Maya unclipped her pink Swiss Army knife from her backpack and snipped off a rose from the lush bushes behind them. “Here,” she said, handing it to Emily.
“Maya!” Emily dropped the rose on her lap. “You can’t pick flowers in here!”
“I don’t care,” Maya insisted. “I want you to have it.”
“Maya.” Emily forcefully slapped her palms on her thighs. “You should go.”
Maya scowled at her. “You’re seriously doing the Tree Tops thing?” When Emily nodded, Maya groaned. “I thought you were stronger than that. And it seems so creepy.”
Emily crumpled up her lunch bag. Hadn’t she already gone through this? “If I don’t do Tree Tops, I have to go to Iowa. And I can’t—my aunt and uncle are crazy.”
She closed her eyes and thought of her aunt, her uncle, and her three Iowa cousins. She hadn’t seen them in years, and all she could picture were five disapproving frowns. “The last time I visited, my aunt Helene told me that I should eat Cheerios and only Cheerios for breakfast because they suppressed sexual urges. My two male cousins went on extra-long runs through the cornfields every morning to drain their sexual energy. And my cousin Abby—she’s my age—wanted to be a nun. She probably is one now. She carried around a notebook that she called Abby’s Little Book of Evil—and she wrote down everything she thought was a sin. She recorded thirty sinful things about me. She even thought going barefoot was evil!”
Maya chuckled. “If you have really ganked-up feet, it is.”
“It’s not funny!” Emily cried. “And this isn’t about me being strong or thinking Tree Tops is right or lying to myself. I can’t move there.”
Emily bit her lip, feeling the hot rush she always got before she was about to cry. In the past two days, if her family passed her in the halls or the kitchen, they wouldn’t even look in her direction. They said nothing to her at meals. She felt weird about joining them on the couch to watch TV. And Emily’s sister Carolyn seemed to have no idea how to deal with her. Since the swim meet, Carolyn had stayed away from their shared bedroom. Usually, the sisters did their homework at their desks, murmuring to each other about math problems, history essays, or random gossip they’d heard at school. Last night, Carolyn came upstairs when Emily was already in bed. She changed in the dark and climbed into her own bed without saying a word.
“My family won’t love me if I’m gay,” Emily explained, looking into Maya’s round brown eyes. “Imagine if your family woke up and decided they hated you.”
“I just want to be with you,” Maya mumbled, twirling the rose between her hands.
“Well, me too,” Emily answered. “But we can’t.”
“Let’s hang out in secret,” Maya suggested. “I’m going to Mona Vanderwaal’s party tomorrow. Meet me there. We’ll ditch and find somewhere to be alone.”
Emily chewed on her thumbnail. She wished she could…but Becka’s words haunted her. Life is hard already. Why make it harder? Yesterday, during her free period, Emily had logged into Google and typed, Are lesbians’ lives hard? Even as she typed that word—lesbian—her right hand pecking the L key and her left the E, S, and B, it seemed strange to think that it applied to her. She didn’t like it, as a word—it made her think of rice pudding, which she despised. Every link in the list was to a blocked porn site. Then again, Emily had put the words lesbian and hard in the same search field.
Emily felt someone’s eyes on her. She glanced around through the whirling vines and bushes and saw Carolyn and a few other swim team girls sitting by the bougainvillea. Her sister glared right at them, a disgusted look on her face.
Emily leapt up from the bench. “Maya, go. Carolyn sees us.”
She took a few steps away, pretending to be fascinated by a planter of marigolds, but Maya didn’t move. “Hurry!” Emily hissed. “Get out of here!”
She felt Maya’s eyes on her. “I’m going to Mona’s party tomorrow,” she said in a low voice. “Are you going to be there or not?”
Emily shook her head, not meeting Maya’s eye. “I’m sorry. I need to change.”
Maya violently yanked up her green-and-white canvas tote. “You can’t change who you are. I’ve told you that a thousand times.”
“But maybe I can,” Emily answered. “And maybe I want to.”
Maya dropped Emily’s rose on the bench and stomped away. Emily watched her weave through the rows of planters past the foggy windows for the exit and wanted to cry. Her life was a horrible mess. Her old, simple life—the one she’d had before this school year started—seemed like it belonged to a different girl entirely.
Suddenly, she felt someone’s fingernails trace the back of her neck. A chill ran up her back, and she whirled around. It was only a tendril from another rosebush, its thorns fat and sharp, the roses plump. Then, Emily noticed something on one of the windows a few feet away. Her mouth fell open. There was writing in the condensation. I see you. Two wide-open, heavily lashed eyes were drawn next to the words. It was signed A.
Emily rushed to the writing to wipe it away with her sleeve. Had it been here all along? Why hadn’t she seen it? Then, something else struck her. Because of the greenhouse’s humidity, water only condensed on its inside walls, so whoever had written this had to be…inside.
Emily turned around, looking for some kind of tell-tale sign, but the only people glancing in her direction were Maya, Carolyn, and the lacrosse boys. Everyone else was milling around the greenhouse door, waiting for lunch period to end, and Emily couldn’t help but wonder if A was among them.
24 AND IN ANOTHER GARDEN ACROSS TOWN…
Friday afternoon, Spencer leaned over her mother’s flower bed, pulling out the thick, stubborn weeds. Her mother usually did the gardening herself, but Spencer was doing it in an attempt to be nice—and to absolve herself of something, although she wasn’t sure what.
The multicolored balloons her mother had bought a few days ago to celebrate the Golden Orchid were still tied to the patio rail. Congratulations, Spencer! they all said. Next to the words were pictures of blue ribbons and trophies. Spencer glanced into the balloons’ shiny Mylar fabric; her warped reflection stared back. It was like looking into a funhouse mirror—her face looked long instead of round, her eyes were small instead of large, and her button nose looked wide and enormous. Maybe it was this balloon girl, not Spencer, who’d cheated to become a Golden Orchid finalist. And maybe Balloon Girl had been the one who’d fought with Ali the night she disappeared, too.
The sprinkler system came on next door at the DiLaurentises’ old house. Spencer stared up at Ali’s old window. It was the last one at the back, directly across from Spencer’s. She and Ali had felt so lucky their rooms faced each other. They had window signals when it was past phone curfew—one blink of the flashlight meant, I can’t sleep, can you? Two blinks meant, Good night. Three meant, We need to sneak out and talk in person.
The memory from Dr. Evans’s office floated into her head again. Spencer tried to push it down, but it bobbed right back up. You care way too much, Ali had said. And that far-off crack. Where had it come from?
“Spencer!” a voice whispered. She whirled around, heart pounding. She faced the woods that bordered the back of her house. Ian Thomas stood between two dogwoods.