Dead Girls Don't Lie Read online

  For my dad, Dale Shaw, for always believing in me,

  and for my mom, Linda Shaw, the one person I know who

  always does the right thing

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jennifer Shaw Wolf

  Chapter 1

  Rachel didn’t wear shoes. She had that kind of sexy, “small town girl” style that works with bare feet. Long dark hair, thin but with all the right curves, and delicate, pretty little feet. I can’t pull off bare feet. I have huge feet and clunky, square toes, and anyway, Dad would never let me go without shoes. But for as long as I can remember, summertime meant Rachel went barefoot.

  She wasn’t wearing shoes when we went to the old house at the edge of the woods last summer. That’s why she cut her foot on a piece of broken glass. It bled like crazy and left a long pink scar on the bottom of her foot and another narrow white one, like a little ring around her middle toe.

  Standing in the sweltering chapel, three people from Rachel’s mom, all I can think about are those scars, and whether Rachel is wearing shoes now.

  But I can’t see her feet.

  I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be feeling, but I’m pretty sure right now isn’t the time to be obsessing about whether Rachel is wearing shoes or not. Dad says I’m in shock. Rachel was my best friend from grade school through about six months ago, but I haven’t cried at all. Not even when Dad picked me up at Claire’s house and told me what had happened. He didn’t come until almost nine o’clock Saturday morning, but I know Rachel died before three. One hour after Skyler kissed me for the first time. Thirty-five minutes after she sent me her last text.

  I step back behind the man in front of me and wrap my fingers hard around my phone. It’s attached to my wrist by a little beaded cord. I forgot until just this minute that Rachel made it for me. It reminds me of what’s on my phone: the text from Rachel, maybe her last words. She was asking for help, but I didn’t answer her. And now she’s gone.

  The man hanging on a cross at the front of the church accuses me. I was taught better. A good friend, a good Christian, would have answered the text immediately. A good girl would have gone to the police.

  Even though she told me not to.

  Dad nudges me from behind. I look up and realize that the only thing between me and the casket is an empty space, kind of like the emptiness in my chest. I hesitate, but he half directs, half pushes me forward.

  As soon as she sees me, Rachel’s mom, Araceli, gasps and pulls me against her so hard that I can barely breathe. She smooths my hair and whispers, “Mija, mija, mija,” and other words in Spanish that I don’t understand. Her voice and her chest heave against me, thick with pain. Over her shoulder I try not to look at Rachel’s face, but I can’t help it. She looks like a wax doll. Her eyelashes lie on powdered pink cheeks, paler than her usual golden tan, and even her satiny black hair looks fake. I’ve never seen a dead person before. Dad told me that she would look like she was sleeping, but to me she looks dead.

  Her dress is all wrong. It’s too formal, white satin with buttons that go all the way up to her chin, choking her. I’ve never seen Rachel in a dress before. Skirts sometimes, long and flowery, like the one her mom is wearing, but never a dress. Usually she wore cutoff shorts, tanks, and T-shirts.

  Maybe the collar on the dress is so high to hide the hole in her chest where the bullet went through.

  The silver ring through her pencil-thin eyebrows and the streaks bleached red in her hair, both added after we stopped being friends, look wrong too. They don’t belong to the Rachel I knew. They belong to the stranger she became.

  Whispers follow me to my seat.

  “Friends for years.”

  “So horrible.”

  “Something like this, here?”

  “Do you think she knows anything about …”

  And then, “Shh, of course not.”

  I glance up, but I can’t tell who was talking. People’s eyes lower as I raise mine. The air is heavy with something more than the scent of wilted flowers and the above-average June temperatures. The looks that I feel as I walk down the aisle aren’t from people who are grieving. Most of the people here knew Rachel her whole life, but lately just by reputation. A mix of curiosity and fear is written in their faces—curiosity, because it always accompanies anything tragic in a small town, and fear, because Rachel’s death represents a crack in the shell of their security. Something that only happens in L.A. or New York, or even Seattle, has happened here.

  Twice.

  This time it feels closer, more personal. The first time it was an outsider, a gangbanger hiding out in our small town, but Rachel was born in Lake Ridge; no matter what they all thought of her by the end of her life, she was one of us.

  I catch furtive, suspicious glances aimed at the knot of Mexicans in the back. In spite of myself, in spite of everything I’ve been taught about charity and about God loving everyone the same, in spite of all the time I spent with Rachel and Araceli, I feel it too. It’s like everyone is looking for a reason, something that makes Rachel different, something that will keep what happened to her from happening to the rest of us.

  I glance back at them. Some of the kids I recognize from school, but as small as Lake Ridge High is, I only know a few of their names. They stick to their own group, and I guess, so do we.

  Taylor slides over to make room on the bench for me. I sit between her and Claire, like we were good friends again, the way we were in grade school before they decided Rachel was too different or maybe just too pretty to hang out with them anymore.

