A dark, modern psychological thriller and coming-of-age about obsession, manipulation, and the intensity of those first friendships that take hold of you and never let go. Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt for Amelia Kahaney’s All the Best Liars, which is out now.
Tic tac toe, three girls in a row. Nine years old and inseparable. Friends for life, or so they think . . .
Best friends Syd, Rain, and Brie grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in the stifling California desert, desperately wishing for a way out.
In the end, each of them will escape—but not in the way they expect. One will do it by dying, another by lying, a third by taking the fall. A deadly fire is set two weeks before the end of their senior year of high school and nothing will ever be the same.
With gorgeous, taut prose and twists to the very last page, All the Best Liars switches between the present and the past to unravel the truth behind the fire and the cost of the secrets at heart of their friendship.
You think you know when you’ve hit bottom, when things have gotten complicated and sad in a way you’ll never be able to fix. But the truth is, you don’t have any idea how much worse it can get.
By the time I had drifted most of the way down, washed up on a Monday morning in the last seat of the lurching yellow school bus with the aftertaste of vomit still on my tongue, my life had blown apart so completely that I couldn’t see the shape of it anymore. I was friendless, abandoned, dumped, humiliated. More alone than I’d ever been.
It was the ass-end of senior year, far too late in the life cycle of high school to assume any of what was broken could be fixed before all of us scattered forever. All I had to do was get through two more weeks of classes. Soon, so soon, high school and all the people in it would be a memory I could spend the rest of my life repressing. Starting with last night.
As the bus sighed to life, flashes of the party glimmered, bright sparkles of shame that died away as quickly as they flared to life. Pieces of the night were already missing. Things I would never get back. All I had were a few garbled moments glimpsed through smeared glass: The pills I took, the drinks I swallowed, the rage I felt stumbling out of that enormous house. The hurt on Rain’s crumpled face. Rain, who always believed I was good. Who never knew the petty, sour girl I’d let myself become.
But why had I been so furious? And what had I said to hurt her so? I remembered only snatches of the fight we’d had. The feel of screaming at each other in that big dim bedroom. How it had been cathartic and terrible all at once.
I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead to the hot bus window, groping for the details of the fight. But like a word you can’t quite think of until hours after you need it, it was just out of reach. My memory skipped from the kerosene burn of whatever I’d swigged in the party’s packed kitchen to the sting of gravel against my skin. The ice-cold desert that had almost swallowed me up. Spider, my brother, cursing low under his breath on the way home. Blood dripping down my forearms, staining the car’s upholstery.
It was almost a coherent narrative.
Almost, but not quite.
Rocketing down the mountain toward school, all I knew for sure was that I was alone, ashamed, a rube. Abandoned in the end even by my brother, who had vanished somewhere in the night. That morning before six, I’d staggered to his room, opened his door to tell him how drug-sick I was, to guilt him into driving me to school . . . but his bed was empty and the car was gone.
Now I curled into my and Rain’s old seat, the seat we’d been sitting in since elementary school. Last one on the left, best seat in the house. You had your pick when you got on first. We were always first on and last off, coming, as we did, from the farthest away. Termico was such a tiny dot on the map that we didn’t have our own schools. So down the mountain we went, into Palm Springs or Palm Desert, where the hotels were, the expensive houses with their swimming pools, the malls, the movie theaters, and the schools.
My index finger traced the ballpoint graffiti we had drawn on the seat back in front of us some years back. Hearts, teardrops, Celtic knots, stylized versions of our names. Syd & Rain 4eva, I’d written in sixth grade, or was it seventh? God, did it feel true. What was that expression? We plan and God laughs?
Miss Roberta pulled the bus over for its next stop and the door hissed open. A pack of freshmen and sophomores whose names I didn’t know got on, along with two junior boys, Kenny Alvarez and Grant Matthews, who lived in a world of role-playing games so complex and all-encompassing that it was like they existed on some other planet.
I turned up my headphones and looked out the window at the sunbaked hills that stretched out past the highway, their brown softness like the curved backs of giant sleeping cats. Skrillex filled my ears—anxious, unromantic zombie tracks. The sun was already strong enough at 7:35 am to make the fingerprinted window hot to the touch. I touched it anyway, wanting to feel the singe of it.
Two more weeks of school and one lonely summer before I could leave this place behind. In the fall I would head to Miami University, which sounded like beaches and volleyball but was actually a midsize college in Oxford, Ohio, where my aunt, Debbie, lived. Miami had given me the best financial aid package out of all the places I applied. Mom was so relieved when I agreed to live in Debbie’s spare room after the college promised twenty hours of work study on top of the tuition waiver. “Your future is all decided now!” Mom had said. It may have been the most depressing thing she’d ever said to me.
But Miami may as well have been in Florida for how badly I longed for it as a vacation from what life here had become. Ohio felt far enough away for me to become a different person. No more ghosts of former friends. No more sweaty afternoons pressed up against a boy who only disappointed me. Debbie’s condo’s guest room overlooked a scrap-metal yard and a Kroger, and beyond that a gray slice of a river. There, it would just be me, my bitten-down fingernails, and my lonely dreams.
Maybe that was the lesson of all this. That life was only manageable if you lived it alone.
Last night proved how capable I was of hurting people I loved. I shuddered, still groping for details that refused to come. Whatever I’d said, it was bad. Bad enough that I’d spent all night apologizing and Rain still wasn’t answering me. I scrolled through all my texts to her.
1:41 am: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said.
2:04 am: Please write back & tell me you’re ok.
2:47 am: Tell me you hate me. Tell me you’ll never forgive me.
Just say something.
5:20 am: Have you really given up on us entirely? Aren’t I allowed to be upset, just this once?
I’d always been the reliable, unflappable one. The girl who measured her words out carefully, who thought before she spoke. Or, I used to be. This horrible year had changed me enough that some days, I didn’t quite recognize myself.
I tried again: Still waiting. Hello?
I watched the screen, looking for the three dots to prove Rain was at least getting my texts, even if she refused to reply. None appeared.
When the bus finally pulled into the parking lot of Valley Sands High, I forced myself up on shaking legs. I didn’t bother to look out the bus window when we parked, so when I shuffled down the stairs and saw hundreds of kids clustered in the front courtyard, I lost my breath with the shock of it. In the desert, people don’t usually hang around outside after March or April. But today, even though it was already 95 degrees outside, most of the school was out front. Everyone was weirdly quiet, staring down at their phones or talking in low, somber voices. Lots of kids were crying.
The sour nervousness in my stomach bubbled into full-blown nausea.
Something bad had happened.
I dug my phone from my pocket again and stared at the blank screen. An old reflex from back when it would twitch with missives from Rain a hundred times a day. Nobody had texted me any news. But really, who would?
I heard the word she, the word fire, again and again as I plunged forward through the heat and smells of high school bodies packed tightly together—the fruit-scented body sprays, the bad cologne, the reek of sports equipment, the makeup and socks and hair gel and the waft of flavored nicotine vapor—until it felt like all of it was in my mouth, an indelible taste I would never get out.
The rubber band snap of missing Rain twanged in my throat. Even with her not speaking to me, I wanted her here. Rain would know what to do, how to deal. She always did.
I pushed through to the center of the courtyard, where the crowd had opened up to make space for Charlotte Yu, a junior from my AP Spanish class who was crying into a microphone held by a woman from News 4. A few feet away, a cameraman filmed them both.
“I just can’t. It’s awful. I can’t even believe how awful this is,” Charlotte sputtered, a track set on repeat.
I strained to hear, remembering last year when Jordy Stewart got hit by a delivery truck while he was skateboarding behind the Rite Aid. The senselessness of it, how you knew that it could have been your sibling, your best friend, even you. How it could have been any of us.
“Brie Walsh was the sweetest girl,” Charlotte said.
I stopped breathing.
Brie Walsh was?
Brie Walsh was?
I had misheard, obviously. A trick played by my subconscious. Because it was true I had wished harm on Brie. Had done so as recently as last night.
“Tell me more about Brianna Walsh,” the reporter urged. “What was she like?”
I blinked hard. When I opened my eyes again, everything was tinted a hospital gray, as if the sky had a shade pulled over it.
Terrifying, was what Charlotte wouldn’t say. She owned all of us, and she kept score.
“She was beautiful and smart and everyone here . . . like, all of us, we looked up to her. She was really nice. Like, a really good person. She was the student body president, ran track, got good grades . . .”
Normally this kind of sucking up would make me laugh, but now I felt all the color drain from my face. Brie had taken everything from me: best friend, boyfriend, sanity, joy. I’d spent so much time this year wishing she would somehow disappear. But I never wished her dead. Would I? Had I?
You two deserve each other.
I shook my head in a futile attempt to erase the memory. The last thing I had said to her last night—the last thing I remembered saying—couldn’t be the last thing I would ever say to her. Life didn’t work that way. In real life, Brie was the winner and I was the loser. She’d made that so clear. And it was never the winners who died tragically.
Excerpted from ALL THE BEST LIARS by Amelia Kahaney. Copyright © 2022 by Amelia Kahaney. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
