Never Have I Ever

by Sara Shepard

Page 20

 

  The door to the lighting booth slammed. Emma turned, grabbed sixteen orange silk Homecoming Court sashes, and found the X on the side of the stage where she was supposed to stand, behind a side curtain and completely isolated from the rest of the court and planners. “Pul the curtain!” Charlotte commanded.

  The crowd’s murmurings grew louder. The court nominees, save for Lili, who was stil upstairs, did a few last minute hair-fluffs and blush-brush sweeps. But when Emma looked past the blinding floodlights to the stage, Gabby was staring at her with a whisper of a smile on her face. In her corpse makeup, blue circles under her eyes, stitches across her cheeks, bloody gashes on her neck, she looked menacing. Evil.

  Emma took a step back. And then she noticed

  something else, something she hadn’t seen before: a silver charm bracelet hung from Gabby’s wrist. Tiny objects dangled from the chain—a little iPhone, a tube of lipstick, a mini Scottie dog. They were made out of the same silver as the miniature locomotive engine that rested snugly in Emma’s purse.

  A chil came over me and Emma. The Twitter Twins had kil ed me. I could feel it.

  “Greetings, Hol ier High!” Madeline boomed into the microphone, so loudly it made Emma jump. “Everyone ready for Homecoming?”

  A cheer rose up, and Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” blasted out of the speakers. The noise was so thunderous that Emma barely heard the snaps of cords breaking above her head. By the time she looked up, the heavy light fixture in the rafters was hurtling swiftly toward her. She screamed and jumped away just as it crashed to the ground with an earsplitting crack.

  Amber glass spewed everywhere. Someone yel ed—

  maybe Emma herself. She felt her body go limp and fal to the ground, the court sashes slipping from her grasp and landing on the hard floor. Just before her eyes fluttered closed, she saw Lili join Gabby in the wings. Emma tried to cal out, to maintain consciousness, but she felt herself slipping away. Gabby shook the pil bottle up and down, up and down. It sounded like chattering teeth.

  The noise reminded me of something else entirely. A tiny pinhole opened in my mind, slowly widening. The world began to whirl like I was on an out-of-control carousel. I didn’t hear pil s shaking in a bottle anymore. I heard, distinctly and most definitely, a commuter train clacking noisily over the tracks. . . .

  Chapter 18

  Tremors and Treachery and

  Threats, Oh My!

  “Where is Gabby?” Lili shrieks as the train whooshes past.

  I whirl around, frantically checking the tracks. I planned it all so carefully. There’s no way Gabby could have rolled under the train . . . right?

  Then Laurel steps a few feet away and points a trembling finger at a crumpled figure by the curved walls of the underpass. It’s Gabby. Her blonde hair covers most of her face. Her pale hand splays open, her crystalstudded iPhone turned over on a patch of gravel.

  “What the hell?” Madeline cries.

  “Gabby!” Lili screams, running to her.

  “Gabby?” I stand over her limp body. “Gabs?”

  A sudden tremor travels from Gabby’s fingertips to her shoulders. Tiny pricks of spit dot her lips, and then her entire body starts convulsing. The train barrels on, rattling my teeth and blowing my hair. Gabby shakes harder and faster. Her arms and legs have minds of their own, jolting in random directions. Her eyes roll to the back of her head like she’s some kind of zombie.

  “Gabby?” I scream. “Gabs? Come on! This isn’t funny!”

  Suddenly, a black man with a carefully trimmed goatee and an earring in one ear nudges me out of the way. I catch sight of a blue jumpsuit with a glow-in-the-dark badge. pima county emt. I hadn’t even realized the ambulance had roared up, but there it is, a big white vehicle with whirling red lights on the top.

  “What happened?” the medic asks, crouching next to Gabby.

  “I have no idea!” Lili pushes in front of me. Her mouth is a triangle, her eyes wide and desperate. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s having a seizure. ” The medic shines a light into Gabby’s eyes, but there’s no color there, only two orbs that look like shiny white marbles. “Has this ever happened before?”

  “No!” Lili looks around frantically, as if she doesn’t believe this is real.

  The EMT rolls Gabby onto one side and puts his ear next to her mouth to see if she’s breathing, but he just lets her lie there, flailing. She moves like one of those cartoon characters who touch a live wire and light up like Christmas trees, white skeletons showing through skin. I want to look away, but I can’t.

  “Can’t you do something for her?” Lili screams, tugging at the EMT’s sleeve. “Anything? What if she’s dying?”

  “I need you girls to get back,” the EMT barks. “I need some space to treat her. ”

  Cars swish by us on the highway. Some slow down and gawk, curious about the ambulance lights and the girl lying in the underpass, but no one stops. Tears stream down Lili’s face. She spins toward me, her eyes on fire. “I can’t believe you did this to her!”

  “I didn’t do anything!” I scream through a clenched jaw.

  “Yes, you did! This is all your fault!”