  Claire nudges me with her elbow and nods toward the door of the church. Skyler is there, standing by himself. I wonder if he’s here for Rachel or if he’s here for me. A heavy weight of guilt presses down on me, and I turn away before he sees me.

  “You should see if he wants to sit by us,” Taylor hisses. Her voice carries over the solemn organ music and muted whispers.

  I shake my head and glance toward my dad, but I don’t think he heard. He’s still standing with Rachel’s mom, his hand on her arm, almost like they were a couple. When Rachel and I were little, she used to talk about what it would be like if my dad and her mom got married. How then we’d really be sisters. I didn’t tell her I didn’t want that to happen, not because I didn’t love Araceli, but because it would mean my parents would never get back together.

  I don’t know if Taylor motioned him over or if he decided on his own, but when I look up, Skyler is standing at the end of the bench. “Can I sit here?” he asks.

  It’s the same question he asked two weeks ago, just before school got out. I was sitting on my usual lunchtime perch outside the library, hunched over a book, pretending I didn’t care that I was al
one. I said yes then, but I can’t make my voice work now. Taylor intervenes, scooting to one side to make room for Skyler between me and her.

  He sits down, and I get a whiff of sweat and too much cologne, just like at the party that night. It feels like someone poured all possible emotions into my stomach and put it on the spin cycle. Sitting by Skyler brings back all the guilt, fear, anger, and elation that I felt at the party, and all the pain, regret, and pitch-black horribleness from the morning after, when Dad told me that Rachel was gone.

  I knew it was my fault.

  I wasn’t supposed to be with Skyler. I wasn’t supposed to be at the party at all. It was the kind of party Dad has warned me to stay away from. But I was stuck at Claire’s house for the night, and she and Taylor were going. Staying behind would have destroyed my nearly nonexistent social footing. After being there for about ten minutes, I was done. I was looking for a way to leave, even contemplating calling Dad, disrupting his business trip, and begging him to come pick me up, even if it meant confessing that we had lied to Mrs. Rallstrom and snuck out.

  Then I realized my phone was gone. My “only because I think you’re responsible enough now” and “so you can get ahold of me if something happens” phone.

  I was frantically searching for it. Peyton Harris, too drunk to even stand up straight, tried to convince me that he had taken my phone and I had to reach down the front of his jeans to get it back. Skyler rescued me. He told Peyton to leave me alone and helped me find my phone in the laundry room, behind a pile of dirty clothes where someone had hidden it.

  Then he offered to take me home.

  People file toward their seats, the organ plays, and I can feel Skyler breathing beside me. His hand is inches from mine, but I can’t look at him. I wonder what he thinks about all of this. If he realizes the phone calls I silenced were from Rachel. If he knows I let her die. I wonder what he thinks about me now.

  I’d never thought of Skyler Cross as a “potential boyfriend candidate” as Claire would put it. He’s quiet, and nice, but kind of all alone. I was too busy being my own kind of quiet and all alone to pay attention to him, until he started sitting by me during lunch. Until then, he was just Evan Cross’s younger brother.

  Thinking about Evan pours jealousy into the churning concoction of pain inside my stomach. In a stupid, horrible way, Evan is responsible for the six-month silence between Rachel and me. Correction: I was stupid and I was horrible, and it was my fault.

  I remember the sheer joy in Claire’s voice when she made a point to find me at church so she could tell me, “Rachel and Evan Cross on New Year’s Eve! All night long, can you believe it?”

  And I remember the venom in Rachel’s voice after I confronted her with the disloyalty: “You don’t know anything about anything, Jaycee. You live life in your own little bubble, so when Claire tells you something, you believe her without even asking for my side of the story. Maybe there’s a good reason I was with Evan. Maybe you should trust me for once.”

  I had answered her back with at least as much venom, because she had admitted to being with him and she wasn’t even sorry. “Don’t talk to me about trust. You’re barely around anymore. You’re always with your other friends. You don’t have time for me, but you still want me to keep your secrets. You told me to keep my mouth shut about what happened at that old house—you won’t even let me talk to you about it—and then you go behind my back with Evan?” I choked on stupid tears as I said his name. “You know how I feel about him.”

  Her face was pale with anger, and something else, fear, because I had dared to go there. “Grow up, Jaycee. There are more important things going on here than your stupid crush on Evan Cross. If you can’t get that, then maybe you should just stay out of my life.”

  I look up at the white casket and Rachel, racking my brain for a follow-up conversation, wondering if those were really the last words we ever said to each other. I think they were.

  I wonder what we would have said to each other if I had answered the phone the night she died. The groove on the side of my phone digs into my hand as I think about the text, the only words from Rachel I have left:

  We’re in trouble. Meet me at my house NOW. Don’t tell your dad. Don’t call the police. Don’t tell anyone what you saw.

  I wonder what I’m supposed to do now.

  Chapter 2

  The floorboards creak under my feet as I follow Rachel’s footprints across the dusty floor. I know I have to find her because something bad is going to happen, but I don’t know what it is. I stop, afraid to follow the trail up the stairs. I call her name, but no one answers. I lift my foot to go upstairs and step in something wet. The stairs are covered with blood.

