Never Have I Ever

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.

Stop digging, or next time I’ll hurt you for real.

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:

@GABBYPONYBALONEY: Do you think we should?

@MissLiliTallywhacker: Definitely. No turning back now. It all falls into place tonight.

And just last week, the night of Charlotte’s sleepover, when someone crept down and strangled Emma:

@MissLiliTallywhacker: She thinks we’re so stupid.

@GabbyPonyBaloney: She’ll know the truth soon enough.

@MissLiliTallywhacker: She’d better be careful. . . .

And the night of Sutton’s birthday party:

@GabbyPonyBaloney: She has no clue what’s coming. I can’t wait to see the look on her face.

@MissLiliTallywhacker: Let’s hope this works.

And the tweet Gabby sent just that afternoon:

@GabbyPonyBaloney: Less than an hour to go. That bitch is going down.

A locker door slammed in the hall, shaking the nursing-station walls and making the thick green contents of a big bottle of cough syrup wobble back and forth on the shelf. That bitch is going down. A vision of the hurtling light fixture swam through Emma’s mind. She stared at Ethan. “They’re talking about me.”

The argument I’d had with Lili the night of Gabby’s accident flashed through my mind. I’d told her she’d better keep her mouth shut, or I’d ruin her life. But maybe instead, she and her sister ruined mine.

“Do me a favor and email these to me,” Emma said to Ethan. “All of them. I can’t risk losing these like I lost the snuff film.”

“Done.” Ethan grabbed the phone back from Emma and started copying and pasting all of the tweets.

Muffled classical music from orchestra practice in the next room echoed through the walls. Suddenly, Emma’s body ached as though she’d run back-to-back marathons. “What a nightmare,” she said, slumping against the flat mattress on the cot. “Knowing there are two of them just makes this feel even more impossible. And were they trying to scare me? Or kill me? And if they were trying to kill me, how long before they try again?”

Ethan murmured a note of sympathy, but didn’t offer any advice. “What I wouldn’t give for a day off from this,” Emma murmured. “A couple of hours off.” She thought about Friday night. It was hard enough navigating broad daylight with the Twitter Twins. But dealing with a dark Homecoming dance with a haunted house theme, all by herself? She snuck a peek at Ethan. “I have an idea.”

Ethan dropped his phone into his pocket. “Let’s hear it.”

“What if you went to Homecoming with me?” Emma gestured to the Halloween Homecoming flyer that hung on the nurse’s wall. It was of a skeleton and a witch doing the tango.

Ethan took a step back. “Emma . . .”

Emma cut him off before he could give her an I-hate-dances spiel. “We could look into the Twins together. I won’t have to handle everything myself. And it could even be fun. We can dress in goofy costumes, OD on the amazing cupcakes the caterer is bringing, dance—or not dance, if you’re really opposed. We can laugh at all the people who are really into it.”

Ethan’s hands twisted together in his lap. “It’s not that I don’t want to go. It’s that . . . well, I’ve actually asked someone else.”

Emma blinked. It felt like he’d just dumped a bucket of cold water on her head, and for a moment her brain was filled with nothing but static. “Oh!” she said, a few moments too late. “Oh, well, great! Good for you!”

The look that crossed Ethan’s face was comically grouchy, almost petulant. “I mean, you said you just wanted to be friends. You said you weren’t interested.”

“I know! I did!” Emma’s voice took on the annoying chirpy quality it always got when she tried too hard to sound upbeat. “I mean, it would have been as friends. But this is totally for the better. I’m so happy for you! You’ll have so much fun!”

The room suddenly felt too small to fit both of them. Emma leapt to her feet. “Um, I should go.”

Ethan stood, too. “What? Where?”

“I-I should get back to the auditorium.” Emma fumbled for the door. “They’re still holding the party. I should help out. Plus, all my stuff is still there.”

“But . . .” Ethan slung his bag over his shoulder and followed her, but Emma did not want to discuss it any further. She gave him the most carefree wave she could muster. “I’ll call you later,” she promised, even though she couldn’t imagine doing so. She speed-walked into the hall, turned a corner, then collapsed against a bank of lockers.

The hall was quiet, the final bell of the day not yet having rung. Emma could hear her own ragged breathing. A sob rose in her throat, but she quickly swallowed it down. “You had your chance,” she whispered furiously. “You made your choice. It is for the best.”

A cackling sound floated down the hall. Emma froze, listening. There was another sharp exhalation of breath around the corner, a second triumphant-sounding snort. A shadow spread across the floor. Had someone been watching her? Listening?

She sprinted down the hall, but when she rounded the corner there was no one there. When Emma breathed in, she could detect the faintest scent of coconut in the air. And when she looked down, she saw a few tiny, glittering shards of glass on the ground.

She crouched down to touch one of the pieces. The amber-colored glass perfectly matched the glass in the light fixture that had nearly shattered her skull.