tightly around the steering wheel, even though the car wasn’t on. She gritted her teeth.
“I’m talking about the file in the psych ward with your name on it,” Emma said, her voice dangerously calm. “Sound familiar?”
Ethan’s face hardened. “You went? How?”
“Nisha gave me the keycard,” Emma said softly.
He inhaled sharply. “I thought we decided you weren’t going to pry into your mother’s private records.”
“No, you decided that. And you didn’t care about my mom’s privacy, you just didn’t want me to find out about your deep, dark secret. Isn’t that right?” Suddenly, Emma felt drained and hollow, the anger deflating. She blinked back tears. “Ethan, I love you. I shared everything with you. And now it feels like I don’t even know you at all.”
The muted sounds of the party drifted toward them on the cool night air. Crickets chirped hopefully around the car. But inside, everything was deathly silent.
The Lying Game #5: Cross My Heart, Hope to Die Page 16