by Sara Shepard
“Is she going to keep the baby?” Harper asked, forking a bite of macaroni salad.
Jessie shrugged. “I don’t know. But she’s terrified of telling her parents. She knows they’re going to freak.”
Quinn shook her head sympathetically. “Mine would, too.”
It was disconcerting that the girls were talking about an issue that was so close to Spencer’s heart. Looking at Emily’s situation objectively, it was crazy that Emily had hidden her pregnancy from almost everyone she knew. It was even crazier that she’d smuggled the baby out of the hospital and left it on someone’s doorstep. Even worse, A—Gayle—had figured out exactly what happened. Was Gayle going to tell? Not just about that, but about everything else they’d done?
She stared down at her empty plate, wishing she had something to do with her hands.
“Spencer, these are really good,” Harper said, pointing to a brownie she’d cut from one of Spencer’s pans. “Try.”
She shoved the brownie toward Spencer’s mouth, but Spencer recoiled. “That’s okay.”
“Why? They’re amazing!”
Quinn narrowed her eyes. “Unless you’re anti-sugar, too?”
The girls were all staring at her so quizzically that Spencer began to feel insecure. She wondered if it was a requirement to eat the food, like an Ivy rite of passage. Maybe she had no choice. “Thanks,” she said, accepting a bite. Harper was right: The brownie was gooey and delicious, and Spencer couldn’t even taste the baked-in pot. Her stomach rumbled in response; she hadn’t eaten since last night. One little brownie wouldn’t hurt, would it?
“Okay, you convinced me,” Spencer said, rising from her seat to get a brownie square for herself.
When she returned, having eaten almost the whole brownie by the time she sat down again, the girls were talking about how they wanted to make a film to enter into the Princeton Student Film contest. “I want to make one about toy tops, just like Charles and Ray Eames did,” Quinn said.
“I was thinking of making a movie about Bethany. Remember how I told you about her? The really fat girl who sits in front of me in Intro to Psych?” Jessie rolled her eyes. “It could be called Girl Who Eats Donuts.”
Spencer took a bite of brownie and wished she was brave enough to tell Jessie she wasn’t exactly a sylph. For some reason, the word sylph suddenly struck her as funny. The oversize freckles on Jessie’s cheeks were kind of funny, too. Jessie looked at her strangely. “What?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Spencer said, taking another nibble of the brownie. A few crumbs fell onto her lap, reminding her of gerbil poops. She started laughing again.
Harper stood, giving Spencer a you’re hopelessly weird look. “I’m going to get another brownie. Girls, you in?”
“Grab me one,” Quinn said. Jessie nodded too.
The brownies. That was why Spencer found everything so funny. She’d only smoked pot twice before, both times at parties at Noel Kahn’s house, but the familiar sensations rushed back. Her pulse slowed. Her normally obsessive tendencies began to fade into the background. She leaned back and grinned at the beautiful kids around her, marveling at their brightly colored dresses and silk ties. Her eyelids felt heavy, and her limbs relaxed into the couch.
Suddenly, she roused herself. A couple was making out across the room, their hands all over each other, their tongues flailing. Another couple was kissing by the grand piano. They were so into it that they leaned on the keys, a tinkle of sounds ringing out. There was a clump of kids staring at a glass-paned china cabinet in the corner, remarking on how amazing the plate patterns were. Quinn was standing in the doorway, telling a story about how her housekeeper always said acrossed instead of across in a snotty, cleaning-people-are-such-lower-class-citizens voice. Jessie’s eyes were glassy and red, and she was wiggling her fingernails in front of her face like they were amazing.
Spencer rubbed her eyes. How long had she been out?
“Streaker!” someone yelled, and a guy in a Princeton beanie and nothing else ran through the parlor, a half-eaten brownie in his hand. A couple of kids stripped off their clothes and followed him down the hall.
Harper appeared above Spencer and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s join in, sleepyhead!”
Spencer woozily pulled her cotton dress over her head, feeling naked in her slip. They followed a string of students through the library, the dining room, and then the kitchen. There were pots and pans all over the floor in the kitchen, an upturned tray of nachos on the table, and, for some reason, a roll of toilet paper was strung around the chandelier over the prep island. Her tray of brownies was almost empty. Spencer grabbed the last square and popped it into her mouth.
