Emma stared at Sutton’s best friends, wishing desperately that she could tell them what they wanted to hear. Even though their friendship was built on a lie, she’d grown to genuinely care about the girls. Underneath the petty jealousies and pranks, the Lying Game girls were fiercely loyal to one another. Emma wasn’t quite sure when she’d stopped thinking of them as Sutton’s friends and started thinking of them as her own—but like everything else of Sutton’s, they weren’t hers at all.

Emma looked down at her shoes, avoiding Madeline’s gaze. “It’s not a prank,” she said softly.

A sharp pain cut across her cheek as Madeline slapped her. “You bitch!” she shrieked, her voice a full octave above its normal range. “What did you do to my best friend?”

Emma reached a hand to her stinging cheek, blinking back tears. The two girls swam in her vision for a moment before a tear finally fell.

“You guys have to believe me,” Emma pleaded. “I didn’t do what they say I did. I didn’t mean for this to happen—I never wanted to lie to you.”

Charlotte had gone even paler under her freckles. Her eyebrows were bright reddish-gold without her makeup, and they made her look wild-eyed.

“We trusted you,” she hissed. “We told you all kinds of secrets, let you ride in our cars, let you in our houses . . . after you killed our best friend!”

“I didn’t kill anyone!” Emma’s voice came out louder than she’d intended, reverberating around the parking lot. A few feet away a little conference of pigeons took wing at the sudden noise. She took a deep breath and said more softly, “I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Sutton since I got here. If you help me, we might be able to figure it out together.”

Madeline gave a bitter bark of laughter. “Help you? You’ve got some nerve. What makes you think we’d help someone who’s been lying to us for months?”

“Madeline, we created an entire game about lying,” I shouted, annoyed. “And you have to help her! She’s my only hope!” But obviously I didn’t get a vote this time.

“I hope you rot in jail,” Charlotte said, her lip curling upward. “And I hope you dream of Sutton every night for the rest of your life. I hope she haunts you until you die.” Then she headed back toward the school entrance without glancing back.

Madeline gave Emma one last look of loathing, and then turned to follow Char.

Emma stood frozen, watching them go, until she realized that the entire parking lot full of students was staring at her. With a nervous glance around, she quickly let herself into Ethan’s car and locked the doors.