The Lying Game Read Free Page A

hard at the image. As the person reached out and began to choke the blindfolded girl, fear streaked through Emma’s stomach. When the anonymous hand pulled off the blindfold, Emma’s identical face appeared on the screen. Emma had the same thick, wavy, chestnut-brown hair as the girl in the movie. The same round chin. The same pink lips kids used to tease Emma about, saying they were puffy as though she’d had an allergic reaction. She shuddered.
    I watched the video again in horror, too. The locket glinting in the light caused a tiny shard of a memory tosurface: I remembered lifting the lid of my baby box, pulling out the locket from under a half-chewed teething giraffe, a lacy receiving blanket, and a pair of knit booties, and putting it around my neck. The video itself brought back nothing though. I didn’t know if it had happened in my backyard … or three states away. I wished I could slap my post-death memory across the face.
    But the video had to be how I died, right? Especially from that quick flashback I’d had when I’d awakened in Emma’s bathroom: that face close to mine, my heart beating hard, my murderer standing above me. But I had no idea how this whole death thing worked: Had I popped into Emma’s world the moment after I’d taken my last breath, or was it days—
months
—later? And how did the video get posted online? Had my family seen it? My friends? Was this some kind of twisted ransom note?
    Emma finally glanced up from the screen. “Where did you find this? “ she asked Travis.
    “Guess someone didn’t know she was a star on the Internet, huh?” Travis snatched the phone from her hands.
    Clarice raked her fingers through her hair. She kept glancing from the video screen to Emma’s face. “Is this what you do for fun?” she asked Emma in a hoarse voice.
    “She probably does it to get high.” Travis paced around the patio like a prowling lion. “I knew some girls at schoollast year who were, like, obsessed with it. One of them almost died.”
    Clarice clapped her hand over her mouth. “What’s wrong with you?”
    Emma’s eyes darted from Travis to Clarice. “Wait, no. That’s not
me.
The girl in this video is someone else.”
    Travis rolled his eyes. “Someone who looks exactly like you?” he deadpanned. “Let me guess. A long-lost sister? An evil twin?”
    There was a low rumbling of thunder in the distance. The breeze smelled like wet pavement, a telltale sign that a storm was close.
A long-lost sister.
The idea ignited in Emma’s mind like a Fourth of July sparkler. It was possible. She’d asked Social Services once if Becky had had any other kids she’d abandoned along the way, but they said they didn’t know.
    A thought burned in my mind, too: I was adopted. That much I remembered. It was common knowledge in my family; my parents had never tried to hide it. They’d told me my adoption had been a last-minute scramble and they’d never met my birth mother.
Could
it be possible? It explained why I was literally stuck to this girl who looked just like me, following her around as if our souls had been tethered together.
    Clarice tapped her long nails on the table. “I don’t tolerate lying or stealing in this house, Emma.”
    Emma felt like she’d just been kicked in the stomach. “That’s not me in the video,” she protested. “And I didn’t steal from you. I swear.”
    Emma reached for her canvas bag on the patio table. All she had to do was call Eddie, her manager at the roller coaster. He’d vouch for her hours today. But Travis got to her bag first, knocking it over so all of its contents spilled out onto the pavement.
    “Oops!” he cried gleefully.
    Emma watched helplessly as her tattered copy of
The Sun Also Rises
landed on a dusty anthill. A crumpled ticket for a free all-you-can-eat BBQ buffet at MGM Grand got caught in the breeze and drifted toward Travis’s free weights. Her BlackBerry and a tube of cherry-flavored ChapStick skittered to a stop