Sara Shepard - Never Have I Ever

Everyone stopped. “Uh-oh,” Charlotte said.

Emma turned around and squinted at where they’d come from, but the trail snaked over rolling hills, and she could no longer see the parking lot. She pulled out Sutton’s iPhone and put it on flashlight mode, but it shed very little light. She also noticed she had no service. Her palms began to sweat. “What do we do?”

“Let’s keep going,” Gabby insisted. “It’s not much farther. I promise.”

Each of them pressed close to the girl in front of her, not wanting to get lost from the pack. “This is freaking me out,” Madeline said. “Someone tell a story or something. I need a distraction.”

“Two Truths and a Lie!” Laurel suggested with a nervous giggle. “We haven’t played in forever.”

“Fun!” Gabby said, pushing a tree branch out of the way. It snapped back and smacked Emma’s jaw.

Madeline snickered. “Do you even know how to play, Gabs?”

“Uh, yeah. ” Gabby skirted around a boulder. “Just because I’m not a member of the Lying Game doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Charlotte muttered, and everyone giggled. Emma saw Gabby’s shoulders tense as she plunged forward on the trail.

Luckily, Emma knew the rules of Two Truths and a Lie; she and Alex and a couple of other girls had played it at a sleepover. Everyone took turns making three statements: one false, two true. Everyone else had to guess which was the lie. If they guessed correctly, the statement-teller had to drink. If they guessed incorrectly, they had to drink.

“I’ll go first,” Madeline volunteered, sounding out of breath as they climbed a slope. “One: When my family went to Miami last year, I crashed a party and met JLO. Two: I had a consultation for a boob job at Pima Plastic Surgery last year. And three: I think I know exactly why Thayer left. I think I know where he is, too, but I’m not telling.”

The words chilled Emma. When she swiveled around and looked at Madeline’s face, she couldn’t tell if she was smiling or frowning.

“The boob job has to be the lie,” Charlotte’s voice rang out in the darkness. “Mads has the best rack of all of us!”

“Wrong!” Madeline taunted. “The boob job is true—I made an appointment because I was flirting with the idea of double-Ds. I changed my mind, though, when I found out what the surgery was like. So drink up, Char!”

“So which one was the lie?” Gabby slowed down at the front of the line. “Thayer?”

Madeline shrugged. “I guess you’ll never know now.”

Emma fixed her gaze on Madeline. Could she know where Thayer was? Was she trying to protect him from someone—maybe their dad?

The liquid in the bottle made a swishing noise as Charlotte drank. “Okay. Statement one: I cheated on Garrett. Two: I think my dad’s cheating on my mom. And three: I kissed Freddy Krueger in the haunted house.”

“But your mom’s way too hot to cheat on, Char.” Madeline sounded torn. “I’m not guessing on this one.”

Emma kept her mouth shut, a thought suddenly swimming into her mind. While waiting for Sutton at Sabino Canyon, she’d seen a man she recognized from Sutton’s Facebook page as Charlotte’s father. He’d seemed flustered, and later, Emma found out Charlotte thought he was away on business.

But she didn’t dare say it, instead maneuvering quietly around two rocks.

“Freddy’s the lie!” Gabby whooped finally.

“Drink up, Gabby!” Charlotte crowed. “I was in the haunted house and felt these hands behind me. Someone spun me around and planted one right on my lips. It was totally Freddy—I saw his freaky nails. He wasn’t a bad kisser, Mads.”

Madeline snorted. “You can have him!”

No one asked Charlotte which one the lie was.

After Gabby drank her penalty shot, Madeline said, “Your turn, Sutton.”

Emma took a deep breath and racked her brain for what she could say about Sutton. But then she had another idea. “Okay. One: I worked at a roller coaster in Las Vegas one summer,” she started.

“Lie,” Charlotte said automatically, cutting her off. “You’ve never worked in Vegas.”

“You’re just trying to get drunk, aren’t you, Sutton?” Madeline passed her the bottle. Emma smiled to herself, but didn’t bother correcting them.

They walked on. A lone coyote howled in the distance. A cactus needle scraped Emma’s shin. Then Gabby turned around and looked at them from the front of the line. “Am I next? One: My sister and I cheated to get on the Halloween dance court. Two: Kevin and I made out in the haunted house right by the jar full of fake eyeballs. And three . . .” She paused for effect. Crickets chirped. “I once touched a dead body.”

The wind shrieked in Emma’s ears, and her heart leapt to her throat.

I shivered. Was it my body? More than ever before, I needed Emma—I needed her to nail Gabby and Lili and expose my murder. I needed them to go down for what they’d done.

Laurel sniffed. “A dead body? Yeah, right.”

Blood pulsed in Emma’s ears. It took everything she had to keep her feet moving forward, because if she tried to turn back, she might get lost . . . or worse.

“But if that’s the lie, that means you cheated to get on the court,” Madeline murmured. “You couldn’t do that, could you?”

“I don’t know, could I?” Gabby taunted. She twisted around and stared straight at Emma. Emma couldn’t see her features, but she could tell Gabby was smirking. “What do you think I’m capable of, Sutton?”

Suddenly, the trail hit an abrupt dead end, and the girls stopped short. Instead of a hot spring burbling before them, they stood at the edge of a cliff. Pebbles cascaded over the side. The faded light showed silhouettes of criss-crossing branches below. It was too dark to tell how far of a drop it was.

A gust of wind howled along the trail, rustling dead leaves at Emma’s feet, and she realized with a jolt how wrong she’d been to think she could handle Gabby. They were in the desert with no flashlights and no cell phone service. One wrong step, one stumble, and Emma would become the headline Gabby and Lili wanted: Teen Dies in Tragic Desert Accident . It was the perfect scenario, really. Because if Emma died out here, everyone would think Sutton Mercer met her end during an ill-fated drinking game. There would no longer be a murder to cover up, no reason for anyone to take Sutton’s place. It would all just be over.

“Uh, Gabby?” Madeline shuffled her feet. “Did we take a wrong turn?”

“Nope.” Gabby smacked the flashlight she was holding and tried the switch again, but it still didn’t work. “The path continues on the other side of this cliff. It’s a really easy jump, I swear.”

Gabby pointed a few feet in the distance. A ravine separated one side of the trail from the other.

“I’m not jumping,” Emma said in a shaking voice.

“Yes, you are.” Gabby sounded amused. “It’s the only way to get to the springs.”

A pair of eyes glowed from a tree branch above Emma’s head. She made out the shape of a great horned owl.

Madeline pushed around them. “Let’s just get there already, okay? I’m sick of hiking.” She held on to her backpack straps and did a graceful, ballet-dancer leap over the chasm, clearing it easily. “Piece of cake!” she yelled from the other side.

Gabby let Charlotte go next, then Laurel. But when Emma tried to edge past her, Gabby stuck out her arm to stop her. “Not so fast,” she said in a low voice.

Emma’s stomach dropped to her feet. This was it.

“Run, Emma!” I screamed at my sister. “Get out of there!”

Across the ravine, the other girls shifted, waiting. “C’mon, guys,” Madeline called out. “What’s the holdup?”