One of Us Is Back (One of Us Is Lying, #3)

by Karen M. McManus

At the time, a lot of people called it a sham of a trial, especially when it was over and Jake was sentenced to a juvenile facility until the age of twenty-five. Everything he did—not just to me and my friends, but to Simon—boiled down to a whopping seven and a half years behind bars. The headlines screamed “Privilege on Display!” and there were a half-dozen online petitions urging the judge to impose a harsher sentence.

There it is. That’s what I’ve been waiting for—the reason I keep torturing myself by watching these. I don’t want to see it, but I need to acknowledge that it exists. That glint in Jake’s eye. The one he can’t hide for a full Q&A session, no matter how hard he tries. The one that reflects all the anger he’s pretending he no longer feels. The one that says, I’m not sorry. The one that says, What would I do differently? I wouldn’t get caught.

He hid his dark side incredibly well. A lot of people do.

I cut myself off from that possibility back in April, and now the only person I can confide in is my older sister, Emma. Who moved to North Carolina to live with one of our aunts as soon as she graduated two weeks ago, and might as well be on the moon considering how infrequently she returns my texts.

What’s done is done, she said before she left. We had our reasons.

My sweet, innocent, still-grieving little brother never meant for Brandon to get hurt.

But almost immediately, doubts started creeping in. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone—especially not Maeve and Knox, after

they’d risked their lives to stop Jared—and the secret made me feel horribly isola...

Now that she’s home from Yale for the summer, she’s decided that Stan needs, as she puts it, “more exercise and mental stimulation.”

There’s not a person in the world you can count on more than Bronwyn Rojas. I know exactly how good I have it with her, and that’s why I’m doing all this—the jobs, school, the cheap-ass house with too many roommates so I’m not blowing everything I make on rent. One of these days I’m going to be the guy Bronwyn deserves, not the guy she had to save from prison while we were in high school.

At the edge of the parking lot, there’s a bulletin board filled with flyers hawking landscaping services, tutoring, housecleaning, dog walking—all the stuff rich people can’t do on their own, because they’re too busy hanging out at country clubs.

Those were created by students, though, not somebody with the kind of money to rent a billboard. Although come to think of it, there are probably plenty of Bayview High kids who could.

I’m not sure how she fills her days now, and it’s kind of depressing to wonder.

It’s a welcome change, after the week I’ve had, to be in charge of a mystery where there’s no bad answer.

Back in April and May, when it was touch and go whether Emma might get into legal trouble, part of me hoped he might confess—that his conscience wouldn’t let her take the fall for him. That he’d at least confide in his family, even if he couldn’t bring himself to tell the police. But he never did.

My smart, studious sister, who’s spent half her life planning for college, is suddenly staring at an empty, uncertain future.

Did he write them?

If the customer who wanted an ingredient-free empanada hadn’t already been the last straw, this would be it: being tossed out of my home away from home while my brother, the potential budding sociopath, gets a plateful of cookies. Maybe that’s my life now: a series of never-ending last straws.

I don’t understand how you can look at someone who’s obviously hurting and think, You know what this person needs? More time in their own head.

He kneels beside my car with practiced ease, as quick and confident as Knox was slow and cautious.

It was interesting, Jake thought, how easy it was to make people see what you wanted them to see.

He didn’t like when Dad sounded like this—as though he was already mad at you before you’d even had a chance to start talking.

The best thing to do, Jake decided, was block it out. Because if you can’t see or hear something, there’s no reason it should bother you.

The more Jake waltzes through town like he’s a regular guy, the more people are going to start thinking that he is one.

Instead of jurors looking at him like a criminal—the way they would’ve looked at me if I’d ever been in front of them—all they’ll see is Bayview’s golden boy.

She refuses to be swayed by my counterargument that baseball is not a new game, and has more than one rule.

because Cooper still rules and that was weirdly iconic.

But now, the scars remind me how life-or-death this town can be.

I know what it’s like to feel as though you’ve got to solve all your problems on your own.

“The biggest unsolved mystery in Bayview is why that guy still has a job,”

For a lot of the past year, ever since Bronwyn and Cooper went to college, it’s been Nate and me left behind in Bayview, trying to figure out a way forward without hyperinvolved parents, money, or lots of natural talent. I don’t begrudge Bronwyn and Cooper their gifts, not even a little. I feel lucky to know them. But there’s something comforting about a friend who doesn’t have everything figured out, and who knows how it feels to take one step forward and then get knocked back two or three.

in the Bayview High parking lot, time slips away and for a few seconds, I feel like her again: Adelaide Prentiss, the always-anxious princess of Bayview High.

Running beneath all that, even before everything imploded with Jake, TJ, and Simon, was my deepest, darkest, most constant fear: I’m not good enough, and I never will be.

I can’t spend my life skulking around the edges of a safe zone to avoid Jake’s wrath; I did enough of that when we were dating.

For one horrifying second, I’m afraid I’m going to pass out, but then the dizziness passes and a strange feeling of calm settles over me. This is the worst thing I could have imagined a month ago, but I’m still standing. I will always keep standing.

A wave of nauseated horror washed over me. I’ve never been so drunk that I’ve blacked out, so maybe I should’ve realized sooner that something was deeply wrong. But I didn’t understand, until right that second, how calculated my lost night had been. When I’d woken up with Addy and Nate beside me, my mouth dry and my head aching, I thought maybe I’d wandered into the shed on my own. Even after I saw the word on my arm, I thought some jerk did it at the party. But as soon as Detective Mendoza said Somebody drugged you, all I could think was: Who? And why?

Oh, Phoebe. You’ve made a big mistake.

Nobody in their right mind wants to spend time there.” She makes a face and holds up her phone. “I should know. I have an account now. My name is Tami Lee Spencer, and you don’t even want to hear what my hobbies are.”

“Give it a chance. Ask yourself, What would Tami Lee do?”

“What if…does anyone think Jake could’ve taken Phoebe?” she asks.

“I’ve been thinking about what the writing could possibly mean,” Addy says. “And then I remembered what you told me when Jake fixed your flat tire. You said you didn’t want to thank him, so you said something like, I should learn how to change a tire. Right?” I nod, and she adds, “And then he said, All it takes is practice.”

“But he’s allowed to be at Bayview High,” Addy points out. “He could’ve been the one who stole Nate’s father’s keys. He was even there the day we found Phoebe.”

“Plus, all Jake needs is one friend with Maeve-level skills to spend half an hour on the dark web or whatever, learning how to get around an ankle monitor.” Maeve opens her mouth to protest, then closes it, because—yeah.

Concise and to the point; Simon didn’t like wasting words while cataloging grievances.

Just because he didn’t find Bronwyn Rojas the slightest bit aesthetically pleasing didn’t mean that someone else might not think differently. Someone with terrible taste, clearly, but still.

Simon kept writing, pen digging into the thin paper of his notebook. He’d thought about making an entry for Jake before, of course, because Jake could be fucking annoying. But he hadn’t done it, out of some kind of misguided loyalty that, he now realized, wasn’t returned.

Mark my words: there’s something creepy about that Kelleher kid.”

“Like it’s so hard to order takeout,” she finally muttered, and Simon nearly laughed out loud. Ms. Riordan had a spine, after all. Too bad she used it only when she was alone.

Her expression made one thing clear: Ms. Riordan liked her job a lot better than she liked her husband.

The Rojas sisters have a lot of skills, but none of them are kitchen-related.