Never Have I Ever: A Lying Game Novel. Sara Shepard

      Never Have I Ever

      A Lying Game Novel

      By Sara Shepard

      Epigraph

      The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

      —OSCAR WILDE

      Contents

       Cover

      Title Page

      Epigraph

      Prologue: Life After Death

      1. A Charmed Life

      2. CSI, Tucson

      3. Spinning Her Wheels

      4. Paper Trail

      5. Extreme Times Call for Extreme Measures

      6. A Criminal History

      7. The Ultimate Prank

      8. Truth or Consequences

      9. Daddy’s Little Girl

      10. Fish Out of Water

      11. Nothing Like a Threat at 2 A.M.

      12. A Secret of a Different Kind

      13. Never Underestimate the Power of Snooping

      14. Double the Trouble

      15. An Opening … And a Closing

      16. An a for Effort

      17. X Marks the Spot

      18. Tremors and Treachery and Threats, Oh My!

      19. The Writing on the Wall

      20. Creepy Vampires to the Left, Stalkers to the Right

      21. Service with a Snicker

      22. Tweet, Untweet

      23. The Awful Truth

      24. The Viking’s Revenge

      25. Almost, But Not Quite

      26. One Down, One to Go

      27. A Shove in the Dark

      28. Walled In

      29. The Darkest Place in the World

      30. The Aftermath

      31. Clever Little Bitches

      32. The Moment We’ve been Waiting For

      Epilogue: A Moment in Time

      Acknowledgments

      Other Books by Sara Shepard

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      

PROLOGUE

      LIFE AFTER DEATH

      It’s the little things you miss when you die. The feel of sliding into bed when you’re exhausted, the clean scent in the Arizona air after a storm during monsoon season, the flutter in your stomach when you see your crush walking down the hall. My killer took all those things away from me just before my eighteenth birthday.

      And because of fate—and a threat from my murderer—my long-lost twin sister, Emma Paxton, stepped into my life.

      When I died two weeks ago, I popped into Emma’s world, a world that was about as different from mine as you could get. From that very first moment I saw what Emma saw, went where she went … and watched. I watched as Emma reached out to me on Facebook and as someone posing as me told her to visit. I watched as Emma traveled to Tucson, cautiously hopeful about our reunion. I watched as my friends tackled Emma, thinking she was me, and brought her to a party. I stood beside her when she got the note that said I was dead, warning her that if she didn’t continue to pretend to be me, that if she told anyone who she really was, she’d be dead, too.

      I watch today as Emma pulls on my favorite thin white tee and swipes my shimmery NARS blush onto her high cheekbones. I can say nothing as she slides into the skinny jeans I used to live in on weekends and sorts through my cherrywood jewelry box for my favorite silver locket, the one that sends rainbow prisms around the room when it catches the light. And I sit silently by as Emma sends a text confirming brunch plans with my best friends, Charlotte and Madeline, even though I would’ve worded it differently. Still, Emma has the basics of me down cold—almost no one has noticed she isn’t me.

      Emma puts my phone down, an uneasy look on her face. “Where are you, Sutton?” she asks aloud in a nervous whisper, as if she knows I’m close.

      I wish I could send her a message from beyond the grave: I’m here. And this is how I died. Only when I died, my memory died, too. I have glimpses here and there of who I used to be, but only a few solid, fleshed-out moments have bobbed to the surface. My death is as much a mystery to me as it is to Emma. All I know in my heart, in my bones, is that someone killed me. And that same someone is watching Emma as closely as I am.

      Does this scare me? Yes. But through Emma, I’ve been given a chance to uncover what happened in those final moments before I took my last breath. And the more I discover about who I was and the secrets I kept, the more I realize how much danger surrounds my long-lost twin.

      My enemies are everywhere. And sometimes, those we least suspect turn out to be our biggest threats.

      

1

      A CHARMED LIFE

      “This way to the terrace.” A tanned, button-nosed hostess grabbed four leather-bound menus and marched through the dining room of La Paloma Country Club in Tucson, Arizona. Emma Paxton, Madeline Vega, Laurel Mercer, and Charlotte Chamberlain followed her, snaking around tables full of men in tan blazers and cowboy hats, women in tennis whites, and children munching on organic turkey sausage.

      Emma dropped into a booth on the stucco veranda, staring at the tattoo on the back of the hostess’s neck as she glided away—a Chinese character that probably meant something lame, like faith or harmony. The terrace had a view of the Catalina Mountains, and every cactus and boulder was in sharp relief in the late-morning sun. A few feet away, golfers stood around a tee, contemplating their drives or checking their BlackBerrys. Before Emma had arrived in Tucson and assumed her twin sister’s life, the closest she’d gotten to setting foot in a country club was working as an attendant at a mini-golf course outside Las Vegas.

      I, however, knew this place like the back of my hand. As I sat, invisible, next to my twin, tethered to her always like a balloon tied to a little kid’s wrist, I felt a tingle of memory. The last time I ate at this restaurant, my parents had brought me to celebrate getting straight Bs on my report card—a rarity for me. A whiff of peppers and eggs brought back my favorite meal—huevos rancheros, made with the best chorizo in all of Tucson. What I wouldn’t give for just one bite.

      “Four tomato juices with lime wedges,” Madeline chirped to the waitress who’d appeared. When the waitress sauntered off, Madeline straightened her spine into her signature ballet-diva posture, whipped her obsidian black hair over her shoulder, and produced a silver flask from her fringed purse. Liquid sloshed as she shook the container back and forth. “We can make Bloody Marys,” she said with a wink.

      Charlotte tucked a piece of red-gold hair behind her freckled ear and grinned.

      “A Bloody Mary might knock me out.” Laurel pinched