Never Have I Ever

Chapter 3 Spinning Her Wheels

On Monday morning, Emma sat at a potter’s wheel in the ceramics room at Hollier High. She was surrounded by lumps of cement-gray clay, wood tools for carving and cutting, and lopsided bowls on wooden slats waiting for kiln firing. The air smelled earthy and wet, and there was the constant whir of wheels spinning and clunky feet clopping the treadles.

Madeline perched on the stool to Emma’s right, glowering at her potter’s wheel as though it were a torture device. “What’s the point of making pottery? Isn’t that what Pottery Barn is for?”

Charlotte snorted. “Pottery Barn doesn’t sell pottery! Do you think Crate and Barrel sells crates and barrels, too?”

“And Pier 1 sells piers?” Laurel giggled a row ahead of them.

“Less talking, more creating, girls,” said Mrs. Gilliam, their ceramics instructor, snaking around the wheels, her bell anklet jingling as she walked. Mrs. Gilliam was one of those people who looked as though she couldn’t be anything but an art teacher. She wore billowing jersey pants, jacquard vests, and statement necklaces over batik tunics that smelled like musty patchouli. Her words were emphatic, reminding Emma of an old social worker she’d known named Mrs. Thuerk, who always spoke as though she was delivering a Shakespearean monologue. How now, Emma . . . art thou being treated well in this Nevada home for children of fosterly care?

“Great work, Nisha,” Mrs. Gilliam cooed as she passed the glazing table, where several students were painting their pottery in earth tones. Nisha Banerjee, who was Sutton’s cocaptain on the tennis team, turned around and smirked triumphantly at Emma. Her eyes flashed with pure hate, which sent a ripple of fear through Emma’s chest. It was clear Nisha and Sutton had some seriously bad blood between them—Nisha had been giving Emma the evil eye ever since she stepped into Sutton’s life.

Looking away, Emma positioned a gray clay blob in the center of the wheel, cupped her hands around it, and slowly let the wheel turn until she had a bowl-like shape. Laurel let out a low whistle. “How do you know how to do that?”

“Uh, beginner’s luck.” Emma shrugged like it was no big deal, but her hands trembled slightly. A headline popped in her head: Master Pottery Skills Expose Emma Paxton Posing as Sutton Mercer. Scandal! Emma had taken pottery back in Henderson. She’d spent hours using the wheel after school; it was a welcome alternative to going home to Ursula and Steve, the hippie foster parents she’d lived with at the time, who didn’t believe in bathing. The No-Suds rule applied to them, their clothing, and their eight mangy dogs.

Emma sliced her hand through the bowl and let out a fake sigh of disappointment when it collapsed. “So much for that.”

As soon as Mrs. Gilliam disappeared into the kiln, Emma eyed Madeline and lifted her foot from the treadle. Madeline and the others still made the most sense to be Sutton’s killers. But she had no proof.

Wiping her hands on a towel, she pulled out Sutton’s iPhone and scrolled through the calendar feature. “Uh, guys?” she said. “Does anyone know when I had my last highlights appointment? I forgot to put it in my calendar and I want to make a note for when I need to go in next. Was it . . . August thirty-first?”

“What day was that?” Charlotte asked. She looked exhausted, like she hadn’t slept at all the night before. She mashed her hands way too hard into the clay, turning the bowl she was making into a soupy pancake.

Emma tapped on the phone again. “Uh . . . the day before Nisha’s party.” The day before Mads kidnapped me at Sabino Canyon, thinking I was Sutton. Or maybe knowing I wasn’t Sutton. “Two days before school started.”

Charlotte glanced at Madeline. “Wasn’t that the day we—”

“No,” Madeline snapped, shooting Charlotte an icy glare. Then she turned to Emma. “Neither of us know where you were that day, Sutton. Someone else will have to cure your amnesia.”

Fluorescent light gleamed over Madeline’s porcelain skin. Her eyes narrowed at Emma, as though challenging her to drop the subject. Charlotte glanced from Emma to Madeline, looking suddenly alert. Even Laurel’s back was stiff in front of them.

Emma waited, knowing she’d hit on something and hoping someone would tell her what it was. But when the tense silence persisted, she gave up. Take two, she thought, reaching into her pocket and wrapping her fingers around the silver train charm. “Whatever. So I was thinking it’s time for a new Lying Game prank.”

“Cool,” Charlotte murmured, her eyes focused back on the spinning lump of clay in front of her. “Any ideas?”