  The train’s fading whistle drowns out Lili’s words. I refuse to feel guilty for this. It wasn’t like I even wanted the Twitter Twins to come tonight. How was I supposed to know Gabby was going to get so freaked she’d fall into a convulsive fit? All of a sudden, I’m so sick of the Twitter Twins I can barely breathe. “I didn’t want you two along tonight,” I say through my teeth. “I knew you couldn’t handle it. ”

  The red and blue ambulance lights streak across Lili’s face. “You could have killed all of us!”

  “Oh please. ” I ball up my fists. “I had it under control the whole time!”

  “How were we supposed to know that?” Lili shrieks. “We thought we were going to die! You have no concept of other people’s feelings! You just . . . you just treat us like toys, doing whatever you want, whenever you want!”

  “Watch what you say,” I warn her, aware of the medics around us.

  “Or what?” Lili asks, turning to Madeline, who stands off to the side with a blank face. “You agree with me, don’t you, Madeline?” Lili says. “Sutton’s a user. Do you really think she gives a shit about our feelings—about anyone’s feelings? Look at how she toyed with your brother! She’s the reason he left!”

  “That’s not true!” I scream, lunging toward Lili. How dare she bring up Thayer! As if she had any idea what things were really like between us!

  Charlotte pulls me back before I can tackle Lili. More medics have gathered around Gabby, and a debate has begun over whether to move her or keep her where she is. Lili turns away from us and peers over the EMT’s shoulder at her sister. An oppressive, July-hot wind kicks up, blowing bits of trash along the ground. A Skittles wrapper plasters itself to Gabby’s twitching legs. A cigarette butt rolls dangerously close to one of her hands.

  A low, keening wail sounds in the distance: a second set of sirens. We all stand up straighter when we realize it’s a police car. My heart begins to race, sweat dripping down my body.

  I clear my throat and face my friends, my voice low and steady. “We cannot tell the cops what really happened. The car stalled for real, okay? This was just an accident. ”

  Madeline, Charlotte, and Laurel look a little sickened, but Gabby’s condition has weakened them. They aren’t thinking of defying me anymore. And even though I violated a sacred Lying Game code, there’s another setin-stone tenet we all live by: If we ever get caught midprank, we stick together. When Laurel almost got busted messing with the twelve-foot holiday tree at La Encantada, we swore up and down she’d been home with us. When Madeline broke her wrist running from security the weekend we dragged the library tables into a ravine, we told her dad she’d fallen hiking. They’ll forgive me for falsely invoking our fail-safe code. We’ll get through this. We always do.

&
nbsp; But Lili looks at me like I’m nuts. “You seriously expect me to lie for you?” She sets her hands on her hips. “I’m telling the cops what you did!”

  “Your choice,” I say calmly. “But whatever is going on with your freaky sister has nothing to do with me, and you know it. If you tell the cops—if you tell anyone—you’ll regret it. ”

  Lili’s eyes widen. “Is that a threat?”

  My face hardens to a mask of stone. “Call it what you want. If you tell, we’ll have no reason to be friends anymore. Things will change for you, big-time, and they’ll change for your sister, too. ” I step so close to Lili I can feel her warm breath on my face. “Lili,” I say, speaking slowly so that she can understand every last word. “When Gabby wakes up, perfectly fine, and finds out that you’ve just made the two of you the biggest losers at Hollier, do you think she’s going to thank you for doing the right thing? Do you think she’s going to see you as a hero?”

  Everyone is silent. Behind us, Gabby is being strapped to a stretcher. My friends shift back and forth, but I know they’re not surprised. We’ve done this before. Lili’s nostrils flare in and out. Her eyes burn with anger. I stare back. There’s no way I’ll crack first.

  We remain in deadlock until the police cruiser roars up in a cloud of desert dust. Two cops, one stocky with a pencil-thin moustache and the other red-haired and freckled, get out of the car and walk toward us.

  “Ladies?” The redhead removes a notepad from his pocket. His walkie-talkie beeps every few seconds.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Lili whips around to face him, and for a moment, I think she’s actually going to spill everything. But then her bottom lip starts to tremble. The EMTs pass us, carrying Gabby to the ambulance. “Where are you taking her?” Lili calls after them.

  “Oro Valley Hospital,” one of the EMTs answers.

  “I-is she going to be okay?” Lili asks, her shaking voice swallowed by the wind. No one answers her. Lili catches them before they shut the back doors. “Can I ride with her? She’s my sister. ”

  The cop clears his throat. “You can’t go yet, miss. We need you to make a statement. ”

  Lili pauses, her toes pointed toward the ambulance, her body twisted back toward us. A swirl of emotions cross her face in a matter of seconds, and I can practically see her brain racing as she calculates her options. Finally she shrugs, a pure white flag of surrender. “Let them speak for me. It happened to all of us. We were all together. ”

  I exhale.

  The cop nods and turns to Madeline, Charlotte, and Laurel and starts his questions. Just after Lili climbs into the ambulance and it turns away, I feel a buzzing in my pocket. I pull out my phone and see a new message on the screen from Lili.

  IF THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH MY SISTER, IF SHE

  DOESN’T MAKE IT, I’M GOING TO KILL YOU.

  Whatever, I think. And then I hit DELETE.

  Chapter 19