“You’re lying.”
“I’m not,” I insist, but it sounds fake. I really need to practice lying. Apparently, I suck at it.
“Who told you?” he asks.
“Told mewhat?”
“What happened to Andrea. They didn’t say it was an accident. If they did, you wouldn’t be shaking right now.”
“I’m not shaking.”
He holds up my hand, which is shaking.
“I’m shivering,” I say. “It’s cold out here.”
He drops my hand. “Why do you keep lying? I thought we were friends.Morethan friends.”
“We are.” I take a breath. “Okay, yeah. I might’ve heard you were involved. But I heard Braden was too.”
Jackson takes a step back, folding his arms over his chest. “Tell me who told you this.”
Not wanting to involve Shayla, I say, “A girl at school. People say she’s crazy. Makes up stories and stuff.”
“Peyton?” he says.
“Yeah. You know her?”
“From when I went to school there. We also had a job together.”
“What job?”
“When we were kids, maybe five or six, we were on a show together. She played my sister.”
“Really? How long did you do the show?”
“Not long. It only ran for a season. Even back then she was crazy. She’d make up stories about the crew, saying they hit her or yelled at her.”
“And it wasn’t true?”
“No. I even saw her bruise herself, then run to the director and blame the camera guy.”
“Why would she do that?”
“For attention. Or to create drama. She gets bored easily so she creates stories in her head that aren’t true but tells them as if they are. Eventually people in the business caught on and stopped hiring her. She was actually a good actress. She could’ve gone far if she wasn’t making up stories about people.”
“I sat with her at the game. It was her idea, not mine. I was sitting with Brock and she wouldn’t leave me alone. She told me about her and the principal.”
“That story is actually true.”
“So she tells the truth sometimes, but not always.”
“What’d she tell you about Andrea?”
“That people think you or Braden did it.”
His eyes lock on mine. “What doyouthink? You think I did it?”
“No!” I nervously laugh. “Of course not. You’re not a killer.”