  My phone buzzes. I panic at the sound and reach to turn it off with my heart pounding in my ears. It takes a minute to pull myself back from that horrible place where memories are twisted into nightmares, as if reality wasn’t bad enough. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must have, because I dreamed, and now it’s morning.

  I check my phone. It’s another text. This one is from Claire, a generic:

  Lake today.

  I put it back on my nightstand and stare at the clock. Rachel’s funeral ended less than twenty-four hours ago. I guess Claire thinks that’s sufficient mourning time for an ex–best friend.

  I’m not sure why she’s suddenly so interested in me. I’ve been pretty much a loner since Rachel and I stopped talking. Maybe Dad told her mom he was “worried” about me and I’m some sort of church charity project. Maybe she’s afraid if she isn’t nice to me, I’ll tell her mom that she snuck out and went to Evan’s party. But I’d be in at least as much trouble as she would be, and I’ve learned that shared guilt doesn’t cement a friendship like you think it would.

  The phone buzzes again.

  U know who might be there.

  I sit up in bed, contemplating that. She could only mean Skyler. Do I want to see him again? It makes me feel guilty to think about it. Especially after the look Dad gave me when he got to the bench and realized Skyler had taken his place beside me.

  Lake Ridge High is pretty small, but I didn’t think Skyler knew who I was until we started eating together. I didn’t really know him either. It wasn’t until then that I realized how sweet and funny and utterly good looking he was. I hadn’t noticed the dimples that only appeared when he laughed, or how much his blue eyes looked like his brother’s, or how the muscles in his arms bulged under the flannel shirts he always wore, even when it was hot. But it wasn’t just the way he looked, and definitely not his resemblance to Evan. It was the way he made me feel.

  I always get stupid and tongue-tied and awkward if a guy so much as looks at me, but with Skyler it was different. At first it was just questions and small talk about classes we had together. Then one day he asked me about my running. Until then, I didn’t think anyone else knew about it. He said he had seen me on the road behind his house. I wasn’t brave enough to tell him I was trying to get my speed up, and that if I got fast enough, I might try soccer again.

  He remembered a comment I had made in government about how the migrant workers should have some kind of health care, even if they’re only here for a few months. “And you stood up to Justin Capp when he was a jerk about it,” he said. “That was impressive.”

  He talked to me like he was interested in whatever I was interested in, like he already knew me, like I was important.

  I was so grateful when he found me at the party, that he offered to take me home, that he didn’t tell me I was a goody-goody for wanting to leave. “I don’t want to be here either,” he said. “This isn’t really my thing.”

  He drove me back to Claire’s house, taking the long way around so we could talk. We kept talking even after he stopped in the alley behind Claire’s house to let me out. When he finally opened the door for me to say good-bye, he kissed me.

  My first kiss.

  After I made it back inside, I lay awake on Claire’s bedroom floor, thin
king about that kiss. How his lips had touched mine—more than just a brush, less than a movie kiss—how he had blushed and turned away. He left with, “We should hang out this summer. A lot.”

  And then I got Rachel’s text.

  When I saw it, part of me wanted to call her back and tell her about Skyler and everything that had happened. I was dying to tell someone, and I was hungry for the old Rachel and the friendship we’d lost. But when I read her text, I remembered the months of secrets, what it felt like to be all alone, and something else.

  When we were walking home at the end of ninth grade, she turned around and saw Skyler walking behind us. She leaned close to me and whispered, “Do you see that guy behind us? Skyler Cross? I think he’s been following me. Don’t you think he’s weird?”

  Rachel, who could have any guy she wanted, judged Skyler without even knowing him. And now that I knew him, now that he had kissed me, that was unforgivable.

  I ignored her and turned off my phone.

  She’s been dead for four days and I still haven’t shown anyone the text.

  “Jaycee, you up?” Dad pokes his head into my bedroom.

  I shove the phone under my pillow. “Yeah. I’m up.”

  “I’ll wait for you, then.” He shuts the door and leaves.

  I get out of bed like I’m on autopilot, afraid to think or feel too much. I pull on my swimsuit and shorts and work my hair into what Taylor would call a hideously unflattering ponytail—apparently I’m too pale to pull my hair back like that, and it makes my cheekbones stick out so I look like a fox. She should know; her mom has been a beautician for, like, ever. I instinctively reach to put my phone into my pocket and then pull back from it, as if it were a snake. I haven’t answered Claire, and I don’t know what time she wants me to be at the lake, but I don’t want the phone with me today. I don’t want to remember what’s on it. I don’t plug it in either. Maybe if it dies completely, maybe if I never charge it again, the text will go away. I won’t have to look at Rachel’s last words. I won’t have to show anyone else, and I won’t have to remember. I leave it under my pillow with my dark thoughts and everything else I don’t want to deal with right now and go downstairs.