Sara Shepard - Never Have I Ever

“Come on.” Laurel hit the key fob to lock the Jetta and started up the driveway, but Emma hung back for a moment. She stared across the street at Ethan’s house. The front porch was dark. The telescope Ethan had peered through the first night Emma had met him had disappeared. She wondered what Ethan was doing tonight. Had he thought about their near kiss in the pool the other night? They’d seen each other in the halls, but they hadn’t really spoken since.

Nisha’s front door flung open, and the tennis team greeted them with hugs and squeals. Emma poked her head into the room and nudged Laurel. “Where’s Maggie?”

Laurel started to laugh. “Maggie’s not actually here .”

Charlotte emerged through the crowd wearing an off-the-shoulder striped top and wide-leg jeans. She linked her elbow through Emma’s. “I see my little plan worked!” The freckles on her nose scrunched together as she grinned.

Emma frowned. Little plan?

Charlotte extended her thumb and pinkie to make the shape of a phone. “ ‘Hello, Mrs. Mercer?’” she said in an adult voice. “ ‘This is Coach Maggie. I’d really, really like Sutton to attend the tennis team dinner tonight. It’s such a show of solidarity! Oh, I understand she’s grounded, but I’ll watch her carefully, I promise. You can count on me!’”

Not even I saw that one coming. My friends were good . With a rush of relief, I tried to wrap my arms around Charlotte, thrilled once more that she wasn’t my killer. But, as usual, my fingers just passed through her skin.

Charlotte put her arm around Emma’s shoulders and squeezed. “No need to thank me. Now all we have to do is figure out how to spring you for Homecoming.”

She pulled Emma into the dining room, where platters of roast chicken and panini sandwiches lay on a checkered tablecloth next to big bowls of pasta salad, crispy, foil-wrapped garlic bread, and a tier of chocolate-iced cupcakes for dessert. Red plastic cups sat next to bottles of Gatorade, Smartwater, and Diet Coke. Everyone else on the team had already dug in, scooping food onto their plates with long-handled plastic spoons.

As Emma stepped toward the table, an icy hand circled her wrist. “Glad you could make it, Sutton,” Nisha said with a saccharine smile.

Emma flinched, jittery at the sight of Nisha. Something about the girl was too glossy, starting with the way she was styled to anal-retentive perfection: her cream-colored silk blouse perfectly tucked into a pair of dark-wash trouser jeans. The gold bangle bracelets on her wrist looked as though they’d been spit-polished. Her hair was a smooth, glassy sheet that hung down her back, and her makeup looked as though it had been professionally applied.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” Nisha went on. “It was kind of hard work to put all this food together. Especially because I had to do it alone.”

“ Liar! ” I wanted to call out. In the kitchen, past all the girls, I spotted a bunch of AJ’s market grocery bags on the kitchen island. No doubt Nisha had bought all this stuff ready-made and just arranged it artfully on plates.

“So,” Nisha’s voice oozed with faux sweetness. “What’s it like for Sutton Mercer not to have a boyfriend? It must be the first time since, oh, I don’t know, kindergarten!”

Emma straightened. “I’m actually really enjoying myself,” she said, reaching forward to pop a cracker into her mouth. “It feels good to be free.”

The corners of Nisha’s mouth curled up into a sickly pink grin. “I heard you wouldn’t have sex with him,” she added, loudly enough to turn the heads of two sophomores lining up for pasta-salad seconds.

Emma’s hand froze over the crackers. “Where did you hear that?”

A tiny giggle escaped from Nisha’s mouth. The answer was obvious. Other than her friends, Garrett was the only person who knew what happened in Sutton’s bedroom.

Ew. I suddenly was glad that Emma broke up with him.

“I had no idea you were such a prude!” Nisha trilled, exposing her pearly teeth. Then, without allowing Emma to get another word in, she whipped around and sashayed into the den.

Emma stabbed at a piece of chicken on the platter, hating Nisha more with every second. Had Sutton hated her this much, too? But it was more than that. There was something about Nisha that unnerved her. The strange looks she gave Emma, the whispers. It was like she was toying with Emma. Like she knew something—something big.

Emma peered out of the dining room. A large, state-of-the-art kitchen was to her right; on the other side of the foyer was a long, dark hallway, which most likely led to Nisha’s bedroom. Did she dare?

“Be careful,” I warned, even though Emma couldn’t hear me. There was no way Nisha would take kindly to snooping.

Emma stared at the chicken leg she’d selected from the platter, the thin, yellowish flesh suddenly turning her stomach. Discarding her plate, she mumbled something about the bathroom to no one in particular and tiptoed down the hall.

Tiny night-lights illuminated the baseboards. The air smelled like Febreze and Indian spices. Emma pressed open the first door with the very tips of her fingers and stared into a walk-in closet full of towels and sheets. She moved to the next door. It was a hall bathroom, adorned with a paisley shower curtain and a mosaic-tiled mirror. The next door, which led to the master bedroom, stood ajar. The king-sized bed hadn’t been made, and men’s dress shirts, black socks, and shiny black shoes were strewn messily all over the carpet. I guess someone’s cleaning lady didn’t come this week , Emma thought, surprised at how accustomed to an immaculate home she’d become after just a few weeks. A twinge of guilt pinched her when she remembered that Mrs. Banerjee had died this summer.

Emma pushed inside the final door to the right. A light glowed from a meticulous desk. A Compaq laptop sat closed, and a white iPod waited in a charging dock next to it. The rest of the surface was empty and sterile, like a hotel room. Nisha had smoothed the bedspread of all creases, organized eight fluffy pillows just so, and lined up her stuffed animals—one of which was a large tennis racket with two googly eyes—along the headboard. She’d alphabetized all the books on her shelf—which seemed mostly of the stuffy, Victorian, Brontë-sisters variety. Even the slats of the venetian blinds tilted precisely at the same angle.

A peal of laughter sounded from the den, and Emma froze. She peeked through the gap between the door and the wall and counted to three. No one appeared at the end of the hall.

She tiptoed farther into the room to take a closer look at the collage of photos housed under a glass pane near Nisha’s bed. Most of the photos showed Nisha in action: hitting a backhand shot, a drop shot, serving, raising her hands above her head when she’d won a match. In the center of the collage, Nisha stood in the first-place spot on a podium, a shiny gold medal around her neck. Sutton stood in the third-place spot, scowling. There was a tan-colored brace on her knee.

Tacked along the border were several group shots of the tennis team: the girls holding a team tournament cup, Sutton standing as far away from Nisha as she could. Charlotte had darker hair in the photo, and Laurel’s hair was cut in a sleek blonde bob. Another photo showed the girls standing at an airport gate. Sutton posed off to the side, jutting her leg up on one of the benches and giving the camera a sexy pout. Emma noticed blinking slot machines in the background. Was that Vegas? Had she and Sutton been in the same city at the same time? For a fleeting moment, she pictured the two of them running into each other at the New York-New York casino where she had worked. Would Sutton have noticed her? Would they have smiled at each other?