Sara Shepard - Twisted

Spencer raised her glass. “Well, here’s to getting what you want.”

Zach smiled. “I always get what I want,” he said meaningfully, which sent more tingles up her spine. Something was going to happen between them tonight. Spencer could just feel it.

“Is that booze?” cried an outraged voice. Zach’s sister, Amelia, emerged from around the corner with a plate full of food.

Spencer sighed and shut her eyes. Her mother had been thrilled that she’d invited Zach to the smorgasbord—it would be a good way for the two of them to get to know each other, she said. “In fact, why doesn’t Amelia join you, too?” she’d chirped a millisecond later. Before Spencer could protest, Mrs. Hastings was on the phone with Nicholas, extending the invitation to Zach’s pinched-faced sister.

Did Amelia even want to be here? A hideous scowl had settled over her features as soon as she’d stepped through the Kahns’ door. When Mrs. Kahn put on a traditional Finnish folk dance song, Amelia had actually winced and covered her ears.

“Want some?” Zach pushed his cup toward Amelia. “It tastes like peppermint patties, your favorite!”

Amelia moved away, making a face. “No thanks.” Her idea of party wear was a striped Brooks Brothers button-down tucked very tightly into a denim pencil skirt that fell to her knees. She looked exactly like Mrs. Ulster, Spencer’s substitute Calc II teacher.

Amelia leaned against the banister and glowered at the Rosewood residents. “So are these people your friends?” She said friends like she might have said bedbug-infested mattresses.

Spencer surveyed the crowd. Most of the Rosewood Day senior class had been invited, as well as a smattering of the Kahns’ society friends. “Well, they all go to my school.”

Amelia made a dismissive uch . “They seem really lame. Especially the girls.”

Spencer flinched. Other than Kelsey, she hadn’t hung out with St. Agnes girls in ages. But she had been to a couple of their parties back in middle school; each clique named themselves after a European princess or queen—there were the Queen Sofias of Spain, the Princess Olgas of Greece, and the Charlottes of Monaco, daughter of Princess Carolina. Hello, lameness?

Zach drained the rest of his drink and set his cup on the stairs. “Oh, these girls look like they might have some dirty little secrets up their sleeves.”

“How can you tell?” Spencer teased.

“It’s all about watching people, noticing what they do. Like when I met you at the restaurant on Sunday—I knew you were in the bar area because you were escaping from someone. Taking a breather.”

Spencer gave him a playful slap. “You’re such a liar.”

Zach crossed his arms over his chest. “Wanna bet? There’s this game I sometimes play called She’s Not What She Seems. I bet I can suss out more secrets than you can.”

Spencer flinched for a moment at the name of the game. For some reason, it reminded her of the postcard they’d received last night. Even though Spencer pretended it didn’t matter, flickers of anxiety threatened to ignite inside of her. Could someone know about Jamaica? A lot of people had been staying at the resort—Noel, Mike, that group of kids from California they’d gone surfing with, some party-crazy boys from England, and of course the staff—but Spencer and the others looked up and down the dark beach after everything had happened and hadn’t seen a soul. It was like they were the last people on earth. Unless . . .

She shut her eyes and swept the thoughts away. There was no unless . And there was no new A. The postcard was just a big coincidence, a lucky guess.

A bunch of girls on the Rosewood Day newspaper staff flitted into the living room with plates of meatballs, potatoes, and sardines. Spencer turned back to Zach. “I’ll play your little secrets game. But you realize I know these people, right? I have a home-court advantage.”

“Then we have to pick people you don’t really know.” Zach leaned forward and gazed around the room. He pointed to Mrs. Byers, Mason’s mom, who was decked out in head-to-toe Kate Spade. “Know anything about her?”

Amelia, who had been watching them both, groaned. “ Her? She’s as generic as they come! Soccer mom, drives a Lexus. Snore.”

Zach clucked his tongue. “That’s where you’re wrong. She looks like your regular upscale suburban housewife, but she likes her boyfriends young.”

“What makes you say that?” Spencer asked incredulously.

“Look.” Zach pointed at how Mrs. Byers was eagerly filling the cup for Ryan Zeiss, one of Mason’s lacrosse teammates. Her hand lingered on Ryan’s shoulders for a long time. Too long.

“Whoa,” Spencer whispered. No wonder Mrs. Byers always volunteered to be the team’s travel mom.

Then it was Spencer’s turn. She looked around the room, trying to locate her victim. Mrs. Zeigler, Naomi’s polished mother, glided across the cheerful black-and-white checkerboard floor. Bingo. “She gets secret Botox treatments,” Spencer said, pointing.

“Oh puh-leease.” Amelia rolled her eyes. “ All of these women get Botox. Some of the kids probably do, too.”

“. . . under her arms,” Spencer added, remembering how, a few years ago, Mrs. Zeigler always had visible sweat stains on her T-shirts whenever she raised her arms to clap for a field hockey goal. This hockey season, however, those sweat stains had magically disappeared.

“Nice.” Zach whistled.

They went around the room, making up more secrets. Zach pointed to Liam Olsen and said he was cheating on his girlfriend, Devon Arliss. Spencer zeroed in on a Goth-looking caterer and said she was a huge Justin Bieber freak and French-kissed his portrait every night. Zach said that Imogen Smith looked like the type who’d secretly had a sexually transmitted disease, and Spencer hypothesized that Beau Baxter, her hot, reclusive costar in Macbeth, had affairs with older women. And then Amelia pointed halfheartedly at someone in the crowd. “Well, she looks like the type who hooks up with teachers.”

Spencer squinted at who she was talking about and almost gasped. It was Aria. After the girls started hanging out again, Aria had told Spencer and the others everything about her affair with Ezra Fitz, her English teacher. How could Amelia know that ?

Then Amelia turned her beady little pea eyes on Spencer. “So what’s your secret?”

“Uh . . .” A chill ran up Spencer’s spine. Suddenly, Amelia seemed weirdly intuitive, like she already knew. Jamaica. How I got into Princeton. What I did to Kelsey. There were definitely a few things Spencer had done she wasn’t proud of.

Zach rolled his eyes. “Don’t answer her. We all have some secrets we don’t want to share—including me.”

Shortly after that, Amelia wandered off into the party to talk to a couple of girls she recognized from candy striping. The party devolved into a giant drunken Finnish clog dance, with the cheesy polka music blaring and Aria and the new exchange student girl dancing wildly at the center.

A glass and a half of schnapps later, Spencer and Zach were still playing She Isn’t Who She Seems.

“Sean Ackard’s a serial masturbator,” Spencer posited, pointing.

“That woman in the head-to-toe Gucci buys all her designer clothes on Canal Street in New York,” Zach countered.

“Celeste Richards loves the smell of her own farts.” Spencer giggled.

“That new Finnish girl is actually a drag queen.” Zach wailed.

“Lori, Kendra, and Madison are into orgies!” Spencer cried, referring to the three soloists from masterworks halfheartedly clogging in the corner.