Never Have I Ever (13 page)

The noise reminded me of something else entirely. A tiny pinhole opened in my mind, slowly widening. The world began to whirl like I was on an out-of-control carousel. I didn’t hear pills shaking in a bottle anymore. I heard, distinctly and most definitely, a commuter train clacking noisily over the tracks. . . .

Chapter 18
Tremors and Treachery and Threats, Oh My!

“Where is Gabby?” Lili shrieks as the train whooshes past.

I whirl around, frantically checking the tracks. I planned it all so carefully. There’s no way Gabby could have rolled under the train . . . right?

Then Laurel steps a few feet away and points a trembling finger at a crumpled figure by the curved walls of the underpass. It’s Gabby. Her blonde hair covers most of her face. Her pale hand splays open, her crystal-studded iPhone turned over on a patch of gravel.

“What the hell?” Madeline cries.

“Gabby!” Lili screams, running to her.

“Gabby?” I stand over her limp body. “Gabs?”

A sudden tremor travels from Gabby’s fingertips to her shoulders. Tiny pricks of spit dot her lips, and then her entire body starts convulsing. The train barrels on, rattling my teeth and blowing my hair. Gabby shakes harder and faster. Her arms and legs have minds of their own, jolting in random directions. Her eyes roll to the back of her head like she’s some kind of zombie.

“Gabby?” I scream. “Gabs? Come on! This isn’t funny!”

Suddenly, a black man with a carefully trimmed goatee and an earring in one ear nudges me out of the way. I catch sight of a blue jumpsuit with a glow-in-the-dark badge. pima county emt. I hadn’t even realized the ambulance had roared up, but there it is, a big white vehicle with whirling red lights on the top.

“What happened?” the medic asks, crouching next to Gabby.

“I have no idea!” Lili pushes in front of me. Her mouth is a triangle, her eyes wide and desperate. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s having a seizure.” The medic shines a light into Gabby’s eyes, but there’s no color there, only two orbs that look like shiny white marbles. “Has this ever happened before?”

“No!” Lili looks around frantically, as if she doesn’t believe this is real.

The EMT rolls Gabby onto one side and puts his ear next to her mouth to see if she’s breathing, but he just lets her lie there, flailing. She moves like one of those cartoon characters who touch a live wire and light up like Christmas trees, white skeletons showing through skin. I want to look away, but I can’t.

“Can’t you do something for her?” Lili screams, tugging at the EMT’s sleeve. “Anything? What if she’s dying?”

“I need you girls to get back,” the EMT barks. “I need some space to treat her.”

Cars swish by us on the highway. Some slow down and gawk, curious about the ambulance lights and the girl lying in the underpass, but no one stops. Tears stream down Lili’s face. She spins toward me, her eyes on fire. “I can’t believe you did this to her!”

“I didn’t do anything!” I scream through a clenched jaw.

“Yes, you did! This is all your fault!”

The train’s fading whistle drowns out Lili’s words. I refuse to feel guilty for this. It wasn’t like I even wanted the Twitter Twins to come tonight. How was I supposed to know Gabby was going to get so freaked she’d fall into a convulsive fit? All of a sudden, I’m so sick of the Twitter Twins I can barely breathe. “I didn’t want you two along tonight,” I say through my teeth. “I knew you couldn’t handle it.”

The red and blue ambulance lights streak across Lili’s face. “You could have killed all of us!”

“Oh please.” I ball up my fists. “I had it under control the whole time!”

“How were we supposed to know that?” Lili shrieks. “We thought we were going to die! You have no concept of other people’s feelings! You just . . . you just treat us like toys, doing whatever you want, whenever you want!”

“Watch what you say,” I warn her, aware of the medics around us.

“Or what?” Lili asks, turning to Madeline, who stands off to the side with a blank face. “You agree with me, don’t you, Madeline?” Lili says. “Sutton’s a user. Do you really think she gives a shit about our feelings—about anyone’s feelings? Look at how she toyed with your brother! She’s the reason he left!”

“That’s not true!” I scream, lunging toward Lili. How dare she bring up Thayer! As if she had any idea what things were really like between us!