When they got back to the parlor, even more kids were making out, and a group was playing a version of Strip Twister, using the large rug in the center of the room as the board. Spencer flopped back on the couch. “Is it me, or has this party suddenly gotten really wild?” she asked Harper.
“Isn’t it awesome?” Harper’s eyes gleamed. “Everyone is flying high, right?”
Uh, isn’t that the point? Spencer wanted to say, but Harper had already whipped around and was staring at the windows. “Hey, you know what I want to do?” she said excitedly. “Make myself a dress out of the curtains just like Scarlett O’Hara did in Gone with the Wind!”
She leapt onto the windowsill and ripped the curtains from the poles before anyone could stop her. Then, grabbing a letter opener from the nearby desk, she slashed the fabric into long strips. Spencer half-giggled, half-winced. Those were probably valuable antique curtains.
Quinn pulled out her cell phone. “This is amazing. It should be our film for the festival!”
“And I want us all to be the stars!” Harper said sloppily, stumbling over the syllables. She looked at Spencer. “Can you record us on your phone?”
“Okay,” Spencer said. She called up the video function on her iPhone and started recording. Harper yanked down more curtains and pulled the stuffing out of the pillows on the leather couch, looking crazed.
“Yeah!” Daniel, the boy who’d hosted the party on Friday, grabbed a swath of curtain fabric and wrapped it around his naked body—he’d been part of the streaking parade—like a toga. A few other guys followed suit, and they all marched around in a circle chanting “To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!”
As they paraded past, Spencer caught a glimpse of a guy with longish dark hair. Was that Phineas? She hadn’t seen him since before her run-in with the law at Penn last year. But when she blinked, he’d vanished, like he’d never been there at all. She pressed her fingers to her temples and made several slow circles. She was so high.
Spencer turned back to Harper. She had seemingly grown bored of ruining the curtains and was now lying on the carpet with her legs up in the air. “I just feel so . . . alive,” she trilled. Then she eyed Spencer. “Hey. I have something to tell you. You know that guy, Raif—Reefer? He has a crush on you.”
Spencer groaned. “What a loser. How’d he get into Princeton, anyway? Is he a legacy?”
Harper’s eyes grew wide. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Harper put her fingers to her lips and giggled. “Spencer, Reefer is, like, a genius. Like Einstein.”
Spencer snickered. “Uh, I don’t think so.”
“No, I’m serious.” Suddenly Harper looked dead sober. “He got a full scholarship. He invented some chemical process that, like, converts plants into renewable energy really cheaply. He received a MacArthur Genius Grant.”
Spencer snorted. “Um, are we talking about the same person?”
Harper’s expression was still serious. Spencer leaned back on her elbows and let this sink in. Reefer was . . . smart? Ridiculously smart? She thought about what he said yesterday at his house. Don’t judge a book by its cover. She started to laugh. The giggles came so fast and furious tears started to stream from her eyes and she could barely breathe.
Harper started laughing, too. “What’s so funny?
”
Spencer shook her head, not even sure. “I’ve had one too many pot brownies, I think. I’m a lightweight.”
Harper frowned. “Pot brownies? Where?”
The muscles in Spencer’s mouth felt gummy and loose. She studied Harper carefully, wondering if this was a hallucination, too. “I baked pot into the brownies I brought,” she said in an isn’t-it-obvious voice.
Harper’s mouth made an O. “No way,” she whispered, slapping Spencer five. “That’s the best idea ever.” She started to laugh for real. “No wonder I feel so bubbly! And here I thought someone spiked the punch with absinthe!”
Spencer laughed nervously. “Well, it’s not necessarily my brownies, is it?” Harper had eaten all kinds of other dishes, after all. Who knew what they had baked into them.
When she noticed the puzzled look on Harper’s face, everything turned upside-down. Maybe none of those other dishes had illegal substances inside them. What if Spencer’s brownies were what was making everyone so crazy?
