Sara Shepard - Never Have I Ever

All of a sudden I had a sharp, distinct memory of Madeline standing in that same taut but wounded pose. We were in her bedroom, and there was a commotion coming from down the hall, muffled voices gaining in volume. I’d heard tiny gasps, as though she was trying to stifle tears.

“Mads?” Emma whispered. Madeline didn’t answer. “Come on, Mads. Whatever I said, I’m sorry.”

Madeline whipped around and stared at Emma with red-rimmed eyes. “Look, I called you first, okay?” Her voice caught, and she pressed her lips together. “You didn’t answer. I guess you had more important things to do.”

She sniffed and took a choked breath. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know. I always jump when you tell me to jump, but it would be nice if you reciprocated sometimes. I called Charlotte next, and she stayed with me all night. So yeah , of course we’ve been tight lately. Satisfied?”

Steeling her jaw, Madeline swept past Emma as though she were a faceless student clogging up the library aisles.

“Mads!” Emma protested. But Madeline didn’t stop. She stormed through the doors and out into the hall.

Everyone in the library turned and stared at Emma. She ducked back into an aisle and leaned against a stack of books. Madeline was hiding something big, but it wasn’t what Emma thought. There was no faking the reaction Madeline just had. Whatever she’d dealt with the night Sutton went missing was her own issue, something completely divorced from what had happened to Sutton. Madeline was busy that night. Innocent. And now, because they were together, Charlotte likely was, too.

Relief washed over me, hard and fast. I wanted to cheer aloud. My two best friends were actually my best friends—not my murderers.

A series of shrill beep s sounded as the librarian scanned books for a scrawny red head. Emma turned to leave, but her knee caught the corner of a copy of The Riverside Shakespeare and knocked it to the floor. The book splayed open, its paper-thin pages full of highlights and notes from kids who didn’t seem to care that it was a library book. A line from Hamlet caught Emma’s eye, sending a chill up her spine.

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

It made me shiver, too. Charlotte and Mads were in the clear, but my killer was still out there—smiling, watching, lurking, waiting.

“She’ll be good, Mom,” Laurel begged. “I promise . Please let her go?”

It was Friday evening, and Emma and Laurel stood in the foyer of the Mercer house. Mrs. Mercer peered at the girls from the doorway of her office. Drake panted beside her, his long tongue looking like a thick slab of ham. Emma edged away from him slightly.

“It’s just a stupid tennis dinner.” Laurel went on in a sweet voice. “It’s going to be totally boring— Nisha’s throwing it. And anyway, didn’t Coach Maggie tell you she was practically going to put an ankle monitor on Sutton once she gets there? You have nothing to worry about.”

“Please?” Emma gave Mrs. Mercer puppy-dog eyes that matched Laurel’s. A week ago she wouldn’t have believed she’d want to go to something at Nisha’s house. But the truth was, being grounded kind of . . . sucked. It wasn’t that she was simply stuck in the house; Mrs. Mercer had taken away Emma’s Internet privileges, disconnected the cable box from Sutton’s room, and confiscated Sutton’s iPhone. After becoming accustomed to Sutton’s shiny, high-tech gear, the outdated, banged-up BlackBerry Emma had brought from Vegas wasn’t exactly cutting it. She had spent the evenings scouring Sutton’s room once more, searching for anything relevant to her murder, but there was nothing. The only thing left to do was homework. Sutton was probably rolling over in her grave.

If I was somewhere as boring as a grave. Which I highly doubted.

Emma wasn’t supposed to be allowed out for Nisha’s tennis team dinner, but Coach Maggie had apparently called Mrs. Mercer at work this afternoon and urged her to let Sutton attend. It would be good for team morale, Maggie had said, assuring Mrs. Mercer she would be there and would keep an eye on Sutton. But now Mrs. Mercer was hesitating.

“You’ll watch her like a hawk, Laurel?” Mrs. Mercer asked.

“Yeh- hes ,” Laurel groaned, fidgeting with the strap of her flowered camisole.

“And you two will come straight home after the dinner is over?”

“Absolutely,” the two girls said in unison.

Mrs. Mercer put a finger to her lips. “Well, it is Nisha.” She uttered Nisha’s name in the same reverent way she might talk about the Dalai Lama. Mrs. Mercer was convinced Nisha was a model girl with straight As and iron-tight morals who could do no wrong.

“Okay, fine.” With a sigh, Mrs. Mercer lowered her shoulders and shooed them out the door.

Emma climbed into Laurel’s car, and Laurel swung into the driver’s seat and whooped. “How does freedom taste?”

“Amazing!” Emma cried.

Laurel drove one-handed through the neighborhood, using her other hand to run a paddle brush through her long blond hair. Despite her messy room, Sutton’s sister was permanently polished: constantly reapplying lip gloss, checking her teeth in mirrors to make sure nothing was caught between them, and dragging out the ironing board from the hall closet and smoothing her skirts and shirts. Emma liked that Laurel took care of her own clothes instead of asking Mrs. Mercer or a dry cleaner to do it. She was resourceful, like Emma was. She could take care of herself.

But that didn’t mean Emma trusted her.

Emma shifted in the passenger seat and mentally assumed her sleuth mode. “So apparently, Madeline has a secret,” she began, turning to Laurel and catching sight of the canine day care, Doggie Dude Ranch, that zoomed past her window. A turquoise and crystal shop was next, followed by a big outdoor pottery shop.

Laurel’s eyebrows shot up, but she didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Oh yeah? What?”

“She won’t tell me. It has something to do with the night before Nisha’s back-to-school party.”

Laurel’s face clouded. “You mean the night before you ditched me?”

Emma bit down hard on the inside of her cheek. Oops. Sutton was supposed to pick up Laurel for that party . . . but since she was dead, it didn’t happen. “Yeah. Well, anyway, Mads called Charlotte that night and told her what it was. I guess it was kind of a big deal.”

“Why weren’t you with them?”

The AC in the car suddenly felt ice-cold. You tell me , Emma wanted to say. “I guess that means you weren’t with them either?”

Laurel’s mouth formed a straight line. The Jetta veered over the line on the highway, and the driver next to them blew his horn, making both girls jump. “Uh, no ,” she answered tightly after she’d steered the car back into its rightful lane. “I wasn’t.”

“So where were you?” Emma tried to sound like she was making casual conversation, even though her heart was rocketing inside her chest.

Laurel’s fingers clutched the steering wheel. She paused for a long moment, her eyes fixed on the horizon. “Sutton, are we seriously going to have this conversation right now?” she said finally in a steely voice . Emma stared at her, waiting, but she didn’t offer anything more.

Laurel pulled the car up to a familiar low-slung ranch house with a big front yard full of desert succulents. It looked exactly the same as it had the last time Emma had come here, her very first day in Tucson, before she knew her twin was dead. Back before all of this craziness started. Several cars were parked in the driveway and at the curb, many of them pasted with bumper stickers that said TENNIS IS THE GOOD LIFE or LOVE with a yellow tennis ball as the O . All the lights were on in the house, and a giggle exploded from somewhere inside.