Nisha’s dark hair cascaded down her back. She carried a green tennis bag on her shoulder. When she turned the corner and noticed the crime scene, she stopped hard. She took a few tentative steps toward it, staring at the locker surrounded by police tape. A helpless look washed over her face.
“Miss?” A woman in a police uniform burst into the room, making everyone, including Emma, Charlotte, and Madeline, jump. Nisha flinched and pressed her arm to her chest as if to say, Who me? “Can you tell me whose locker this is?”
Nisha’s tawny skin turned ashen. She glanced at the cop’s badge, then at her gun. “Um, that’s my locker.”
Laurel let out a tiny yelp of a laugh. Charlotte shot her a look.
The cop tapped the locker door with the antenna of her walkie-talkie. “Would you mind opening it for me? I need to search it.”
Nisha’s bag slipped from her shoulder to the floor. She didn’t pick it back up. “W-Why?”
“I have a warrant right here.” The cop unfolded a piece of paper and flashed it in Nisha’s face. “I need to search this locker.”
Charlotte covered her mouth with her hand. Madeline’s whole body shook, making tiny I-don’t-want-to-laugh squeaks. They both turned to Emma. Charlotte lifted her eyebrows in a silent look that seemed to ask, Don’t you love this? Emma looked away.
More girls gathered in the locker room, nudging and staring. The cop paced the aisle. Nisha opened and closed her mouth a few times without speaking. Tears welled in her eyes. “Am I in trouble? I didn’t do anything!”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” the cop said. The handcuffs on her belt jingled.
Madeline nudged Laurel in the ribs. “Where did you find her?”
“I put an ad on Craigslist.” Laurel beamed. “She’s a theater major at the U of A.”
The cop nodded at Nisha again, this time more forcefully. Nisha’s hands shook as she worked the combination. By now Charlotte was doubled over, her shoulders shaking. Madeline had her tongue wedged between her teeth to stave off giggles. When the locker opened, the cop plunged her hand inside and pulled out a kitchen knife. More red stuff smeared the pointed tip.
Nisha sank down to the bench in the middle of the aisle. “I-I don’t know how that got there!”
Emma picked nervously at dry skin on her palm. Sure, Nisha was a bitch, but was she this much of a bitch?
I watched uncertainly, too. Maybe I’d been a prankster when I was alive, but from the other side, a staged murder definitely turned the proverbial stomach of a girl who’d just been killed. In fact, it seemed almost eerily coincidental. . . .
“I need to search the top part of the locker, too,” the cop demanded. “And then you and I are going to take a little trip down to the station.”
“But this is a mistake!” Nisha’s eyes filled with tears.
Emma tugged Charlotte’s sleeve. “Guys. Come on. That’s enough.”
Charlotte shot up and whirled around. “What?”
“Nisha seems kind of freaked out.”
Madeline cocked her head. “That’s why it’s funny.”
“We don’t want her to have a heart attack,” Emma argued.
“Like you haven’t done worse, Sutton?” A water droplet from the shower nozzle plopped on Charlotte’s head, but she ignored it. “Don’t get all soft on us now. Anyway, we had to go big with her. She knows what we’re about. We couldn’t just fill her pool with frogs or put Nair in her shampoo or something dumb like that.”
“I think it was a genius idea,” Laurel whispered behind them.
“Thank you.” Charlotte grinned. “I knew we needed something special to kick off a new year of the Lying Game!”
Emma chomped down on the inside of her cheek to keep from showing surprise. The Lying Game?
The words swirled in my head, too. Sensations bobbed to the surface. Screams and laughs, hands clapped over mouths, the hot stomach-pull of excitement. I strained to remember more, but it was just a cascade of feelings that rushed over me.
Out in the aisle, the cop pressed the latch to open the top compartment of Nisha’s locker. Charlotte grabbed Emma’s hand. “Get ready.” As the door opened, something shot out of the space. Nisha screamed and covered her eyes. Emma braced herself, too . . . and then she saw a shiny Mylar balloon float lazily into the aisle and bob to the ceiling. It was in the shape of a banana with bug eyes and a deranged smile. “That’s bananas!” a robotic voice rang out from the balloon as it bounced off the ceiling. “That’s bananas! That’s bananas!” A note dangled from the end of the string that said GOTCHA!
Emma couldn’t help but explode with laughter. Now that was funny.
Nisha wiped her eyes, a tiny wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. She looked over her shoulder for the cop, but the University of Arizona drama student had run off, bloody knife and all. Nisha ripped the GOTCHA! note off the string, crumpled it up, and tossed it to the floor. “That’s bananas!” the balloon bleated again and again in a robotic voice.
Charlotte emerged from their hiding place in the showers, her high-heeled boots clicking on the tile. Nisha turned and glared at her, her face puce. “You better not tell on us,” Charlotte said in a chillingly even voice. She wagged her finger back and forth. “Or else we’ll get you worse.”
Madeline and Laurel formed a convoy behind Charlotte, shooting Nisha the same don’t-mess-with-us looks, too. Emma ran past Nisha as fast as she could. Out in the hall, the girls leaned against the wall and laughed long and hard. Madeline grabbed Charlotte’s hand. Tears rolled down Laurel’s cheeks.