She looked around the room. In one corner, a girl was feeding another girl a bite of something gooey and brownie-like. Two guys by the window chowed down on the brownies like they were their last meal. The brownies were everywhere. On plates left on side tables. In people’s hands as they swigged back sips of punch. On cheeks and under fingernails and ground into the fibers of the carpet. A half-eaten tray sat on the coffee table. Another tray was balanced on the radiator. Spencer peeked into the kitchen. Her three trays of brownies were still there, the bottoms scraped clean. Had someone else brought brownies, or had she brought five instead of three? Her mind felt so cloudy right now she couldn’t think clearly at all.
Her skin prickled. Harper seemed thrilled by the pot-brownie prank. But it was one thing if her brownies were one of many illegal foods at the party, and another for them to be the singular secret potion that made everyone act insane.
The walls felt like they were closing in on her. “I’ll be back,” she murmured to Harper, pushing to stand. She wove around a bunch of kids making snow angels on the carpet and two guys dueling with antique swords pulled from hooks on the wall and grabbed her coat from a pile near the kitchen. Ahead of her was a heavy door that led to the backyard; she pushed through it and stood in the crisp, late-winter air. To her surprise, only a thin strip of sunlight gleamed through the trees. Hours must have passed since she’d arrived.
Spencer stepped off the patio, taking deep breaths of cold air. The university buildings shone on the horizon. A billboard cut through the sky, bearing a picture of a newborn baby and the words CHOOSE PRINCETON HOSPITAL FOR YOUR MOST PRECIOUS MOMENTS.
It made Spencer think of the day she’d met Emily at the hospital for her C-section. By the time she got there, still flummoxed by Emily’s news, Aria and Hanna were standing by her side. Spencer’s jaw had dropped at the sight of Emily’s swollen belly. Her heart had picked up speed when she saw the shadowy image of the baby on the fetal monitor screen next to Emily’s bed. This was real.
“Emily?” a nurse had said, popping her head into the room. “They’re ready for you. It’s time to have your baby.”
There was no question whether Spencer and the others would be there for Emily’s surgery. They dressed in blue scrubs and followed the gurney into an operating room. Emily was freaking out, but the three of them held her hands the whole time, telling her she was strong and amazing. Spencer didn’t have the guts to peek over the curtain to watch as the OB cut through Emily’s midsection, but within minutes, he let out a happy whoop. “A healthy baby girl!”
The doctor lifted a tiny, perfect creature over the partition. She had red, wrinkled skin, tiny, closed eyes, and a big screaming mouth. Tears welled in all of their eyes. It was amazing and sad, all at the same time. They squeezed Emily’s hands hard, so grateful they’d been able to share this with her.
Luckily, the baby didn’t need to be in the NICU, which meant the girls could follow through with their plans of sneaking mother and baby out of the hospital that very night. At midnight, when there was a nurse shift change, the girls helped Emily out of bed and into her clothes. They dressed the baby as quietly as they could and tiptoed out of Emily’s room. The maternity ward was silent and still. Nurses were tending to newborns in the nursery. When a doctor rounded the corner, Spencer distracted her by asking for directions to the cafeteria. The others spirited Emily and baby into the elevator. Once they were on the main floor, no one looked at them twice.
They crept to the parking garage, the lights of Philadelphia blazing all around them. But as they were getting into Aria’s car, a flutter of activity behind one of the concrete beams caught Spencer’s eye. Nerves streaked through her belly. Was checking a baby out of the hospital before it was discharged illegal? She stood very still for a few moments, waiting for whomever it was to reveal herself, but no one did. She figured she was just tired, although now she wasn’t sure. Maybe A had been there. Maybe A had seen everything.
Snap.
Spencer returned to the present with a start. Dark trees surrounded her. Branches scratched her skin. The bark on the trees spiraled psychedelically; the stars were huge and garish in the sky, like a Van Gogh painting. What the hell was in this pot, anyway?
There was a whooshing sound of someone crunching through leaves. Spencer rubbed her eyes. “Hello? Who’s there?”
No answer. The crunching sounds grew louder and louder. Spencer blinked, searching for the path back to the Ivy House, but her vision was distorted and blurred. “Hello?” she cried again.
A hand clapped on her shoulder, and she screamed. She flailed her arms, trying to see who it was, but her senses were too muddled, the night too dark. Her legs gave out from under her, and she felt herself falling, falling, falling. The last thing she remembered seeing was a dark shape standing next to her, glaring. Maybe wanting to hurt her. Maybe wanting to get rid of her forever.
And then everything went black.
24
HANNA BRINGS HER A GAME
Hanna knew she was supposed to be in the stretch limo with her father, Isabel, and Kate, heading to the fund-raising ball, not balanced on her four-inch Louboutin platform heels outside the familiar Victorian house in Old Hollis that was home to Jeffrey Lebrecque’s photo studio. But here she was, like it or not. Ready to nail Colleen once and for all.
The porch light was on, throwing golden light onto Hanna’s professionally made-up face. The front parlor window was all lit up, too, which meant the photographer was home. Just before Hanna climbed the steps, her phone chimed. It was Richard, one of her dad’s campaign assistants. Just wanted to let you know the voter registration records database is back up, he wrote.
Perfect, Hanna replied. That meant she could search for where the Bakers had moved. The site had been down, and she’d had to resort to asking Richard about it, but she didn’t dare ask him to look up the family himself.
Then, rolling her shoulders back, she rang the bell. There were footsteps, and the door creaked open and the same graying man she’d seen the day before answered.
“Hello?” Jeffrey Lebrecque looked Hanna up and down, from the big ringlets in her hair to her navy chiffon dress to the faux-mink shrug around her shoulders she’d picked out for the ball. There was a gaudy gold ring on his pinkie finger, and he had the top two buttons of his shirt unbuttoned, exposing quite a bit of chest hair. Ick.
“Hi!” Hanna said brightly. “Are you Mr. Lebrecque?”
“That’s right.” The man furrowed his brow. “Do we have an appointment?”
“Actually, I’m here to pick up photos for Colleen Bebris,” Hanna said in her most innocent voice, batting her eyelashes at him. “I’m her best friend, and she asked me to do it. She got held up at an exercise class. She’s a pole dancer, did you know that?”
The photographer frowned. “I’m not sure I can do that. Ms. Bebris didn’t say someone else was going to pick them up. Maybe I should call her.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a ce
ll phone.
“No need!” Hanna said quickly, whipping out her own phone and showing him a text on the screen. “See?” The sender was Colleen Bebris, and the text asked if Hanna could pick up her photos. Of course it wasn’t really from Colleen—Hanna just used her mom’s phone to send the text, temporarily changing her mom’s contact information to Colleen’s name.
Jeffrey Lebrecque read the text, and his caterpillar-esque eyebrows knitted together. “There’s also the matter of payment.”
“Oh, she told me to pay for it and then she’d pay me back,” Hanna piped up, proud she’d thought to raid her emergency cash shoebox before coming.
The photographer peered at Hanna, and for a moment, she was afraid he was going to call her bluff. Did Mona-as-A and Real Ali-as-A worry they were going to get caught when they skulked, stole, and lied to get top-secret information on Hanna and the others? Was it wrong of her to do this? It wasn’t like she was ruining Colleen’s life, though. All she wanted was her boyfriend back.
“Follow me,” Mr. Lebrecque said, turning and heading down the hallway and into his studio. Slides and printouts covered a work desk, and a large-screen Apple monitor glowed in the corner. A fluffy white cat padded lazily through the room, and a calico preened itself on the windowsill. The place smelled like a mix of dust and cat litter and seemed sketchy in a way Hanna couldn’t quite put her finger on. She hunted around for telltale signs that this guy was running a covert Internet-porn operation, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she should be looking for. Playboy magazines? Blackout shades? Bottles of Cristal, like they drank in hip-hop videos?
Mr. Lebrecque shuffled to a table at the back of the room, sorted through a pile of envelopes, and pulled one out. “I picked these up from the printer today. Tell Colleen that I printed all of them, just like she asked, but if she wants more copies it’ll cost her extra.” He punched some numbers into a calculator. “So . . . that’ll be $450.”