Sara Shepard - Never Have I Ever

Ethan’s eyes were round. “You think the Twins . . . ?”

“I’m more sure than ever,” Emma whispered, her mind racing. “I’m positive Lili cut the light, too—she ran upstairs to grab her phone right before it fell. And you should’ve seen the way both the Twins stared at me before I passed out.” Goose bumps covered Emma’s flesh as she pictured it again. “They looked capable of anything .”

My mind flashed back to the murderous look in Lili’s eyes on the night of the train prank and the text she sent from the ambulance promising revenge if anything was wrong with Gabby. Thank God Emma had stepped aside before the light crashed on her head. She’d been inches away from joining me here in the in-between.

Outside, a flock of birds lifted off from a knot of bushes beneath the nurse’s window. Emma paced the floor. “It makes so much sense,” she whispered. “Gabby and Lili are Twitter and Facebook masters—they could’ve easily hacked on to Sutton’s page, read that first note from me, and sent one back asking me to come to Tucson and wait at Sabino Canyon. They were with Madeline the night she hijacked me at Sabino and dragged me to Nisha’s party, too. Who’s to say Gabby and Lili didn’t suggest the whole kidnapping thing?”

Ethan moved the chair back and forth, the caster wheels squeaking, not saying a word.

“And they’re such gossip hounds,” Emma went on, pausing by a big poster titled WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE THE VICTIM OF ASSAULT. “It wouldn’t look suspicious for them to skulk around, spying, listening in. And both of them were at Charlotte’s sleepover last week. They could’ve snuck down and strangled me without tripping the alarm.” All of Emma’s nerves snapped. She was onto something big—and terrifying. “Lili and Gabby were with Sutton the night she died. It has to be them.”

Ethan’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “So how do we prove it? How do we nail them?”

“With your phone.” Emma held out her hand. Confused, Ethan dropped it in her palm. Emma pulled up the home page for Twitter and looked again at Gabby’s and Lili’s tweets. On August 28, they were innocuous and random: Love my new Chanel oil blotter! And What are you wearing to Nisha’s party? I was thinking of breaking in my back-2-school purchases. And Avocado burger at California Cookin’, yumness!

They sometimes shot off thirty tweets an hour. But on the thirty-first, neither of them had tweeted at all. “ That’s odd,” Emma said, sinking back to the cot. “I figured they would’ve bragged about shoplifting with Sutton that day.”

Ethan sat beside her as Emma scrolled to the most recent tweet. At ten this morning, Gabby had tweeted she’d aced the math test she never studied for.

“Humble, isn’t she?” Ethan grumbled as he read over Emma’s shoulder.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Emma said, tapping her index finger against Ethan’s phone. “Gabby made Laurel wait while she finished a tweet this afternoon right before the ceremony. So why doesn’t the tweet show up on her page?” Emma’s eyes widened. “Wait. What if they have secret Twitter accounts?”

Ethan looked at her as though he wasn’t quite sure what she was getting at.

“It’s when someone has a public account that they tell everyone about and a secondary account under a code name,” Emma explained.

“Why would they bother?” Ethan asked.

“If they have stuff they want to talk to each other about that they don’t want anyone else reading.”

“It makes sense.” Ethan’s voice rose with excitement. “And it sounds exactly like something those two would do.”

“But how could we figure out what they are? Would the names be an inside joke?”

“Probably,” Ethan answered. “Or they could be totally random.”

“Let’s try fashion designers,” Emma suggested. “Or maybe favorite shoe brands or movies.” She called up the Twitter homepage and typed in @rodarte , the Twins’ favorite clothing label. But that Twitter profile belonged to someone in Australia. She typed in other variations— rodarteGirl , RodarteFan— as well as other things the Twitter Twins liked, like Gabby’s all-time favorite movie, The Devil Wears Prada , or Lili’s favorite band, My Chemical Romance.

They checked the Twins’ Facebook pages to spark other ideas. “They have twin dogs named Googoo and Gaga,” Ethan pointed out.

“Seriously?” Emma groaned and typed it in, but nothing came up—except for a lot of Lady Gaga fan pages.

They tried makeup brands , variations on Gucci and Marc Jacobs, celebs they loved, and stores they shopped at. None of them worked. Emma sat back and massaged her temples. What would her secret Twitter account be? A nickname no one would guess? All she could think of was how Lou, the mechanic at the garage, called her Little Grease Monkey. Or how, when she worked at the New York-New York roller coaster, some of the guys who bartended nearby not-so-secretly referred to her as the “vomit-comet hottie.”

“What if Lili and Gabby’s secret Twitter names are kind of embarrassing?” Emma asked. “Like something about Gabby running over Lili’s foot.”

“Or when Gabby got stuck in the locker,” Ethan added.

Suddenly, they both looked at each other. Emma typed in @GabbyPonyBaloney . A profile popped up; the tiny picture was definitely Gabby. Only one girl was following her: @MissLiliTallywhacker .

“I can’t believe it,” Emma whispered. Her fingers shook as she scrolled down the page. These tweets weren’t nearly as mindless. Every post she read made the room spin just a little bit faster. First, she read their tweets from August 31:

@GABBYPONYBALONEY: Do you think we should?

@MissLiliTallywhacker: Definitely. No turning back now. It all falls into place tonight.

And just last week, the night of Charlotte’s sleepover, when someone crept down and strangled Emma:

@MissLiliTallywhacker: She thinks we’re so stupid.

@GabbyPonyBaloney: She’ll know the truth soon enough.

@MissLiliTallywhacker: She’d better be careful. . . .

And the night of Sutton’s birthday party:

@GabbyPonyBaloney: She has no clue what’s coming. I can’t wait to see the look on her face.

@MissLiliTallywhacker: Let’s hope this works.

And the tweet Gabby sent just that afternoon:

@GabbyPonyBaloney: Less than an hour to go. That bitch is going down.

A locker door slammed in the hall, shaking the nursing-station walls and making the thick green contents of a big bottle of cough syrup wobble back and forth on the shelf. That bitch is going down. A vision of the hurtling light fixture swam through Emma’s mind. She stared at Ethan. “They’re talking about me.”

The argument I’d had with Lili the night of Gabby’s accident flashed through my mind. I’d told her she’d better keep her mouth shut, or I’d ruin her life. But maybe instead, she and her sister ruined mine .

“Do me a favor and email these to me,” Emma said to Ethan. “All of them. I can’t risk losing these like I lost the snuff film.”

“Done.” Ethan grabbed the phone back from Emma and started copying and pasting all of the tweets.

Muffled classical music from orchestra practice in the next room echoed through the walls. Suddenly, Emma’s body ached as though she’d run back-to-back marathons. “What a nightmare,” she said, slumping against the flat mattress on the cot. “Knowing there are two of them just makes this feel even more impossible. And were they trying to scare me? Or kill me? And if they were trying to kill me, how long before they try again?”