Charlotte pulls me back before I can tackle Lili. More medics have gathered around Gabby, and a debate has begun over whether to move her or keep her where she is. Lili turns away from us and peers over the EMT’s shoulder at her sister. An oppressive, July-hot wind kicks up, blowing bits of trash along the ground. A Skittles wrapper plasters itself to Gabby’s twitching legs. A cigarette butt rolls dangerously close to one of her hands.

A low, keening wail sounds in the distance: a second set of sirens. We all stand up straighter when we realize it’s a police car. My heart begins to race, sweat dripping down my body.

I clear my throat and face my friends, my voice low and steady. “We
cannot
tell the cops what really happened. The car stalled for real, okay? This was just an accident.”

Madeline, Charlotte, and Laurel look a little sickened, but Gabby’s condition has weakened them. They aren’t thinking of defying me anymore. And even though I violated a sacred Lying Game code, there’s another set-in-stone tenet we all live by: If we ever get caught mid-prank, we stick together. When Laurel almost got busted messing with the twelve-foot holiday tree at La Encantada, we swore up and down she’d been home with us. When Madeline broke her wrist running from security the weekend we dragged the library tables into a ravine, we told her dad she’d fallen hiking. They’ll forgive me for falsely invoking our fail-safe code. We’ll get through this. We always do.

But Lili looks at me like I’m nuts. “You seriously expect me to
lie
for you?” She sets her hands on her hips. “I’m telling the cops what you did!”

“Your choice,” I say calmly. “But whatever is going on with your freaky sister has nothing to do with me, and you know it. If you tell the cops—if you tell anyone—you’ll regret it.”

Lili’s eyes widen. “Is that a
threat
?”

My face hardens to a mask of stone. “Call it what you want. If you tell, we’ll have no reason to be friends anymore. Things will change for you, big-time, and they’ll change for your sister, too.” I step so close to Lili I can feel her warm breath on my face. “Lili,” I say, speaking slowly so that she can understand every last word. “When Gabby wakes up, perfectly fine, and finds out that you’ve just made the two of you the biggest losers at Hollier, do you think she’s going to thank you for doing the right thing? Do you think she’s going to see you as a hero?”

Everyone is silent. Behind us, Gabby is being strapped to a stretcher. My friends shift back and forth, but I know they’re not surprised. We’ve done this before. Lili’s nostrils flare in and out. Her eyes burn with anger. I stare back. There’s no way I’ll crack first.

We remain in deadlock until the police cruiser roars up in a cloud of desert dust. Two cops, one stocky with a pencil-thin moustache and the other red-haired and freckled, get out of the car and walk toward us.

“Ladies?” The redhead removes a notepad from his pocket. His walkie-talkie beeps every few seconds. “What’s going on here?”

Lili whips around to face him, and for a moment, I think she’s actually going to spill everything. But then her bottom lip starts to tremble. The EMTs pass us, carrying Gabby to the ambulance. “Where are you taking her?” Lili calls after them.

“Oro Valley Hospital,” one of the EMTs answers.

“I-is she going to be okay?” Lili asks, her shaking voice swallowed by the wind. No one answers her. Lili catches them before they shut the back doors. “Can I ride with her? She’s my sister.”

The cop clears his throat. “You can’t go yet, miss. We need you to make a statement.”

Lili pauses, her toes pointed toward the ambulance, her body twisted back toward us. A swirl of emotions cross her face in a matter of seconds, and I can practically see her brain racing as she calculates her options. Finally she shrugs, a pure white flag of surrender. “Let them speak for me. It happened to all of us. We were all together.”

I exhale.

The cop nods and turns to Madeline, Charlotte, and Laurel and starts his questions. Just after Lili climbs into the ambulance and it turns away, I feel a buzzing in my pocket. I pull out my phone and see a new message on the screen from Lili.

Whatever
, I think. And then I hit
DELETE
.

Chapter 19
The Writing on the Wall

At first, Emma could only make out blurry shadows. She heard screams, but it was like they were coming from the end of a long tunnel. A hardwood floor pressed into her back. A musty, closed-up scent assaulted her nostrils. Something wet pooled on her face—she wondered vaguely if it was blood.

