Sara Shepard - The Lying Game

Plink. Plink. Plink.

Hours later, Emma woke from a dreamless sleep and looked around. What was that?

Plink. She whipped around to the window that faced the front yard. A tiny pebble ricocheted off the glass and plummeted to the ground below. Emma ran to the window and looked down. A figure stood under the large floodlight by the front porch. Emma rubbed her eyes hard.

“ Mom? ” she cried.

She barely felt the stairs on her feet as she whipped down them. The door creaked when she flung it open and stepped into the night. Becky stood in the middle of the driveway next to Laurel’s car.

I gawked at the woman on the driveway. This was the first time I’d ever seen our mother. She had chin-length, silky dark hair and blue-green eyes. Her body was thin—almost too thin—and she wore baggy jeans with a hole in the knee and a faded T-shirt that said THE CASUAL CLAM RESTAURANT. She would’ve been someone I’d just pass by on the street. I felt no connection to her, no instant bond. It didn’t feel real.

But when Emma got to Becky, her arms went right through her body. She stepped back, blinking hard. “Mom?” she cried again. She tried to touch Becky, but it was as though she was made of vapor. Emma touched her own face to make sure she was still real. “What’s going on?”

“It’s not what you think, honey,” Becky said in her gravelly smoker’s voice. “You have to be careful,” Becky added. “You have to be quiet. Things are about to get very dangerous.”

“W-What do you mean?” Emma asked.

“Shh.”

“But—”

Then Becky stepped forward and pressed her hand over Emma’s mouth. It felt like a real hand to Emma, solid and stable. “You need to do this for me.”

Suddenly a vision flashed in my brain. I heard that same voice say, You need to do this for me , loud and clear. At least I thought it was the same voice. I wasn’t sure if the voice was speaking to me . . . or to someone else. But just as I was grappling to see this memory, it dissolved.

All at once, Emma’s eyes popped open.

She was in Sutton’s dark bedroom once more. The curtains fluttered in the breeze. The glass of water she’d filled before she went to sleep sat on the nightstand. The dream still pounded in her head. She sat up, and her vision cleared. There was a figure standing over her.

Becky? Emma thought immediately. But this person’s hair was blond, not brown. Her nose turned up at the end, and freckles splashed across her cheeks. Emma stared straight into Laurel’s tourmaline-green eyes. Laurel’s hand clapped tightly over Emma’s mouth.

“Scream!” I yelled frantically at Emma.

That was just what Emma did. She kicked the sheets off and whacked her hands at Laurel’s arms. Laurel backed away, an astonished expression on her face. In seconds, the bedroom door opened and the Mercer parents burst inside. Mr. Mercer didn’t have a shirt on. Mrs. Mercer wore plaid pajama pants and a lacy tank top. Drake bounded in, too, emitting a few short, low barks.

“What’s going on?” Mr. Mercer demanded.

“Laurel’s trying to kill me!” Emma screamed.

“ What? ” Laurel backed away from the bed as though it were on fire.

Emma shuffled back until she was pressed against the headboard. Her chest heaved with sobs. “She was trying to suffocate me.”

Laurel let out an indignant squeak. “No, I wasn’t!” She gestured to the digital clock next to the bed. The red numbers flashed 12:01. “I came in here because I wanted to be the very first one to wish you a happy birthday.”

“Don’t deny it.” Emma held the sheets to her chest. “I saw you!”

“Sutton, honey, Laurel wouldn’t do something like that,” Mr. Mercer said gently.

“You probably just had a nightmare.” Mrs. Mercer rubbed her eyes. “Are you worried about your birthday party?”

“Why would I be worried about a birthday party ?” Emma snapped. She whipped a finger in Laurel’s direction. “She. Tried. To. Kill. Me!”

But when she looked at the Mercers again, sleepy skepticism was obvious in both of their faces. “Honey, why don’t you go downstairs and have a glass of milk?” Mrs. Mercer suggested.

And then, yawning, they turned for the door. Drake and Laurel followed. But before Laurel turned in the hall, she wheeled around and met Emma’s gaze. Her eyes narrowed. The corners of her mouth arced down. Fire shot through Emma’s veins. The words Becky had said in the dream flashed into her mind once more. Things are about to get very dangerous.

The words swirled in my mind, too. Talk about a dream come true.

“There’s the birthday girl!” Madeline cried, tottering across the patio in bright blue stilettos, a silver party dress, and a foil crown. She plopped an almost identical crown on Emma’s head, which said 18 in pink numbers.

“Smile!” Charlotte darted up to them, dressed in a short striped dress and espadrilles. She smushed close to Emma and held a digital camera out from their bodies. Just as the flash went off, Laurel leapt into the picture, throwing her arm around Emma and grinning broadly.

“Cheese!” Laurel said overenthusiastically, her smile as white as the gauzy tunic she wore over black leggings. Emma tried her best to smile, but she had a feeling she just looked scared.

Sutton’s friends broke from the hug and launched into another round of “Happy Birthday.” Charlotte belted it out at the top of her lungs. Madeline sang it like Marilyn Monroe when she serenaded JFK. And Laurel sang sweetly, innocently. Emma took a slight step away from her.

It was 9 P.M., and Sutton’s birthday party was in full swing. A DJ spun records on the patio table near the grill. Throngs of kids swayed and twirled on the dance floor. Girls from the tennis team held plates of canapés. Mrs. Mercer had strung tiny pink Christmas lights all around the patio and filled punch bowls with virgin sangria. At least twenty-five cheapo digital cameras were strewn around the patio. Three laptops sat on a table near the door; each had USB cords to upload photos to Facebook and Twitter. The Mercer parents had mapped out a radio-controlled car obstacle course in the desert-dust part of the backyard. The air smelled like a mélange of everyone’s perfume and hair products, with a slight undertone of booze. A large card table near the door held a pile of wrapped birthday presents, more than Emma had ever seen in her life.

Not that Emma was able to enjoy any of it. She might have been dressed up in the pale-pink minidress that she’d found hanging in Sutton’s closet with the word birthday written on the hanger; she might’ve spent an hour in the salon getting her hair curled just so; and she might’ve been wearing high-heeled booties that probably cost more than her entire year’s clothing budget. But it didn’t mean she felt particularly festive. Every time a flash went off, she winced and wheeled around. Every time someone touched her to say hi, she stiffened. Every firework Mr. Mercer and some of the boys set off at the end of the yard made her flinch. They sounded like gunshots. It felt like any minute might be her last.

I hoped she was wrong.

After they finished Happy Birthday–ing, Madeline, Charlotte and Laurel surveyed the picture on the preview screen. “Madeline looks drunk,” Charlotte said.

“And I look drugged.” Laurel sidled up to Emma and showed her the camera. “You’re the only one who looks normal. If you put this on Facebook, you have to Photoshop all of us out of it.”

Emma slowly inched away from Laurel’s muscular frame; being this close to her made her tingly with nerves. All night, she’d watched Laurel. She’d been on the dance floor for most of the party, requesting fast, edgy songs that got everyone moving. An hour ago, she’d cornered Emma by the pool and presented her with a birthday gift, two tickets to a revival of Les Misérables the following week. “You can take anyone you want, but I’d love to go,” Laurel said bashfully. “Remember how we used to act out the scenes when we were little? You always insisted on being Cosette.”