How to Get Away with Lying

Chapter 3

Annabeth

The Final Girls

"You want us to continue to act as if we're dead?"

"Yes," Ivy answered me blandly as she folded her arms on the table. "You can't just go around revealing to mortals that you're alive again."

I rolled my eyes and slouched in the booth, frustrated by the response.

I hadn't even been alive for four hours and this bitch was already controlling my life. I should have been thankful that she and that asshole revived me, but I wasn't.

They were the ones who had wanted me dead in the first place, after all.

Adley had technically been the one to kill me the night of the slumber party three months ago. But I knew by the way that she looked at me when I had been resurrected that she did care about me. Besides, Ivy had reasons to kill me, while Adley never did. Ivy and Nate weren't telling us something, and they were letting Adley convince herself that it had all been her.

I wanted to tell Adley not to blame herself, but Ivy and Nate hadn't given me much of a chance. Since I was resurrected, she had been ranting about the supernatural shit that I had no intention to listen to. I knew damn well my role in all of this – I was the chosen angel sent from Heaven to eradicate evil.

What she should have been explaining was how I ended up dead since I knew that it hadn't fully been because of Adley. But it felt like they weren't ready to explain that yet.

The flickering 1950s ceiling fan that hung above our heads began to sway. I then caught sight of a broken mirror hanging on one of the café's walls, which sent a shiver down my spine.

A bad omen.

"Why, again, did you bring us here?" I asked Ivy, surely cutting off whatever she was ranting about still.

The building looked as if a tornado had once hit it. Its white siding was crumbling off the exterior, and its gray, unpolished floor tiles were scratched to death. Every booth had seats with peeling black leather, and the tables were all marked with what I guessed was coffee from years of spills that had never been cleaned. The walls were beige and looked run down, and the wooden shelves behind the counter were empty. I would have sworn that the café had been abandoned decades ago if not for the little Open sign that still hung on the outside of the glass entrance door. Somehow, the café had gotten a middle-aged woman to work here with a proper uniform – a beige dress and a white apron with the words Crystal Lake Café printed in light blue cursive at the top.

"So that nobody notices that you two freaks are back to life," Ivy told me. "No one from this deserted town will recognize us."

"If anyone actually lives here," Adley mumbled from beside me as she glanced out the large, dusty window next to her, which displayed the café's vacant parking lot.

"This will give us the time we need to plan out your new aliases," Nate finished, acting all smart with his big words. I was still trying to wrap around the fact that the douchebag was working with Ivy, who hadn't yet kicked him to the curb due to his stupidity levels.

"New lives?" I asked, not wanting to believe what he said. "Is that really necessary?"

"You're acting like you haven't reinvented yourself before," Nate muttered, looking at me with judging eyes.

"That was during my improvement phase," I reminded him.

"Some improvement you made. You just hid the world from knowing the kind of bitch you truly are–"