Soft fabric brushed up against her bare arm. Breath warmed her skin. “Hello?” Emma struggled to say. It took an enormous effort to form the words. “Hello?” she said again. “Who’s there?”

A figure moved away. The floorboards creaked. There was something wrong with Emma’s vision. Someone loomed nearby, but all she could see was a black blob. She heard squeaking sounds, smelled chalk dust. What was going on?

A few seconds later, her vision focused. The blob was gone. Sitting in front of her was a large upright chalkboard from an old set. Emma had passed it countless times during the party preparations today, noting that someone had written a quote from
The Glass Menagerie
on it
:
“Things have a way of turning out so badly.” Those words had been wiped away now, and a new message had taken its place. As soon as Emma read the slanted handwriting, her blood went cold.

Emma gasped. “Who’s there?” she screamed. “Come out!”

“Say something!” I yelled, too, as blind as she was. “We know you’re there!”

But whoever had written the note didn’t answer. And then the warm, throbbing darkness began to take hold of Emma once more. Her eyes fluttered, and she fought to keep them open. Just before she passed out again, she caught sight of the same blurry figure—or maybe
two
blurry figures—swirling their hands over the chalkboard, wiping the words clean.

The next time Emma opened her eyes, she was lying on a bed in a small white room. An instructional sheet on how to properly wash one’s hands hung on the opposite wall. Another poster for how to administer the Heimlich maneuver hung over a small table that contained jars of cotton swabs and boxes of latex gloves.

“Sutton?”

Emma turned toward the voice. Madeline sat on an office chair next to the cot, her knees pressed tightly together, her fingers knotted in her lap. When she saw that Emma was awake, relief flooded her face. “Thank God! Are you okay?”

Emma lifted her arm and pressed it to her forehead. Her limbs felt normal again, not filled with sand like they had as she lay on the stage floor. “What happened?” she croaked. “Where am I?”

“It’s all right, dear,” said another voice. A lanky woman with dishwater-blond hair cut bluntly to her chin and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose swam into view. She wore a white lab coat that had the words
T. GROVE
and
NURSE
stitched on the breast. “It appears you fainted. It was probably from low blood sugar. Have you had anything to eat today?”

“A light fell from the rafters and almost hit you,” Madeline said in a shaking voice. “It was crazy—it almost landed on your head!”

Emma squinted, remembering the blurry figure above her. The warning in white chalk. Her heart began to race, thudding so hard against her chest she was scared Madeline and the nurse could hear it. “Did you see someone standing over me when I was lying on the ground? Someone writing something on that chalkboard?”

Madeline narrowed her eyes. “
What
chalkboard?”

“Someone wrote something,” Emma insisted. “Are you sure it wasn’t Gabby? Lili?”

An expression Emma couldn’t read flitted across Madeline’s face. “I think you need to rest some more. Gabby and Lili were on the stage when the light fell. The custodian said it was just a freak accident—those lights are super-old.” She patted Emma’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry to do this, but I have to get back to the auditorium—Charlotte will have my head if I’m not there to help direct the caterers.” Madeline stood. “Just take it easy, and I’ll check on you when the party’s over, okay?”

The bulletin board on the back of the door swung back and forth as Madeline pulled it shut behind her. The nurse murmured that she’d be back in a moment, too, and slipped out another door. In the silence of the tiny room, Emma shut her eyes, leaned back against the cot’s rock-hard pillow, and exhaled.

Don’t you think you should take your place now, Sutton?
Gabby had said just before the ceremony began.
You’re at stage left, right?
And then Lili had run back upstairs for her iPhone, right where the light was fastened. And then . . .
crash
. The light hit exactly where she was supposed to be standing.

“Emma?”

Emma opened her eyes to see Ethan hovering over her, his dark eyebrows furrowed with concern. He was dressed in a worn olive-green T-shirt, dark-wash jeans, and black Vans that looked as though they’d been through a wood chipper. She felt the heat of his body as he stepped closer. He took her hand, then glanced away, as if unsure whether touching her was okay. Emma hadn’t been alone with him since the art opening—since she’d rejected him.

