Little White Lies by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Author:Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

That night, I stood in front of my vanity scrubbing viciously at the makeup on my face.

“Sawyer.”

I’d caught Lily up on what had happened. Nick was arrested. Campbell might have had something to do with it.

“Sawyer,” Lily said again. She caught my wrists. “You’re going to take the skin right off your face.”

“So?”

She nudged me toward the edge of my bathtub, pushing me to a sitting position. “Stay.” She removed the cloth from my hand and went back to the sink. When she returned, there was a container of makeup remover in her hand.

My cousin didn’t say anything as she swabbed a damp cotton ball gently over my eyes, my cheeks.

This is our fault. If what happened tonight has anything to do with the pearls—it’s our fault.

I’d known better than to trust Campbell. I’d known that something was off.

“We’ll figure out what happened,” Lily said softly. My eyes were still closed. She was still removing mascara. “No matter how quietly the arrest was handled, word will get out. People will talk—at the club, at school. We’ll corner Campbell. We’ll figure this out, Sawyer.”

The problem was that every instinct I had—every probability I’d learned growing up bar-adjacent, the sixth sense that let me keep an eye out for trouble customers at Big Jim’s—said that figuring this out wouldn’t solve the problem.

At most, figuring it out would confirm what the problem was.

“What if she framed him?” I asked. “What if Campbell Ames framed that poor guy for stealing the pearls, and we helped?”

Was it too late to go to the cops? We could tell them that we’d falsified Campbell’s alibi, claim that we’d thought she wanted to sneak off for run-of-the-mill teenage hijinks, not to commit a major crime.

Then why, I could hear someone asking, didn’t you come clean when the pearls went missing?

“I have something that might cheer you up.” Lily ducked into the bedroom and came back up with a gift bag: black, with glittery orange tissue paper. “You forgot your favor from tonight’s event.”

If Lily thought a Symphony Ball keepsake could put a dent in my current mood, she had mistaken me for someone with no conscience and a fondness for the saccharine and overpriced.

“Just open it,” Lily prodded. She was using her I am the granddaughter of Lillian Taft voice, genteel and bossy in equal parts.

Shooting her a dark look, I tossed the tissue paper aside a little harder than necessary. Sitting at the bottom of the bag, in a clear plastic case with the words Symphony Ball engraved on it, was a USB drive.

“The scavenger hunt footage,” Lily told me. “I understand there was some debate about what to do with ours, but ultimately, it was decided that the best tack to take was ignoring our little side trip. A professional videographer put together a highlight video of each group—and one of the whole event. Plus, we each get a copy of our own raw footage.”

Footage of us at the lot, the library, The Holler.

“Why would this cheer me up?” I asked Lily.

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