Sara Shepard - Never Have I Ever

Emma opened her eyes and looked around. She was lying on a sleeping bag on the floor of the Mercers’ family den. The blue light of the muted TV flickered across the room, bags and containers of Thai takeout lay abandoned on the coffee table, and several dog-eared copies of Us Weekly and Life & Style were facedown on the carpet. The time on the cable box said 2:46 A.M. Charlotte, Madeline, and Laurel slept beside her, and Gabby and Lili were curled up near the fireplace, their brand-new Lying Game membership cards still clutched in their hands.

Bzzz.

Sutton’s phone glowed next to Emma’s pillow. The screen said ETHAN LANDRY . Emma was immediately alert.

Emma slid out of the sleeping bag and padded into the hall. The house was eerily still and dark, the only sound the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer. “Hello?” she whispered into the phone.

“ There you are!” Ethan cried on the other end. “I’ve been calling all night!”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t you get my messages?” Ethan sounded out of breath, as if he’d been running. “I need to talk to you!”

Oh, now you want to talk to me , Emma thought, glancing out the window. A familiar red car sat at the curb. She dropped the curtain and pulled her T-shirt down so that it covered her stomach. “A-are you outside Sutton’s house ?”

There was a pause. Ethan sighed. “Yeah. I was driving around, and I saw Madeline’s car in your driveway. Can you come out?”

Emma wasn’t sure how to feel about Ethan sitting outside the Mercers’ house in the middle of the night. If it had been anyone else, she would’ve thought it was slightly stalkerish. At least he’d used the phone this time, instead of pebbles. “It’s three A.M.,” she said frostily.

“Please?”

Emma ran her finger around the lip of a bowl on the hall table. “I don’t know. . . .”

“Please, Emma?”

The area around Emma’s temples began to ache. Her muscles were stiff from squeezing into the cave. She had no energy to play hard to get right now. “Fine.”

The lights on Ethan’s car died as Emma padded across the yard. “Why didn’t you answer my calls?” he asked when she stepped off the curb.

Emma peered at Sutton’s iPhone. Sure enough, there were six messages and missed calls from Ethan. She hadn’t noticed them before—she’d been having too much fun with Sutton’s friends, giving Gabby and Lili makeovers, drinking Kahlua shots, playing Dance Dance Revolution , and, of course, inducting Gabby and Lili into the Lying Game.

“I was busy,” she answered, a hard edge to her voice. “I figured you were busy, too.”

Ethan squared his shoulders and opened his mouth, but Emma held up her hand to stop him. “Before you say anything, it’s not Gabby or Lili. They aren’t who I thought they were.” She was careful to use I instead of we , like it was her investigation only, not both of theirs.

Ethan frowned. “What happened?”

Emma took a breath and told him about the night. “It was just a prank,” she concluded. “I mean, Gabby and Lili were definitely mad about the seizure thing, but they aren’t Sutton’s killers. All they wanted was to be part of the Lying Game.”

Ethan leaned against the door of the car. A few houses down, a dog let out a lonely howl.

“They didn’t drop that light on my head either,” Emma went on, a shiver trailing along her spine. “I think Sutton’s real killer did.”

“But Gabby and Lili made so much sense. You said yourself Lili went back upstairs to retrieve her phone just before the light fell.”

Emma shrugged. “Maybe the killer noticed that, too, hoping I’d suspect Gabby and Lili because of what Sutton did to them.” She winced, thinking how she’d taken the bait. Even if Gabby had only fake-fallen, even if it was all a ruse, Emma had still lashed out in anger. What if things had gone wrong and the force of Emma’s push had really killed her? She’d never felt so out of control.

Ethan shifted his weight and coughed into his fist. “The reason I’ve been trying to get ahold of you is that Sam told me something really . . . strange. At the end of the night, she got kind of fed up and asked what I was doing hanging out with someone like Sutton. She was like, ‘I heard Sutton Mercer hit someone with her car and almost killed them.’”

“What?” Emma shot up. “Who?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. Or maybe she didn’t know.”

Emma squinted. “Had you heard anything like this before?”

Ethan shrugged. “Maybe it’s not true.”

Emma’s heart pounded. Who could Sutton have almost killed with her car—and when ? How could she not have known something so huge? “Maybe it is true,” she said hesitantly. “I went to the impound to pick up Sutton’s car earlier this week . . . but it wasn’t there. Sutton signed it out . . . on the thirty-first. ”

“The night she died?” Ethan’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously.

“Yes. Not a single one of Sutton’s friends knew she’d picked up the car.” Emma tied her hair in a tight knot. “What if she had a reason not to tell anyone she picked it up? Maybe this rumor about her almost killing someone with her car is true. Maybe she tried to run someone down on the thirty-first.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Ethan waved his hands across each other. “You’re jumping to conclusions. Sutton wasn’t always nice, but she wasn’t a killer.”

“Yeah,” I wanted to add. Now Emma thought I was a hit-and-run kind of girl?

Emma took a deep breath. Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her. “Still,” she said. “We need to find Sutton’s car. We need to figure this out.”

“So it’s we again , is it?” Ethan asked, smiling. “I’m allowed to be part of the investigation after all?”

Emma stared into the distance over his shoulder. “I guess.” But embarrassment and rejection still pulsed inside her. This was what scared her about getting too close to someone: all the mixed signals, all the misinterpreted gestures, all the emotions that became overamplified because something big was on the line. It was so much easier to steer clear of all that. It prevented so much potential pain.

“I’m sorry about Sam,” Ethan said, reading her thoughts. “But she really is just a friend.”

“I don’t care,” Emma said quickly, trying to look like she meant it.

“Well, I want you to care.” Ethan’s voice cracked. “I mean, I want you to care that we’re not together.”

“You can go out with her if you want. It’s obvious she likes you.”

An amused laugh escaped from Ethan. “I highly doubt she likes me after tonight. I spent the whole time asking questions about you, avoiding you, coming to talk to you in the parking lot, or obsessing over whether or not you were okay.”

Emma winced at the memory. “Yeah, but then when she came looking for you, you jumped up in a heartbeat. You ditched me.”

“She was my date!” Ethan raised his palms to the air. “I had to be polite! And even after I went back to her, I just asked more questions. At the end of the dance, she was like, ‘I’m not the girl you want.’ And it’s true.”

Emma snuck a peek at him. A sincere, earnest look flooded Ethan’s face. “I know you have your doubts,” he continued softly. “But I can’t let you go. I can’t stand by and just be friends.”

He reached over and took Emma’s hands. A tingly sensation snapped through Emma’s insides. As she stared into Ethan’s bright, loyal eyes, the tightly closed fist inside of her slowly began to open. Screw all her baggage. Screw worrying about getting hurt or emotions clogging up the investigation. Ethan was the most amazing guy Emma had ever met. What was the point of living if she didn’t take some risks every once in a while? And maybe, just maybe, this was something Sutton would have wanted for her, too, if she were still alive: to go after Ethan, even if the prospects were scary, even if she was putting herself out on a limb. Sutton would encourage her to go after what she wanted anyway.