She sat up quickly and smoothed her hair. “Hey,” she croaked.

Ethan let go of her hand and dropped down on the black office chair Madeline had just occupied. “I heard a crash backstage. Next thing I know, people were calling your name. What the hell happened?”

A shudder ran through Emma’s body as she told him about the light and the note on the chalkboard. When she was finished, Ethan stood up halfway, his arm muscles taut as he held his body inches above the chair. “Is the message still there?”

“No. Someone erased it.”

He sank onto the chair again. “There were a ton of people backstage as soon as the crash happened. Someone would’ve seen all that, don’t you think?”

“I know it doesn’t make sense. But there was someone there. Someone wrote that message.”

He gave her the same look Madeline had. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

“It didn’t
feel
like a dream.” Emma pulled the nurse’s blanket tighter around her, feeling sweat from her palms melt into the rough wool. “I think it was the Twins,” she said. She hushed her voice and told Ethan about what Charlotte and Madeline had said about Sutton doing something to Gabby that landed her in the hospital. Then she told him about the pill bottle Gabby had removed from the bag. “It was something called Topamax. I’ve seen Gabby popping pills before, but I always thought it was a party thing. Do you have your phone? I need to Google it.”

“Emma,” Ethan said, urgency in his voice. “Someone just told you to stop digging.”

Emma sniffed. “I thought you didn’t believe me about the board.”

“Of course I believe you—I just hoped it wasn’t true.” Ethan’s eyes burned a dark blue under the florescent lights. “I think it’s time we put an end to this.”

Emma ran her hands down the length of her face. “If we stop, that means whoever did this to Sutton will have gotten away with murder.” Then she swung her legs over the tiny cot. Blood prickled through her body as she rose to her feet.

“What are you doing?” Ethan exclaimed, watching her make her way to the filing cabinets along the wall.

“Gabby’s medical history will be on file with the school if there’s any type of problem,” Emma whispered. She yanked open the file cabinet marked
E–F
and ran her fingers over the worn manila folders until she found
FIORELLO, GABRIELLA.

Heels clacked along the hallway, and Emma froze, listening as they grew louder and then faded as they passed the nurses office. Emma pulled out Gabby’s folder and saw that it was crisper than the others, as if it hadn’t done the time to earn worn edges. She thumbed through the contents and let out a low whistle. “Topamax, Gabby’s medicine? It’s to treat
epilepsy
.”

“She has epilepsy?” Ethan narrowed his eyes. “I feel like I would’ve heard about that.”

Emma kept reading. “It says the disease was dormant until July, and that ‘an incident triggered the first seizure.’” She raised her eyes to Ethan. “The train prank was in July. What if Sutton caused her epilepsy?”

“Jesus.” Ethan’s face paled.

Emma slipped the folder back into the drawer and guided it shut with her hip. “The Twitter Twins must have been beyond furious—maybe even angry and crazed enough to plan Sutton’s murder.”

Ethan’s eyes were round. “You think the Twins . . . ?”

“I’m more sure than ever,” Emma whispered, her mind racing. “I’m positive Lili cut the light, too—she ran upstairs to grab her phone right before it fell. And you should’ve seen the way both the Twins stared at me before I passed out.” Goose bumps covered Emma’s flesh as she pictured it again. “They looked capable of
anything
.”

My mind flashed back to the murderous look in Lili’s eyes on the night of the train prank and the text she sent from the ambulance promising revenge if anything was wrong with Gabby. Thank God Emma had stepped aside before the light crashed on her head. She’d been inches away from joining me here in the in-between.

Outside, a flock of birds lifted off from a knot of bushes beneath the nurse’s window. Emma paced the floor. “It makes so much sense,” she whispered. “Gabby and Lili are Twitter and Facebook masters—they could’ve easily hacked on to Sutton’s page, read that first note from me, and sent one back asking me to come to Tucson and wait at Sabino Canyon. They were with Madeline the night she hijacked me at Sabino and dragged me to Nisha’s party, too. Who’s to say Gabby and Lili didn’t suggest the whole kidnapping thing?”