Across the room, a girl washed her hands at the sink, and a loud crash sounded from the kiln. “The prank where we stole my mom’s car was awesome.” She remembered seeing a video of the girls doing just that on Laurel’s computer. “Maybe we should do something like that again.”

Madeline nodded, thinking. “Maybe.”

“Except . . . with a twist,” Emma went on, saying the words she’d rehearsed the night before in Sutton’s bedroom. “Like, we could leave someone’s car in the middle of a car wash. Or drive it into a swimming pool. Or abandon it on the train tracks.”

At the word tracks, Charlotte, Laurel, and Madeline tensed. A hot, sharp pain streaked through Emma’s gut. Bull’s-eye.

“Very funny.” Charlotte slapped her clay down with a thwap.

“No repeats allowed, remember?” Laurel hissed over her shoulder.

Madeline swiped the back of her hand across her forehead and glared at Emma. “And are you hoping the cops come again, too?”

The cops. I tried my hardest to force a memory to the surface. But that flash I’d gotten about train tracks had faded into dust.

Emma looked at Sutton’s friends, her mouth feeling cottony dry. But before she could assemble her next question, feedback screeched through the PA system.

“Attention!” spoke the tinny voice of Amanda Donovan, a senior who read the daily announcements. “It’s time to announce the winners of the Homecoming Halloween Dance Court, voted in by Hollier’s talented boys’ football, soccer, cross-country, and volleyball teams! It’s in two weeks, ghosts and goblins, so get your tickets today before they sell out! My date and I already have!”

Madeline’s lips pursed in disgust. “Who could Amanda possibly be going with? Uncle Wes?”

Charlotte and Laurel snickered. Amanda’s uncle was Wes Donovan, a sportscaster who had his own Sirius radio show. Amanda name-dropped him so often during morning announcements that Madeline swore they were secret lovers.

“Please join me in warm congratulations to Norah Alvarez, Madison Cates, Jennifer Morrison, Zoe Mitchell, Alicia Young, Tinsley Zimmerman . . .”

Every time a name was called, Madeline, Charlotte, and Laurel pantomimed a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

“. . . and Gabriella and Lilianna Fiorello, our first Homecoming Court twins ever!” Amanda concluded. “A warm congratulations, ladies!”

Madeline blinked several times as if waking up from a dream. “The Twitter Twins? On the court?”

Charlotte sniffed. “Who would vote for them?”

Emma looked back and forth between them, trying to keep up. Gabby and Lili Fiorello, the Twitter Twins, were fraternal twins in their grade. They both had big blue eyes and honey-blonde hair, but each girl also had other features all her own, like the mole by Lili’s chin or Gabby’s Angelina Jolie lips. Emma still was unclear whether Gabby and Lili were in or out of the clique; they’d attended Charlotte’s sleepover two weekends ago, when the anonymous attacker nearly strangled Emma to death, but they weren’t members of the Lying Game. With their dopey expressions, twin-brain mentality, and iPhone addictions, they struck Emma as all fluff and no substance, the girl equivalent of low-calorie Cool Whip.

I wasn’t sure about that, though. If there was one thing I was learning, it was that looks could be deceiving. . . .

As if on cue, four sharp ringtones filled the room. Charlotte, Madeline, Laurel, and Emma all fumbled for their phones. On Emma’s screen were two new texts, one from Gabby, one from Lili. WE KNOW WE’RE GORGEOUS! Gabby’s said. CAN’T WAIT TO WEAR OUR CROWNS! Lili wrote.

“Divas,” Madeline said next to her. Emma glanced at her screen. Madeline had received the same texts.

Charlotte snorted, staring at her phone, too. “They should go as twin Carries. Then we’d get to dump pig’s blood on their heads.”

Emma’s phone chimed once more. Lili had sent her an additional missive. WHO’S THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL? TAKE THAT, QUEEN BEE-OTCH!

“Well, now they’re officially not coming camping with us after the dance,” Charlotte declared.

“We’re doing that again?” Laurel said, wrinkling her nose.

“It’s tradition,” Charlotte said sharply. She looked at Emma. “Right, Sutton?”

Camping? Emma raised an eyebrow. These girls didn’t seem the outdoorsy types. But she nodded along. “Right.”

“Maybe we could try those awesome hot springs on Mount Lemmon,” Madeline said, twisting her dark hair into a bun. “Gabby and Lili say they’re filled with natural salts that make your skin feel amazing.”

“Enough talk about Gabby and Lili,” Charlotte groaned, adjusting the the cornflower-blue headband in her hair. “I can’t believe we have to plan a party for them. They’re going to be impossible.”

Emma frowned. “Why would we have to plan a party?”

For a moment, everyone just stared at her. Charlotte clucked her tongue. “Remember a little organization called Homecoming Committee? The only activity you’ve been doing since freshman year?”

Emma felt her pulse quicken. She forced a fake heh-heh laugh. “I was being ironic. Ever heard of it?”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Well, unfortunately, the court party can’t be ironic. We have to beat last year’s.”

Emma shut her eyes. Sutton . . . on a dance committee? Seriously? When Emma attended school at Henderson High, she and her best friend Alex used to make fun of the dorky dance committee girls. They were all Martha Stewarts–in-training, obsessed with cupcake baking, streamer hanging, and picking the most perfect slow-dance mixes.

But from what I remembered, it was an honor to be on the Homecoming Committee at Hollier. The school also had a strict policy that those planning Homecoming couldn’t be members of the court, which was why Amanda hadn’t called my name just now. If my spotty memory served me correctly, though, last prom I’d paraded into the ballroom with a court sash across my torso.

I wondered: Would Emma still be here to take my place at this year’s prom? Could my murder really go unsolved for that long? Could Emma still be living a lie in the spring? The thought of all of it filled me with dread. It also filled me with the now-familiar ache of sadness: There would be no more proms for me. No more cheesy wrist corsages or stretch limos or after parties. I even missed the bad prom music, the goofy DJs who thought they were the next Girl Talk. When I was alive, I’d let it all pass by so fast, barely registering any of the moments, unaware of how good I had it.

The bell rang, and the girls rose from their wheels. Emma stood at the sink and let cool water wash over her clay-gunked hands. As she dried them on a paper towel, Sutton’s cell phone chimed in her bag once more. Groaning, Emma pulled it out. Had Gabby and Lili sent another text?

But it was an email message from Emma’s own account, which she’d loaded onto Sutton’s phone. FROM ALEX, it said. THINKING OF YOU! CALL WHEN YOU CAN. CAN’T WAIT TO TALK! XX.

Emma clutched the sides of the iPhone, contemplating how to reply. It had been days since she’d written to Alex, the only person besides Ethan who knew about her trek to Arizona. But unlike with Ethan, Emma had fudged the truth: Alex still thought Sutton was alive and had taken Emma in. Sometimes, when Emma woke up in the morning, she tried to pretend like that was what really happened, and that the previous events and threats had all been a dream. She’d even started a section of her journal called Stuff Sutton and I Would Do Together if She Were Here. She would teach Sutton how to make French cream puffs, something she’d learned at an after-school catering job. Sutton would show her how to curl her eyelashes, which Emma had never been able to properly master. And maybe, at school, they’d switch places for the day, going to each other’s classes and answering to each other’s names. Not because they had to. Because they wanted to.

Suddenly, Emma had the distinct feeling someone was watching her. She whirled around to find the ceramics room was now mostly empty. But out in the hall, two pairs of eyes stared at her. It was Gabby and Lili, the Twitter Twins. When they noticed that Emma had spotted them, they smirked, leaned their heads close, and whispered. Emma flinched.

A hand touched Emma’s arm, and she jumped once more. Laurel stood behind her, leaning against the big gray trash barrel of wet clay next to the sink.

“Oh, hey.” Emma’s heart pounded in her ears.

“Just waiting for you.” Laurel brushed a lock of highlighted blonde hair over her shoulder and stared at the iPhone in Emma’s hands. “Writing to anyone interesting?”

Emma dropped Sutton’s phone into her bag. “Uh, not really.” The spot where the Twitter Twins had stood was now empty.

Laurel caught her arm. “Why did you bring up the train prank?” she asked, her voice hushed and hard. “No one finds it funny.”

Sweat prickled on the back of Emma’s neck. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Laurel’s words echoed the note she’d gotten: The others might not want to remember the train prank, but I’ll be seized by the memory always. Something had happened that night. Something horrible.

Emma took a deep breath, rolled back her shoulders, and slung her arm around Laurel’s waist. “Don’t be so sensitive. Now let’s go. It smells like ass in here.” She hoped she sounded breezier than she felt.

Laurel glared at Emma for a moment, but then followed her into the crowded hall. Emma let out a sigh of relief when Laurel headed in the opposite direction. She felt like she’d dodged a huge bullet.

Or maybe, I thought, opened up a huge can of worms.