“Who are you taking, Laurel?” Madeline asked. Laurel ran a hand over a snag in the carpet. “Caleb Rosen.”
“Don’t know him,” Charlotte announced in a loud voice. Madeline gave Laurel a tepid smile. “I have math with him,” she said. Her monotone made it unclear whether she approved or disapproved.
Emma blinked. “You guys have dates?”
Madeline ashed out the window. “You mean you don’t?”
“Wel , I was going with Garrett,” Emma said,
remembering the ticket Garrett had given her when they broke up. He and Sutton must have planned it before she vanished. “But then I got grounded. So I didn’t ask anyone else.”
Madeline blew a plume of smoke out the window. “Just ask someone, Sutton. Tons of guys would be thril ed to go with you.”
Emma stared at the back issues of National Geographic and Motor Trend that lined the bookshelf. She wondered if school dances were Ethan’s thing. “I can’t think of anyone,”
she said after a moment.
I wanted to elbow her. Sutton Mercer did not go stag to dances. Madeline gestured a wide arc with her cigarette like she was doing the top half of a bal et move. “Real y, Sutton? You don’t even have a little crush on someone?”
“Nope.”
Charlotte smacked Emma with a pil ow. “Stop lying. Laurel told us.”
Emma stared at Laurel, but Laurel just raised her shoulders unapologetical y. “I know you snuck into that pool with someone. I heard you guys.”
“Spil it!” Madeline’s eyes twinkled.
Heat flooded Emma’s cheeks. “It’s no one, I swear.”
“Come on, Sutton!” Laurel pressed her palms together.
“You can tel us!”
Emma ran her tongue over her teeth. Did she dare tel them about Ethan? They were Sutton’s friends, after al , not her murderers. And now that Emma had cleared them, they’d begun to feel like her friends, too.
Tell them, I wished I could say. My friends would probably encourage Emma to get over her oh-so-unSutton-Mercer shyness and ask Ethan out. Sure Ethan was a loner, but he was a hot loner.
Suddenly, the front door slammed. “Hel o?” a man’s voice cal ed out.
Madeline leapt up, stabbed out the cigarette on the windowsil , and fanned the fumes outside. There were footsteps, and then Mr. Vega peered into the den. “Oh. Hel o, girls. Madeline didn’t tel me you were coming over today.”
“They’re just here to plan the Homecoming dance, Daddy,” Madeline said, jumping from the window seat to the La-Z-Boy chair. Her face was even paler than usual. Mr. Vega turned and gave her a long, discerning stare. He tilted his nostrils up and sniffed the air. “Was someone smoking?” The transformation of Mr. Vega’s stony face into a fiery scowl now reminded Emma of Mr. Smythe, another one of her foster dads. He was like Dr. Jekyl /Mr. Hyde: sweet one moment and volatile the next. The only way Emma could tel he was going to freak out was when he started feverishly licking his lips.
Madeline shook her head. “Of course not!”
“It’s from outside,” Charlotte said at the same time. “A bunch of kids walked by, and they were al smoking.”
A neutral look settled over Mr. Vega’s face again, but his eyes stil burned. “Wel , if you girls need anything, I’l be in my office.” Then he eyed the episode of Jersey Shore on TV. “You shouldn’t watch that trash, Madeline.”
Madeline clicked the remote. A chase scene of a male lion taking down a frantic zebra fil ed the screen. After he left, Charlotte walked over and touched Madeline’s arm. A tinny bleep issued from Madeline’s iPhone, which sat facedown on the coffee table. Everyone started. She grabbed it and studied the screen. “Surprise, surprise. Another text from Lili and Gabby. They’ve been begging to come to Mount Lemmon with us al day.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Charlotte said. Sutton’s phone, which Mrs. Mercer had let Emma have back in case of an emergency, rang, too. Emma pul ed it from her bag. HELLO, SWEETS! Gabby wrote. YOU TOTALLY
WANT TO BE US, DON’T YOU? THAT MAKES THREE OF US—WE LOVE
US, TOO! MWAH!
Charlotte groaned as she read her BlackBerry. “If they were any more ful of themselves, they’d have to have ego liposuction.”
Their phones lit up once more. GUESS THE l IN LYING GAME
STANDS FOR loser!
“That’s not cool.” Laurel jabbed at her phone to delete the message. “If they keep this up no one wil ever vote for them again.”
“I don’t know how they got voted in at all,” Charlotte mused, fiddling with a ceramic donkey statue on the coffee table. “I took a look at the bal ots online—Isabel Girard and Kaitlin Pierce were also on it, and guys are much more into them than Gabby and Lili.”
“I vote we stop hanging out with them.” Madeline reached for a handful of popcorn.
“I second that,” Emma said quickly, remembering Gabby’s eerie gun-trigger gesture at lunch the other day. I third that, I thought.
The phones beeped once more, and everyone diverted their attention to their screens. TWO PRETTY COURT GIRLS
DESERVE A SMOKIN’ PARTY! STEP IT UP, BITCHES!
“You know what I think we should do?” Madeline leaned back on the couch and curled her knees to her chest. “We should knock those princesses down to size. Hit ’em where it hurts.”
“A prank?” Laurel’s eyebrows shot up.
Emma shifted her weight. “I don’t think so. . . .” She thought about the file at the police station—Gabby going to the hospital, al of it being Sutton’s fault. She stil hadn’t figured out how Gabby had gotten hurt, but a trip to the ER
couldn’t have been good. “It might be going too far. Especial y after what happened . . .” She let her voice trail off and gazed out the window, figuring Sutton’s friends knew far more about the train incident than she did. Sutton’s friends were silent. Laurel stared at her hands and picked at a cuticle. Madeline flipped through her binder. “Oh please,” Charlotte final y said. “Now that you’re al buddy-buddy with them, they’re off-limits?”
Emma raised an eyebrow. Buddy-buddy? Not from what she’d noticed of the Twins.
Charlotte draped her arms over the top of the couch.
“They said they shoplifted with you at Clique,” she said, rol ing her eyes. “Gabby and Lili bragged about it like it was the coolest thing, like we al hadn’t done it a mil ion times before.”
Madeline’s mouth dropped open. “Were they with you the other day when you got arrested?”
“No, not that time,” Emma said quickly, her mind racing.
“It was before that,” Charlotte butted in.
Emma turned away, needing a moment to process al of this. According to Sutton’s credit card statement, the last time Sutton was at Clique was on the thirty-first. And Samantha at Clique had said Sutton stole something from the store while she’d been with someone else—or, more specifical y, a posse of someones. And the very last phone cal Sutton picked up on the thirty-first was from Lili.
“Yeah, I went to Clique with them right before school started,” Emma said slowly.
Al of a sudden, a memory ignited in my mind: Gabby and Lili, flanking me behind a rack of silky camisoles and lingerie at Clique. “Do it, Sutton,” Gabby had whispered, her warm, mint-scented breath on my neck.
“C’mon, Sutton,” Laurel urged. “Those bitches deserve to be pranked.”
The room stil smel ed slightly of smoke. On the television, a lion sunned itself in the grass, blood from a fresh kil on its lips. Emma ran her fingers through her hair, her chest feeling hot and tight. Puzzle pieces began to slot into place. The Twitter Twins had been in al the right places at al the right times—with Sutton the night she died, in Madeline’s car the night Emma was kidnapped and mistaken for Sutton, at Charlotte’s sleepover when Emma had been strangled.
“I stil don’t know, guys,” Emma said, her vocal cords taut.
“After last time . . .” She trailed off.
Charlotte sniffed. “That was ages ago.”
“It’s just . . .” Emma swal owed hard. “I just don’t . . .”
“Stop being such a wuss.” Madeline reached over and shoved Sutton’s iPhone at Emma. “We’re doing this. You’re cal ing them.”
Emma stared at the phone’s black screen. “A-and tel ing them what?”
Madeline, Charlotte, and Laurel looked at one another. A plan unfolded in minutes, the events rocketing forward out of Emma’s control. They turned to Emma and nudged their chins toward Sutton’s phone. Emma pul ed her dark hair into a ponytail, scrol ed to find Gabby’s number, and pressed CALL. When the line began to ring, she put the cal on speaker.
Gabby answered. “Sutton! Have you been getting our tweets?”
Charlotte rol ed her eyes. Madeline snickered softly. “Of course,” Emma said brightly, tucking her trembling hands under her butt. “They’re awesome!” This made Sutton’s friends shake even harder with silent laughter. “So, listen, Gabs. Can you put Lili on, too?”
Gabby rustled up her sister, and soon both Twitter Twins were on the line “So, I have some information about the Court Ceremony,” Emma said, glancing at Sutton’s friends around her. They nodded encouragingly.
“It’s about time!” Lili tril ed. “This had better be good!”
“It’s awesome! Sort of a ghoulish Titanic meets Baywatch. Everyone wil wear bikinis.”
“Baywatch,” Laurel mouthed, bending over in silent laughter.
“Bikinis?” Gabby sounded skeptical. “Is the school going to al ow that?”
“Of course they’re going to al ow it,” Emma cooed.
“We’ve already had it approved.”
Charlotte swal owed a loud, snorting giggle.
“This ceremony is going to be fabulous, girls,” Emma went on. “Super glamorous in an old-school kind of way.”
For a split second, she wondered if Sutton would be proud of her. If Sutton were here, would she be laughing, too, squeezing Emma’s hand and egging her on?
I would . . . and I wouldn’t. Not with what I now knew about the Twitter Twins. Emma was skating on thin ice.
“Nice,” Gabby and Lili said in unison.
“We’re going to tel the other nominees soon, but I wanted to let you guys know first so you could get a jump on them and be the most fabulous court girls up there,” Emma said. “Go out and buy amazing suits this weekend. The skimpier, the better!”
“We’re on it.” Lili’s voice sang through the receiver.
“Wow, Sutton. You’re so good at this. Keep up the good work.”
As soon as they hung up, the girls col apsed into laughter. Laurel rol ed off the couch onto the floor. Charlotte giggled into a throw pil ow. Madeline kicked her legs in front of the TV screen, which now showed two hyenas perched on a rock. “They are so stupid!” she crowed.