Ethan moved the chair back and forth, the caster wheels squeaking, not saying a word.

“And they’re such gossip hounds,” Emma went on, pausing by a big poster titled
WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE THE VICTIM OF ASSAULT
. “It wouldn’t look suspicious for them to skulk around, spying, listening in.
And
both of them were at Charlotte’s sleepover last week. They could’ve snuck down and strangled me without tripping the alarm.” All of Emma’s nerves snapped. She was onto something big—and terrifying. “Lili and Gabby were with Sutton the night she died. It
has
to be them.”

Ethan’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “So how do we prove it? How do we nail them?”

“With your phone.” Emma held out her hand. Confused, Ethan dropped it in her palm. Emma pulled up the home page for Twitter and looked again at Gabby’s and Lili’s tweets. On August 28, they were innocuous and random:
Love my new Chanel oil blotter!
And
What are you wearing to Nisha’s party? I was thinking of breaking in my back-2-school purchases.
And
Avocado burger at California Cookin’, yumness!

They sometimes shot off thirty tweets an hour. But on the thirty-first, neither of them had tweeted at all. “
That’s
odd,” Emma said, sinking back to the cot. “I figured they would’ve bragged about shoplifting with Sutton that day.”

Ethan sat beside her as Emma scrolled to the most recent tweet. At ten this morning, Gabby had tweeted she’d aced the math test she never studied for.

“Humble, isn’t she?” Ethan grumbled as he read over Emma’s shoulder.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Emma said, tapping her index finger against Ethan’s phone. “Gabby made Laurel wait while she finished a tweet this afternoon right before the ceremony. So why doesn’t the tweet show up on her page?” Emma’s eyes widened. “Wait. What if they have secret Twitter accounts?”

Ethan looked at her as though he wasn’t quite sure what she was getting at.

“It’s when someone has a public account that they tell everyone about and a secondary account under a code name,” Emma explained.

“Why would they bother?” Ethan asked.

“If they have stuff they want to talk to each other about that they don’t want anyone else reading.”

“It makes sense.” Ethan’s voice rose with excitement. “And it sounds exactly like something those two would do.”

“But how could we figure out what they are? Would the names be an inside joke?”

“Probably,” Ethan answered. “Or they could be totally random.”

“Let’s try fashion designers,” Emma suggested. “Or maybe favorite shoe brands or movies.” She called up the Twitter homepage and typed in
@rodarte
, the Twins’ favorite clothing label. But that Twitter profile belonged to someone in Australia. She typed in other variations—
rodarteGirl
,
RodarteFan—
as well as other things the Twitter Twins liked, like Gabby’s all-time favorite movie,
The Devil Wears Prada
, or Lili’s favorite band, My Chemical Romance.

They checked the Twins’ Facebook pages to spark other ideas. “They have twin dogs named Googoo and Gaga,” Ethan pointed out.

“Seriously?” Emma groaned and typed it in, but nothing came up—except for a lot of Lady Gaga fan pages.

They tried makeup brands
,
variations on Gucci and Marc Jacobs, celebs they loved, and stores they shopped at. None of them worked. Emma sat back and massaged her temples. What would
her
secret Twitter account be? A nickname no one would guess? All she could think of was how Lou, the mechanic at the garage, called her Little Grease Monkey. Or how, when she worked at the New York-New York roller coaster, some of the guys who bartended nearby not-so-secretly referred to her as the “vomit-comet hottie.”

“What if Lili and Gabby’s secret Twitter names are kind of embarrassing?” Emma asked. “Like something about Gabby running over Lili’s foot.”

“Or when Gabby got stuck in the locker,” Ethan added.

Suddenly, they both looked at each other. Emma typed in
@GabbyPonyBaloney
. A profile popped up; the tiny picture was definitely Gabby. Only one girl was following her:
@MissLiliTallywhacker
.

“I can’t believe it,” Emma whispered. Her fingers shook as she scrolled down the page. These tweets weren’t nearly as mindless. Every post she read made the room spin just a little bit faster. First, she read their tweets from August 31: